Just clean code - Dreamwever

I don't know how I started liking it. As for as I know it never had any killer features out of the box. It was a plain vanila HTML editor as I knew it since the version 2. Still worse that the initial learning curve was cumbersome when I first got introduced myself to Dreamweaver.

I start developing web pages with NetObjects Fusion which was much like a DTP publishing tool and easier to learn. Easy placing of elements gives more control to a designer than a untidy table structure or so I thought. In that opinion Dreamweaver was there, nothing fancy, no obsession to go for. But very soon I realised Dreamweaver was producing a much more cleaner HTML code than anything else in the market. It was the best code generator around at that time, may be even today.

I guess that itself provided me enough reasons to use it, It was painful to make pages with it at first. Anyway I managed that period and finally stick with it. Even today I haven't mastered it as such but I use it in every day basis. I make most of my living out of it.

Slowly it has become an indispensable partner for my work flow though I have literally taken it for granted from the beginning.

So I say it, It was a love hate affair though now I have made peace with Dreamweaver for my layouting tool.

Aldus Freehand - It truly was...

Eons ago I started my career as a Sinhala Copy Writer and happened to be in one of Colombo's leading advertising firms. That's where I found most of the things which helped me to get the shape of my life everafter.

Aldus Freehand is one of the things I am still in love with, still using since. This is a nice wrap up of the program’s history which now owns by Macromedia Inc.

 The Freehand Version 4 application icon


There were idle Macintoshes so I could play with Freehand. The version was 4 and then called Aldus Freehand. I watched our Graphics Designer was laying out his layouts and there were a plenty of time for me to do the catching up and do things on my own. My learning curve was quick. In two, three weeks I mastered it to a point where I could get our all work done. The actual preview of layouts is still not as cryspy as Adobe Illustrator but the learning curve may be easier for anyone who is intersted about DTP publishing.

I did a free learning. So I guess it gives a double meaning to Freehand. Later it was brought by Macromedia and still shines bright to this day.

Living with a slow DialUp - FlashGet

There is a strange connection between all the software I am listing here. Which is at one point they have all being downloaded by FlashGet.

I have lived my best part of online life with slow dialups. The modems were saying 56Kbps but I have never saw a dial up actually reach anything more than 8kbps. Since this speed is slow and goes up and down, lines/downloads tend to drop frequently. You need a good download manager. Imagine you download a good part of a big file and if broken, you have to go and get it again. You can't remember the URL. It's complete waste of time and money. So I tested a series of download managers from those days (1997) but never came up with anything else as good as FlashGet. Some had come with spyware, some couldn't resume broken downloads, some takes up all your bandwidth but still slow and the rest had lousy interfaces.

From FlashGet version 0.96a or something it hasn't change much. When other companys' release patches for their software every other day, FlashGet was practically a solid product which I never had a problem with even if you use that early version right now.

Things I liked about FlashGet was
1. The sheer speed
2. Split downloading and resume
3. Retrieval of past downloaded URLs
4. Hung up or Shutdown when done
5. Checks if the file has been update
6. Clutter free interface
7. Tight integration with browser(IE)
8. Opera and now Firefox integration
9. Never had a corrupted file
10. That lovely blue, red and grey dotted resemblance of the file being downloading.

Pictures at Ease - FastStone Image Viewer

What is the most used application in your computer. Most will say the browser. Yeah! Being a graphics person and a photo lover my second most used application is also happened to be a browser, an image browser.

I thought I've tried everything on earth but finally like most of the folks settled with ACDsee. It is nice but as I have mentioned here I hate blotted programs. ACDSee version 6 was a mess. Completely a crappy code took ages to load. V7 is good but they are heading the way of Adobe Photoshop. :-( So I was again in the look out for a bare bone Imave Viewer.

Then I found this beauty.

Welcome to FastStone Image Viewer



It is FREE. Only 2.5 MB in size.(Compressed) Supports all major graphics formats. It is easy to use for everyone from beginner to professional level, powerful and flexible enough just as ACDSee, even your collection grows by thousands daily. Other features include a full-screen image viewer with top thumbnail strip. And a lesser memory foot print which I adore.

Only thing which bugs me that I can't tell it where to store its Thumbnail Data Base and can’t run in multiple instances. You know I ain't like my Program Files folder being scattered with a ever growing huge image DB. I like the total control.

Anyway for an average user this is no brainer. Go, use it and give you PC a little more breathing boom.

http://www.faststone.org