27 great tools for web design and development

My web design toolkit

I have been working on websites and graphics since 2000 and my toolkit has ben changing and upgrading with every better, cooler stuff I found or read about. Starting with Corel Draw and Corel Photopaint I turned to Photoshop, when I started to do design for more than a hobby – helping in a small photo studio, building my first website in Dreamweaver and then turning to Notepad++ and PSPad, learning HTML and CSS from W3Schools.com… It’s been a long story, but everyone has started somewhere…
Here is my current setup on Windows 7, I use Open Source and free software, when I only can, but sometimes simply there isn’t a free alternative…

Design

Adobe Photoshop – bitmap editor with great image compression for web – a must for a web designer (I know – GIMP but…)
Adobe Illustrator – vector editor, I use it mostly for print designs
Adobe Flash – to create animations, interactive elements
Desktop Color Finder – neat Adobe AIR app from Colour Lovers, that gives you colors, color schemes, patterns based on specified color

Coding

Komodo Edit – I was trying to use Ecplise for great SVN integration, but I didn’t like the auto completion, was too slow, then I switched to Komodo Edit, set up a dark color scheme to save my eyes and dove in to coding

Sandbox Tools

Wampserver 2 – PHP + Apache installation for Win, I also used Vertrigo and Xampp
TortoiseSVN – probably best and most intuitive Windows SVN client with great Explorer integration
PuTTY and Pageant – for security keys handling and server side operations
FlieZilla – great FTP client
SQLyog – superb fast database editing but only local- but thinking about MySql Workbench
Firefox 3 + Firebug + HTML Validator – absolutely a must for any serious web development and theming
MS VirtualPC + IE6/IE7 – an evil must for QA
Opera 9.6 – again for QA
Safari 4 beta – again only for QA

Blogging

Websnapshots – great Adobe AIR app for automated website screenshots creation
Shrink-O-matic – for batch image resizing, again an Adobe AIR utility
Spellchecker.net – spell checking online, since english is not my primary language

Time Logging

TimeLoc – another AIR app  for time tracking, with great project/task management – considering to use Klok instead

CMS

Drupal – voted as best Open Source PHP CMS – I use Drupal for all websites I build, for its great theming and customization possibilities, security, permissioning and categorizing options and for its amazing community
Wordpress – best blogging platform, I use it for this blog

What’s in your toolbox?

Share your experiences with tools, programs that you use. Let me know pls when you have anything that I should switch to… thanks.