PC Setup

Posted: Fri 24 October, 2008 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Geeky, Getting Organised, Web Development, Work-related, Writing |Leave a comment »

Over the last few days, I’ve spent a fair amount of time setting up the PC at the new workplace, so I thought I’d do a bit of a dump of what’s gone in – and, as a corollary, a dump of the development tools and software that I find essential.

Browsers

The first thing to get installed was, of course, Firefox. This is just essential – particularly when the company’s default browser is still the incredibly shonky IE 6. Following on from there, the following Firefox extensions got installed…

1. WebDeveloper – just an essential tool for web developing, couldn’t do without it
2. AdBlock Plus – not for web-development, but just for blocking adverts on sites. It was weird to see sites with Ads, I’m so used to Adblock Plus now
3. FoxMarks – as a user of multiple computers (home, laptop, work) I love being able to synchronise my bookmarks between all three machines without needing to repeatedly export them from one machine to another. I used to use Google’s BrowserSync, but that doesn’t support FF3, so FoxMarks is a suitable replacement.
4. FlashBlock – similar reasons to AdBlock Plus, but as download of the Flash plugin is also blocked, I might as well just block Flash entirely. Works for me, anyhow.

Then we get onto the development tools.

PHP – I’ve put on two text editors

1. Crimson Editor
   and
2. phpDesigner 2008, which I’m getting to like.

CSS

1. BradSoft’s TopStyle – my CSS Editor of choice. Yes, I can (and do) use text editors to do the CSS, but when I get lost to what’s doing what, TopStyle’s the place to go

MySQL

1. MySQL’s GUI Tool suite is always useful

Others – there are probably some more things I’ll add in over time, but for now the only extra bits I’ve added on are:

1. Open Office 3.0 – always a joy to use after experiencing MS Office again
2. CeltX – For the writing side of things, just in case I need some diversion tactics to take my brain off PHP for a while

And that’s it – for now at least.

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