I am a big fan of Open Source software, mainly because I am an even bigger adversary of pirated and 'copied' software. Software is generally expensive (eg: Microsoft anything.. ) and keeping up to date with version enhancements can be budget busting
Enter: Open Source software. Freely distrubuted. Updated (or not) automatically. And usually with as good (or better) functionality as some paid-for applications. I have huge respect for those people that code, support and maintain these app's, and then make them available for use to use, for nothing.
For development, Firefox is firmly at the top of the list, mainly down to its plugins.
- FireBug is just awesome for interrogating HTML, CSS, and Ajax requests and responses.
At the present time, no other Browsers' Dev Tools have the Ajax tab anywhere near as good as Firefox
- Web Dev Toolbar has been around for ever, but is very handy for measuring and interrogating
and manipulating what is currently on the screen. It also includes a handy mobile device emulator.. 'Ctrl+Shift+M'
- Selenium (IDE) this is my latest find - especially awesome for testimng form-heavy websites.
The export to PHPUnit is my next development project.
Development IDE's have come a long way since the WYSIWYG Dreamweaver days.. They now concentrate on code development and the tools required for making the coders life easier. NetBeans is not perfect, but it is in constant development and is continually improving and integrating with new languages and technologies.
Microsoft One Note.. Google Keep.. or Evernote. Somewhere to write a list, copy some text (or code), paste an image and for it to instantly be across all devices.
I use it for saving everything, every day. Categories.. Tags.. if you like being organised, then Evernote is for you.
Cloud storage across multi platforms. Take a photo on your phone and within seconds, view it on your desktop.
Quick and easy to use, with some nice features including integrated FTP, code overview and multi tabs.
One of those handy tools that I need on every device I use. Quickly and easily compare files or whole directories and shoot changes across from one to the other.
WampServer is a Windows web development environment providing an Apache2, PHP and a MySQL development environment.
One of the best, if not the best free FTP progam out there. I love the 'Directory comparisson' and 'Synchronised browsing' features for comparing local/remote locations.