Software Alternatives
(last updated: Jul 15, 2009) print

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HTML Editors

HTML-Kit is chosen as our editor for these reasons: The downside of this editor is this For Mac users here are some possible alternatives:
  1. The Bluefish editor. This is free and available at This editor is also useable on Linux systems. Mac users should use the fink tool to download and install bluefish and then run it through X11. It has less built-in HTML-generating buttons than HTML-Kit, but other features are very nice, such as automatic end tag completion when start tag is typed.
  2. The TextWrangler 2 editor. This is free and available at
  3. Dreamweaver used in "code mode". Adobe's (Macromedia) Dreamweaver is quite expensive, but it's a great software tool used by professional developers. You can create HTML either in WYSIWYG or code modes.

Graphical Image Editors

The editor of choice in terms of free and universal is The GIMP whose home page is:
http://www.gimp.org/
The downside for Photoshop users is that it requires a learning curve to figure out the equivalences of the Photoshop tasks.

Secure Shell Clients

There are two types of secure shell clients needed:
  1. A secure shell access client to the roadrunner server is rarely needed for this course. This is served by PuTTy on Windows.
  2. More importantly, a secure transfer client is needed for uploading to the roadrunner server.
On UNIX-based clients (like Linux and presumably Mac) the ssh command-line client serves for shell access. As far as secure transfer, one possiblility is the the gFTP client, which is available through the package system. Using gFTP is fairly straightforward; you need only know to select SSH2 from the protocol list in the top-right.

Here are some other possible alternatives for Mac users:
  1. Fugu
  2. CyberDuck
I have been told that they are very reliable, and that Cyberduck supports more features but a bit slower than Fugu.


© Robert M. Kline