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Blog Archive 2005-December 2005-November 2005-October 2005-September 2005-August 2005-July 2005-June

Fri, 07 Oct 2005

Some tools I use...

Sorry the blog went dark the last two weeks. Work's been very busy and we've had some sickness in the house... nothing serious, but nothing fun either. I thought a fun way to ramp back up would be to link to a few of the tools I've found useful recently and then add a few quick blog links.

Visual Thesaurus This tool was invaluable when we were writing Ship It! and I still find myself going back to it from time to time. In fact, I used it tonight. The interface is just amazing. They offer a free trial as well. Hit the URL and type in a word. After a few moments you'll see a visual representation of the words grouped by similar meanings. Invaluable when you're trying to figure out how to say something just right.

NVU is a great HTML editor. They bill themselves as "the complete web authoring system for Windows, Mac and Linux". I've only used it on Windows and Linux and it works great. I use it for any non-trivial HTML.

Dia is a program to draw diagrams. Reminds me of Visio. The Windows version is here.

The Gimp This is the a great (and free) image manipulation program. I'm no graphics guru so I can't speak to it's advanced features but it's great for the types of simple edits I need to do for presentations. It does take a lot of horsepower though... it's the reason I just upgraded my wife's box to one AMD's dual core chips!

Speaking of the dual core chips... wow! My desktop is a dual Opteron and my wife's dual core is just as responsive. If it weren't for the hassle of reinstalling everything, I'd probably sell my desktop and upgrade. I'm still amazed at how inexpensive her box was... at Best Buy no less. I'm waiting for the dual core laptops to start shipping. I've found press releases that say the laptops will show up in October.

As you've probably noticed, there are no code tools listed here today. Recently I've been working on several presentations and I haven't had any spare cycles for code. Hopefully that will change after Atlanta.

For those who've missed it, the Pragmatic Ajax book is in beta. I love the cover. If you're working with Ajax, buy the beta and tell the authors what you need. How often do you guys like Justin Gehtland writing to your spec?

Also, Jeffery Fredrick had a great a great blog entry called Ruby, Rails and Eclipse. (See? People read your blog!)

I'm going to try to post about how automated tests rust in a bit... but first I've got to go edit a few slides. :)

Enjoy!

Jared

posted at: 21:10 | path: | permanent link to this entry