Jeremy P's Web design tools
OK, my web pages are not very complex entities, being as they are mostly
an electronic photo album. For this reason I tend to use a number of very
simple tools to generate them. The main thing is that most of them are
free or at least very cheap. This page is a basically a list of
credits.
All packages on this page are free unless otherwise specified.
There was only one original HTML page which I generated back in the mists of
time with Netscape composer or possibly Frontpage Express, I've forgotten which.
Anyway, all the pages on my site were generated by copying the original
"proto-page" and editing the HTML direct with one of my two favourite text
editors. These are:-
- NEdit, "Nirvana text editor", my favourite text editor in an X/Unix
environment. You can get this free at... well the link is down at the
moment. I'll wait until it reappears. However NEdit 5.2 is distributed
with SuSE Linux.
- vi, "Neanderthal text editor", my favourite text editor in a
command line environment. Anybody with any kind of Unix-like
environment already has this.
Most of the pictures on my site were either taken by me with a digital camera
or stolen from other web sites. Actually there is only one stolen image - the
vi logo on the home page. The photographs are manipulated using one of several
photographic packages depending on which computer I am on at the time.
- The Gimp, the GNU imaging project or something like that. I use
this for manipulating images on Linux.
- Graphic Converter, from Lemke Software, costs 30 US dollars.
Probably not as good as the Gimp but runs natively on my operating system of
choice (MacOS X).
- Microsoft Photoshop, from Microsoft, costs a lot of US dollars,
but works under Windows.
Some of the other tools I use are listed below. I have also included operating
systems, I try to be OS agnostic. Most of the ones I use currently are pretty
good in many ways.
- Mac OS X, is my favourite operating system of the moment. It has
a very nice looking user interface and I can drop into a Unix command line
to do the power hungry stuff. You can get it from Apple and it costs about
100 UKP.
- SuSE Linux, is my current Linux distro. If you buy it, it'll set
you back about 50 UKP depending on the version you get.
- Microsoft Windows 2000, was forced on me by the company I work
for. Having said that, it is quite a nice OS considering it is from
Microsoft.
- Tenon XTools, is an X server for the Macintosh which runs under
OS X. It set me back a hefty 199 USD but it allows me to run NEdit on the
Mac (plus a lot of other useful Unix utilities).
- Lesstif, is an X toolkit which you need to run NEdit if you are
building it from source code (which you need to do with OS X because there
is no prebuilt binary).
- CVS, a code control utility. The version I run is that which
comes with the Apple Developer suite.
$Id: tools.html,v 1.2 2002/09/13 10:04:36 jeremyp Exp $