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Tools of the Trade

My friends ask me all the time what programs do I use to program and what are the best programs for image editing, etc. I tend to always tell them the same thing, get Adobe Creative Suite 3. This isn’t the case for some people though and some of the applications in CS3 are bloated and just don’t work as well as other programs, that’s why I use a bunch of different programs from other places. They also don’t cost you an arm and a leg like CS3 does, but you can always find other ways to get CS3 if you really want it. That is for another day though.

What PHP Editor do you use?

Until recently, my PHP editor was Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 just because I was so used to using it, but that has changed. I really like using Eclipse as my PHP Editor of choice. It is quick and responsive on my computer and with the PHPDev plug ins it has all the features that I could need. I still use Dreamweaver for making templates and other UI intensive things, but for programming I enjoy using Eclipse.

What Image Editor do you use?

I use Photoshop CS3. Simply put I use Photoshop because I know Photoshop. I like the way it work and I really don’t want to learn the GIMP, even though that seems to be quite a full featured image editor.

What do you use for your development environment?

I use XAMPP. I prefer to use XAMPP because it allows for the simplicity of a one click install WAMP (Windows Apache MySQL PHP) setup. XAMPP also allows for you to have a great deal of customization that you don’t get with other one click install WAMP things.

You make videos, what do you use for that?

I make my videos with Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platnium v8. I record my footage with FRAPS. I used to use Avid but it is too expensive for me to use at home and I really like how easy Vegas is to use compared to Avid. I wish I would have found it in High School when I was part of the Media Productions magnet program at my school.

Do you use any of these programs? Did you buy them? I used to own a priated copy of CS2 but I got CS3 from my school when I started last year.