Free, Essential Web Development Tools
Because I know I’m always looking for new things to make my own web development easier or simply better, here is my collection of free web development-related tools that I probably couldn’t live with out:
- Firefox
This is so obvious, but essential. Not just as a web browser, but as a tool in itself. My general design routine consists of, first and foremost, getting my designs to work in Firefox. Once I’ve got a design the way it “should be”, I move on and start doing the little Internet Explorer hacks. - Web Developer Add-On
This is easily the most essential thing you could ever have, in my opinion. If you could have one Firefox add-on, this would be it. While breaking down a design in just about every way imaginable, some of my most commonly used functionalities of it are: Display Form Details to show, inline beside form items, names and values of form inputs, Outline Custom Elements to show the box properties of specific divs, Resize to preview a design at lower resolutions, and View CSS to show all of the CSS styles on a single page. There are just so many more, and probably even more I haven’t fully made use of yet. - Firebug Add-On
While I just discovered this a few weeks ago, it’s already proved useful. Firebug allows you to quickly debug and inspect specific page elements. It’s especially useful to inline edit CSS styles or HTML tags/properties, as well as use the console to run and test Javascript functions. The CSS box modeling is great, and the rulers are really useful. - Notepad++
This is a fantastic, open source general purpose text editor with syntax highlighting for all the popular languages. It has everything you’d expect in a text editor, but it’s really quick, doesn’t eat memory, and the menus are organized really well. The plugins menu has a lot of additionally functionality, including escaping quotes, bulk changing of character cases, and plenty more. - SQLyog
If you do any MySQL administration or setup, then this tool is key to getting things done. It’s open source, and provides you a fast way of querying and administering MySQL databases and tables, especially if using phpMyAdmin in a browser isn’t your cup of tea. - Color Selector
A very simple tool which does exactly as the name implies. I don’t miss the days of taken screenshots, opening Photoshop, and using the colour dipper tool just to fetch the HTML hex code of a colour on screen. It’s easy to use and offers a lot different colour code formats should you desire them.