Free Webdesign / Webdevelopment tools

Being back to webdesign projects and unable to aford tools like Dreamweaver, Flash and Firework the "de facto" tools for webdesign, I was forced to scavenge a little for some free or open-source alternatives.
Athough WYSIWYG editors are nice, for me they are not a requisite, as I find that most of my time I'm fixing HTML because those tools insist on adding a lot of code I don't really need.
I like my code clean and simple.

After a little search I had to give it to Aptana Studio a open-source, cross-platform IDE for HTML, Javascript (with awsome debugging features), PHP, Ruby, AJAX (It's main purpose) and CSS. Based on the Eclipse IDE it has all the solid features and flexibility of it's big brother. There is also a commercial version of the Aptanta Studio IDE, that supports Internet Explorer javascript debugging, JSON, FTPS, SFTP, a Remote Project Import Wizards, Project Reporting Engine and Support.


I also came across a really nice WYSIWYG tool called Komposer a rather nice web authoring tool based on NVU a Linspire sponsored "rival" to FrontPage and Dreamweaver although not much of a rival it is a rather nice app and quite powerful. With a lot of features as site projects, css editor (not very powerful but does the job), website publishing through FTP, tabbed editing, templates, and the best features are open-source and cross-platform.

Both this tools are great, specially Aptana that has a great CSS editor.

For the graphics I didn't have many options, for the vector drawing I couldn't find anything better than Inkscape, an excellent open-source / cross-platform vector drawing tool.


My image editing tool of choice was The Gimp, the best open-source / cross-platform image editing tool that is the closest thing to photoshop there is.
Another option is Paint.Net, which is also open-sorce, but is .Net framework 2.0 based wich restricts you to windows platforms.

These are my work tools for now, let's see what I can do with them.

Hope they can be useful to you to. Have fun coding!

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