Favourite tools
Here we list several pieces of software which we consider excellent and highly recommend to our Clients for their day-to-day operation of web applications. Most are free, although their commercial alternatives can be quite expensive.
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Open Office
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An Office suite. Free. Comparable in functionality to Microsoft Office 97 + can generate PDF files from documents. Fully compatible with Microsoft Office (which costs EUR 500). For developers like us, files being in an open XML format is a great benefit.
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Filezilla
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An FTP client. Free. Also includes a FTP server, which supports secured FTP.
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XML Spy
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The best suite of XML editors. The "Home" version is free of charge. Several our clients use it to maintain their XML-based web content.
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Gimp
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An image editor. Free. Better than Paint Shop Pro (which costs EUR 80), but still not a Photoshop killer (costs EUR 700 + 3 months' hard work to learn)
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PhpMyAdmin
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A web-based, secure graphical interface to remote MySQL database servers. Free. Very easy to use to update data, import/ export data.
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DBManager Professional
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A graphical interface to local MySQL (and other) database servers. Free. Still has less "proprietary" features (SQL extensions) than Microsoft Access.
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7-zip
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A zip utility, functionally comparable to earlier versions of Winzip. Free.
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HTML-Kit
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Although not open-source, this is our favourite free HTML (and code) editor. The standard version (which is what we use to write code) is free. The Pro version allows to graphically edit tables, in the manner of Dreamweaver 4, for a fraction of the price.
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