This course will go much more smoothly if we all use the same tools.
Browser
- Google Chrome – Don’t use Safari. Firefox is okay, if you have specific reasons you want to use it. But for simplicity’s sake, let’s all use Chrome.
Text Editor
- Brackets – A great open source text editor from Adobe (weird, I know). Most relevantly for this class, includes syntax highlighting and good preview tools, but a lot of other nice stuff, too.
FTP
- Cyberduck – Weirdly, you pay for this tool in the Mac App Store, but you can still download it for free straight from their website.
Image Editing
- Photoshop – Still the industry standard, but fairly expensive to install on your own computer. If you want to use it on your own machine, the Creative Cloud Photography plan ($10/month) is probably your best bet.
- Pixelmator – A strong challenger to Photoshop. Not as full featured, but more than you’ll need for this class.
- Preview.app – You can resize and lightly edit images with this built-in Mac app.
File Sync
- Dropbox – There are other file syncing services out there, and if you’re comfortable / already invested in one of them, go for it. Otherwise, Dropbox really is pretty great.
Extra Resources
- Codrops– Really cool and extensive CSS reference with important properties and info.