Good tools can make a huge difference to productivity and job satisfaction when working extensively with PCs. Blueberry is always looking out for new ways of working better. The following are some of the tools that we have found make a difference.

General Tools

FileZilla
FileZilla is a fast, reliable, and secure open source FTP/SFTP client that allows you to transfer files between Web sites and PCs running Windows.

Zoiper
Zoiper is a multi-platform IAX and SIP softphone, compatible with Asterisk or any SIP-based IP-PBX. It is available in Free and Biz editions. Most important features of the paid Biz version include: T.38 Faxing, TCP/TLS support with SIP, Automatic provisioning (XML), URL handling, Outlook/Thunderbird Integration, Native conferencing, API, and Attended transfer. Zoiper is our recommended IAX client.

Visual Slickedit
Slickedit is marketed as programmers' text editor—a tool to allow programmers to edit large numbers of source files. However, it has applications well beyond this market, and anyone who spends a lot of time working with text files may find this program useful. It's fast, feature-rich and it's available on UNIX and Windows platforms.

ACDSee
ACDSee is an image-browsing extension for Windows Explorer. It's very useful when working with lots of bitmap graphics. These days, there are many image-editors – including a range of new online tools. But some people at Blueberry find that ACDSee still provides the best solution when editing large collections of photos.

VMWare
A Virtual Machine is an exact simulation of a complete operating system run as a program on a host computer. Multiple virtual machines can be run on a single host (providing it is powerful enough), giving multiple independent and isolated ‘machines’.

Machine virtualisation has become hugely important within the IT world in recent years, particularly in the server hosting and software testing sectors. We have found VMWare to be a particularly effective machine virtualisation platform, and use it extensively for our online server systems. The main reason for choosing VMWare is its stability, which is crucial when used for running unattended servers. However, VMWare can be quite complex to configure and administer, and has a significant learning curve associated with it.

For less demanding virtual machine requirements we also use Sun Microsystem’s XVM platform. Although XVM is slightly less stable than VMWare it is easier to configure. These facts make XVM suitable in ‘desktop’ environments such as software testing.

Putty
Putty is a freeware program that allows the user to securely log in to a remote UNIX machine using the SSH protocol. It's useful when you have Linux or UNIX machines to manage but your main machine is a Windows PC.

Software Update Wizard:
Adds Automatic Updates to your applications with a single line of code.

Graphics/Web Tools

Dreamweaver
Dreamweaver is the best web site design tool on the market at present. It delivers a good level of WYSIWYG design and, in the Ultradev version, supports database access.

Goldshell Flax
Flax is a neat, low-cost utility that allows the creation of text effects in Macromedia Flash.

FireBug
FireBug is a Firefox add-on that has become an indispensable tool when developing web applications using HTML, CSS and Javascript.

SilverLight
SilverLight is a browser plug-in created by Microsoft which provides a new way to present information within the browser. The primary benefit of SilverLight is that creating rich, interactive web-sites has become a lot easier.

WPF
WPF is a completely new user interface technology developed by Microsoft. Unlike previous enhancements to the Windows User Interface platform WPF does not build upon existing Windows UI components, but rather provides a completely new UI platform.

WPF is implemented in .NET Framework 3.0 and is built into Vista and can easily be installed onto Windows XP machines. WPF operates alongside traditional Windows User Interface components rather than replacing them. In fact, a WPF application can include traditional Windows UI components.

Developer Tools

InstallAware
Creating software installers that work reliably on the multitude of different Windows platform configurations continues to be a complex and expensive task. Although previously we have used InstallMaker from Wise, in recent years we’ve switched over to InstallAware for our larger systems.

The main reason for using InstallAware is that it keeps pace with the constant evolution of Microsoft technologies better than other installer systems, probably because the company behind the product focuses entirely on installer systems. Keeping up with Microsoft is particularly important for the increasingly common practice of on-demand downloading of Windows components required by the software being installed.

For smaller and less demanding software installation requirements we also used NullSoft, due to its small footprint and relatively small learning curve.

Python
Python is a powerful, object-oriented script language that runs under Windows and UNIX. We've been very impressed with the power of language, and it's much more logical than Perl for instance.

SysInternals
This web site has a range of system utilities and freeware, such as tools to monitor what programs do. Such tools can be invaluable when tracking down software problems.

Servers

Kentico
Kentico CMS for ASP.NET is a flexible, all-in-one solution for web developers that provides a content-oriented framework based on the ASP.NET platform.

MailTraq
MailTraq is an e-mail server for smaller companies. Blueberry have used this product in the past, and have recommended it to clients and others, who have also been impressed.