Grooveshark

Our development team spends countless hours staring at code and trying to get the most out of our SQL queries. Amidst all of the work that we dig through everything day, there are some tools and programs that make the whole web development process a lot easier:

LiveHTTPHeaders is an extension for Firefox that lets you watch the HTTP request and response headers in real time. It’s proved invaluable several times for debugging both Flash and Ajax by letting us see what was going on underneath the surface.

Kuler is an experimental web-based color palette generator created by Adobe. While we haven’t used it directly with our product development, it’s still a great source of inspiration and fun.

Omni Outliner is our favorite out of the Omni Group products we use. It’s the most intuitive outlining program I’ve ever worked with, and it’s great for taking notes during meetings, brainstorming or organizing ideas, and tracking hours for all the different projects we work on.

TextMate is seriously the text editor for OS X. I tried a couple of IDE’s, but they were all too bulky for me, especially when all I really needed was some good context highlighting and a project-wide find and replace. I know I’ve barely scratched the surface of what TextMate can do, but that’s one of the best things about it - you aren’t required to become an expert in it for it to be useful to you (like some of the IDE’s I’ve tried).

dotProject an open-source, PHP-based project management system. When it comes to tracking our development progress outside of the office, sharing files with our marketing department, and posting bulletins for everyone to discuss, dotProject is perfect. It’s simple and easy-to-use, but still offers many features not found in some of the newer PM systems (such as forums, support tickets, multiple company/department support, and hourly task logs).

Firebug is the ultimate Firefox plug-in that allows anyone to see the HTML, JavaScript, CSS or any DOM-related item for a given page. As we mentioned in a previous blog post, Firebug also lets you look at the parameters, headers, and response for any server-side script calls.

jQuery is a JavaScript library that has been quickly gaining a reputation for its speed, versatility and ease of use. It is becoming more commonly used among hardcore JavaScript coders who have worked previously with Prototype or Dojo. jQuery helps us by taking care of some of the heavy lifting regarding Ajax functionality, DOM manipulation, and animations.

WinSCP is a great FTP, secure FTP (sFTP), and secure copy (SCP) transfer program. WinSCP is open-source, versatile, and even has a built-in text editor and batch file scripting.

Putty is the best standalone Unix SSH terminal program I’ve ever witnessed. If you ever need to make an SSH connection to a server, putty.exe is a tool you can’t live without.

OpenOffice is a great alternative to Microsoft Office in pretty much every way, and you can easily download it to install on any box. Oh, and it’s free. OpenOffice still supports Microsoft Office files for conversion or even not converting. Great support, and updates bring new goodies all the time.

del.icio.us is remarkable. Saving bookmarks from any machine to a central location is very important as I bounce from anywhere between two and a dozen different computers every week. It allows me to organize and easily save any websites I find interesting, or even ones I plan to read at a later time. On top of that, it allows me to share them with anyone on del.icio.us and to easily see what websites my friends and co-workers enjoy.

Vyew is a great way to collaborate, draw, present, and meet online. We usually use it along with Skype, using Skype for communication (audio, video, IM) and everything else on Vyew. You can direct and manipulate things like you were on a writeboard in the same room, and you can host conferences with real-time interaction and document sharing.

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• Posted in All of The Rest