Software

Visual Studio

My go-to IDE for most things. Any serious developer should be using this and you can get the Community version for free, so just get it!

Download Visual Studio

Or if you want a light-weight editor, maybe just go for Visual Studio Code instead...

Download Visual Studio Code

Sublime Text

A nice, popular, but technically not free text editor with a shed-load of plug-ins available. Is it better than Komodo? Maybe. It definitely seems to be faster.

Download Sublime Text

Komodo Edit

Komodo Edit from Active State is a free text editor with lots of programmer features built in. It understands loads of programming languages including HTML, CSS, SASS, PHP, JavaScript etc.

Download Komodo Edit

Chrome Developer Tools

By far the best way to debug your web sites and web apps.  Just install Chrome and it's available from the More Tools section of the main menu.

Download Chrome

Firebug

An essential Firefox plugin for web developers.  Makes it easy to visualise your layouts with their inspector, plus load of other cool features.

Although I should probably try out the in-built dev tools in Firefox!

Download Firebug

Node and NPM

Node is a Javascript runtime. It lets you execute JS scripts locally or on a server. Node is an essential part of any modern web developer's toolkit and opens up a whole world of possibilities. Tools like Grunt and Babel require it and you'll need to use Node if you want to develop apps using React, Angular or Ionic - so you'd better get it installed!

Download Node | NPM | Grunt | Babel | React | Angular | Ionic

Flash Develop

Another Text Editor mainly geared towards ActionScript and Haxe.  I pretty much always use Flash Develop when working with ActionScript.

Download Flash Develop

Flash (Now Called Adobe Animate)

Not so much need for it these days, but I've been using it for years, so I know my way around it pretty well.  I actually used it to create the few images you can see throughout the site.

About Adobe Animate

Dreamweaver

Another Piece of software I don't use so much these days, mainly due to it's slowness and the bulky HTML code you can often end up with.

Xampp and Wamp

Xampp (or Wamp) is an essential tool in a web developers kit (on Windows at any rate).  It allows your computer to act as a local web server, allowing me to edit files and immediately see the effect and test changes in my web browser.

I always, always work on a local copy of the site, then when it's time to go live I use a staging server in order to test the site in a live environment before finally pushing all the changes live.  If you're just working on a personal or low traffic site, then maybe you can skip the staging server part, but you might still end up with a bunch of problems to fix on a live site.

Download Xampp | Download Wamp

FileZilla

FileZilla is my FTP client of choice.  It's free and well known, so why not? This is how I transfered the files for this site to my web server.

Download FileZilla

Photoshop

I have a rudimentary unerstanding of Photoshop.  I'm not a designer so I'm not concerned with fancy design tools, but I know enough to pick apart a design and rebuild it using HTML and CSS.

Flash Builder

I use this less these days than I used to.  I prefer the free option!

Adobe Scout

Invaluable for optimising Flash content.

Word

Everybody needs to make text documents from time to time.

Excell

I have good Excell skills.  I needed to use it for my books while self employed.

Eclipse

I haven't used Eclipse a lot.  It's the IDE that comes with the Android SDK and I've used it to create and edit ANEs for Flash content.