Here are links to some of the tools I mentioned in class, as well as other useful and/or fun things.
Portable Applications
We'll use these on USB sticks in the BHCC computer lab. You can also use them on your PC at home. If you have a Mac, use the portable apps at school. You can use Mac apps on your home computer, but still keep your files on the USB stick (see below).
- Text Editor:
- Notepad++
- Mac People: Use TextWrangler on your Mac, but keep your files on your USB stick
- Browsers:
- Opera
- Google Chrome
- Firefox
- Image Editor:
- GIMP Photo and Image Editor
- sftp Client:
- Filezilla
Desktop or Laptop Applications
- Text editor: (all are free)
- TextPad (what I generally use)
- Notepad++
- HTML kit
- Mac People: Use TextWrangler on your Mac. TextEdit, which is already on the Mac is not a plain-text editor. Rather, it is a lite word processor. It won't work for this class.
- Browser: (all are free)
- Firefox (most popular, non-IE version)
- Opera (most standards compliant, much faster than FF and IE—my first choice)
- Google Chrome (spare but fast—my second choice)
- Safari (primarily Mac, but Windows version exists)
- sftp client: (both are free)
- CoreFTPLite (what I generally use)
- Filezilla
- Dreamweaver CS5:
- Stand-alone Dreamweaver ($149 from JourneyEd; $399 from Adobe)
- CS4 Design Premium Suite ($449 from JourneyEd; $1899 from Adobe)
- Dreamweaver
- Photoshop
- Illustrator
- Flash
- Fireworks
- InDesign
- other goodies
- Dreamweaver Help:
- Whatever you get, you'll need help. The DW on-line help is hard to navigate and takes ages to work through. You're much better off having the help in a convenient .pdf file on your desktop or thumb drive.
- Help for Dreamweaver CS4
- Help for Dreamweaver CS5
Some good on-line resources
- The Web Style Guide, tells you what you need to know about site designs, typography, formatting, the general user experience, how to set up a web-design team, etc. You can read the whole thing on line or buy a hard copy from Amazon
- Here's a handy, one page summary of what makes for clean code.
- I love the HTML Dog for an on-line reference on the various html tags and the css properties that go with various selectors. They also have some decent tutorials.
Some Fun Things
- If you like music, I had a cool on-line audio player, featuring my son, Justin. Unfortunately, the hosting service was sold and I've not been able to set up in a new place yet. I should have something mid-semester.
- For Christmas, you might like Christmas Memories, originally a tape composed and performed by my late singing teacher, Luther Enstad. Again, the selling of the hosting service borked my player. Should be up before Christmas (well, perhaps next Christmas).