A freelance developer’s tool box
As a freelancer it’s always a challenge to find the right tools for the job. No collective knowledge base of colleagues you can quickly pop a question to. On the other hand, being a freelancer also gives you the unique opportunity to have a peek in the kitchen of various companies. And I’m always curious as to what tools are used, not only software or IDE’s but also frameworks, libraries etc…
Here’s a list of stuff I use including the pricing (which I kept in the original currency so it’s mixed Dollars and Euros). I know a lot of people tend to use the free/cheap stuff but if you take yourself serious as a developer you shouldn’t hesitate to pay for good software.
Editplus
One of the first pieces of sofware I bought way back when there were no real IDE’s. Even though I’ve switched to PHPStorm I still use Editplus when I quickly want to open or edit a file.
It is really just an enhanced notepad (comparable to the then better known UltraEdit). Well not ‘just’, apart from your regular code folding, syntax highlighting, ftp etc, it also has vertical selection and keystroke recording!
url: http://www.editplus.com/
price: $35
Irfanview
Windows always had the most crappy image viewer imaginable. Lucky for us some Bosnian dude called Irfan created Irfanview (first version in 1996). Lightning fast for viewing images (including psd) and a whole bunch of other non-image files. It features batch- resize and renaming. And I also tend to use it a lot for doing simple image measurements (sizes, margins, paddings).
Free software doesn’t get any better than this.
url: http://www.irfanview.com/ price: freeware
Colorpic
So instead of having to fire-up that resource hungry Photoshop, I just use Irfanview half the time and get my color hex values with another nifty app called Colorpic. It comes with a built-in magnifier so you can easily see them anti-aliased pixels.
url: http://www.iconico.com/colorpic/
price: freeware
PHPStorm
I loved PHPStorm ever since I first touched it. It has everything I knew from FDT only better: debugging, refactoring, VCS integration, auto completion, auto fomatting and a ton of things you can customize. And even though there are numerous settings everything is still quite easy to find.
url: http://www.jetbrains.com/phpstorm/
price: €89 (or €44 for WebStorm)
Beyond Compare
A good IDE is not complete without good file comparison. And although PHPStorm has a good one, Beyond Compare is better (and PHPStorm let’s you integrate it). I actually bought this before PHPStorm and mainly because I really disliked the comparison in Tortoise. But it’s not just for comparing files, it compares about anything. The best feature is that you can compare your local- and your server folders. I mainly use it for deployment, VCS merging and for syncing backups, but you can also compare images, registry, mp3 and hex.
url: http://www.scootersoftware.com/
price: $30 standard ($50 pro)
XP-dev
Not software per se, but a hosting provider for project tracking and version control systems. They have Subversion, Git, Mercurial, Trac and a custom agile project tracker.
url: https://xp-dev.com/
price: ranges from $5 p/m for 2GB to $50 p/m for 40GB
FDT
By far the best IDE for developing ActionScript. Good debugging and refactoring features. It has been a while since I touched it though, with all clients wanting HTML5 and all. The pricing is a bit on the high side: when I first bought FDT4 it was €599 (and €49 to upgrade to 5). A while back they switched to a subscription based model. I’m not that keen on this new subscription trend you see everywhere. Then again, my FDT5 still works fine and I don’t do that much as3 anymore anyway (thanks Apple).
url: http://fdt.powerflasher.com/
price: ranging from €59 for one month to €708 for two years
Manictime and/or Chrometa
Keeping track the time you spend on projects is an absolute must if you are a freelancer, and also a royal pain in the arse.
This week, after forgetting to log my time for two weeks, I decided to scavenge the interwebs for software that tracks your computer usage. Turned out there’s a lot of good stuff out there. One of the best ones out there is called Chrometa. It has a clear and easy to use web-interface where you can set rules to gather use of certain files/folders/programs/websites to a project. Also a bit more pricey than others and subscription based at $19 per month (€14.68). But I have an issue with it being cloud based; all the paths and uris of those files/folders/programs/websites get send to their server. And most of the others similar software is cloud based as well.
So after looking a little further I found Manictime. Not as nice and easy an interface as Chrometa, but not cloud based and no subscription. A single license will cost you $67 (€51.77). So that is 3.5 months of Chrometa, although that’s not really a fair comparison since Chrometa also features invoicing (which I don’t need).
Tough decision, that’s why I list them both, but I’ve bought Manictime.
url: http://www.manictime.com/
price: $67
url: http://chrometa.com/
price: $19
Adobe
I was going to start with this but I didn’t want start this post all negative. I never was a big fan of Photoshop or Adobe for that matter. The software is overpriced (even upgrades) especially compared to the software listed above. There used to be good alternatives but it has become the industry standard so you’re almost forced to buy it. To make matters worse they are moving to a subscription based pay model. You can still buy a single license but it’s somewhere hidden away on their site. I’ve had the full Creative Cloud subscription for almost a year now and I will not renew for another year. It’s way too much for something I use only sporadically to export images from the designs I get sent.
url: http://adobe.com
price:
Creative Cloud: €61.49 per month (for one year) or €92.24 per month
Single Creative Cloud (Ps, Fw, Fl, Ai): €24.45 pm (for one year) or €36.89 per month
Photoshop CS6: €950,79
Well, I hope you find something useful in this list. And don’t hesitate to comment, I’m very curious what you yourself use.