|
|
Q. What are the best tools to use?
A. There is no such thing as a Swiss Army knife in Web development terms.
You might think that you will be able to find that one ideal development tool that can solve all of your problems and you’ll then be able to develop every other project on it. It’s more likely that you would stumble across the Holy Grail in your attic. I have evaluated a lot of tools and expect to carry on evaluating lots more for some time to come yet. So far I have found that most tools have one or two really strong features that make them very suitable for a particular project. However, most also have a major shortcoming or two that offset that advantage. There is as yet no truly cross platform tool that will allow you to develop on one machine and know with certainty that the software will run faultlessly on all the others. I think we might be close to a solution on this and that over the next several years, we might see some emerging technology that will, for the time being at least - serve the purpose well enough.
You are going to need some powerful image editing software. There are several alternative paint programs, each offering some unique effects and facilities. Probably the most popular is Photoshop but you may prefer some of the others for particular work. If you do any amount of video editing, then Premier or something like it is going to be useful. Of course, from my experience I’m talking here about predominantly Macintosh-based tools but most graphic design and artistic folks I meet use the Macintosh platform anyway. If you are editing AVI files as opposed to QuickTime, then a PC platform may be better suited. As an aside, Beware of trying to convert AVI and QT movies from one format to the other, sample rates and optimisations are rarely working in your favour. On the Macintosh, sound editing requires a program like SoundEdit, nowadays shipped by MacroMedia. You may also have a need for 3D modelling and rendering software, font editors and of course all the usual stand by word processors, spreadsheets and database software for engineering the informational content.
A piece of software that is vastly underrated and one that I find is a lot of help all of the time is the HyperCard program. It’s only real shortcoming is the lack of embedded colour support. In all other respects it is virtually flawless in its ergonomics and utility. It is all round, a very useful tool and I use it a lot for roughing out program ideas. I find its better than Director and for a programmer its a lot like the equivalent of an artist’s sketch pad.
To work out prototypes, you might find a combination of HyperCard, SuperCard and Director to be useful. There are new products coming along all the time and the choice is growing almost weekly. There is a certain symbiosis when you use 2 or 3 applications together. The specific applications may change from time to time based on your work. For example, keeping Excel, HyperCard and Photoshop open together is a helpful combination. Excel is quite handy for mathematical scribbling and working out lists. HyperCard is very useful as a text manipulation tool. Instead of Excel, you might have a text editor open such as BBEdit or CodeWarrior. HyperCard, Photoshop and ResEdit together seem to work well. When I am networking I use NCSA Telnet, Dartmouth Fetch and Think-C. This is a really useful combination for programming in C language and working on a networked combination of VMS, UNIX and Macintosh machines. Somehow, adding a fourth program seems to make the symbiosis less efficient. Its something to do with how much you can remember all at once and how much screen space you can use. Maybe its because you can place the edges of the windows at three sides of the screen and still have the menu bar at the top.
Finally, you may prefer to ship a custom coded solution rather than use a Director or Toolbook based design. This is not for the faint hearted and may not be cheap to develop on a one off basis. To write a proprietary script based presentation engine ought not to take more than about 6 man months of development effort. For this you will want to be able to compile good quality C or perhaps C++ code. Microsoft Visual C/C++ on PC platforms and MetroWerks Platinum on the Macintosh are the current favourites. Constraining your software to be ANSI C compliant means that apart from the obvious platform dependant code, the rest of your application will work in C language on most UNIX platforms as well. I have successfully developed portable applications across the Macintosh, VMS and the five most popular UNIX variants. Porting that code to Windows 3.1 was a little more problematical but certainly feasible. I have not yet tried W95.
Beware that the development software tools for Web work cost roughly ten times as much when you are buying a UNIX version compared with the similar Macintosh or Windows version. There are no technical benefits in using Photoshop for instance on a Silicon Graphics as opposed to a Macintosh. Other than perhaps some performance advantages. Of course if you already own and use a variety of SGI tools, adding Photoshop is not likely to worry you much.
Check out the whole list of Cliff's pithy tips for Web developers.
|
|
