Utilities and Tools

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.

FTP Voyager

FTP Voyager allows you to explore FTP sites using an interface similar to Internet Explorer, and even supports drag-drop operations between folders on the FTP site. (Note that IE's FTP functions have some bugs that make using password-protected sites rather difficult.)

ICQ

ICQ is an instant-messaging program. Although it's normally considered more as recreational than business software, we've found it to be very useful for internal communication. Even better is the price: free.

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.

K9

This program and its larger cousin, Tardis, can be used to keep a PC's clock synchronized to an external time source over the internet. Whilst this may seem unnecessary, it's actually very important when collaborating on development projects using CVS.

VMWare

VMWare is a very exciting product that allows you to create complete virtual PCs within your existing computer. You can even set up multiple virtual computers and switch between them easily. This make testing of programs on multiple operating systems much easier—just install virtual machines for each OS on a single PC! The main downside is that VMWare does need a relatively powerful machine to run well.

Putty

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

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.

Fireworks

Fireworks is replacing Adobe Photoshop as our preferred graphic design tool. It has a unique editing model that combines the best features of bitmap and vector graphic programs, and great features for creating web-oriented graphics.

Goldshell Flax

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

InstallMaker

Some years back, creating a setup/install program took days if not weeks. Now it's much quicker, thanks to products like this. We've generally found the WISE range to be the best of these products.

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.

Zope

Zope is an open-source web application server based on the Python language. It competes with systems like IIS and PHP, but has a slightly different philosophy: it features tight integration between the server, the scripting language and a built-in object database. There are a lot of large Zope sites on the Internet, and it can be a very productive system to use.

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.