McArthur GFX

I kinda like Twitter. It’s a fun place to leave occasional comments. It’s also a great way to find links to interesting information I would normally miss from my feeds. But being a Windows user, I have yet to find that Twitter application that is a joy to use.

I’ve tried out a couple applications, and found each one lacking:

• Tweetdeck
• DestroyTwitter
• Seesmic

There might be a decent application out there that I haven’t found, but these are the most popular ones available to Windows. It almost feels like people only want to make cool stuff for Macs.

Recently, there has been a bit of talk about upcoming tablets like the CrunchPad and the iSlate, and whether we need them, how useful they'll be, or ifthey're only use is browsing the web on the toilet. Many people are of the opinion that we don't need one. Or that only gadget enthusiasts would buy it for couch web browsing. Well, I'll go out and say it: Tablets will replace everything.

LAMP is common lingo for web developers. It's an incredibly popular software stack to run dynamic websites. Many hosting companies include the stack for you, already configured and ready to go. But before we get there? That wonderful point where we trust our code to the production server, and then watch something blow up beautifully in a fire-y mess of status codes, fatal errors, and SQLStates. We developers like to test thing before then.

So I'm left wondering, why does setting up a testing environment suck so hard?

Sitting in front of a computer all day long can get boring. Sure, I love what I do. But after staring at text for a while, you have to break it up! And many developers have toys on their desk for just this reason. Mine's a Rubik's Cube.

One of the most obvious benefits to code editors and IDEs is being able to customize all the pretty colors that we must stare at for hours on end. It's our decoration. It's our wardrobe. So let me show off my own code outfitting.

PuTTY is on the utility belt of every developer.  It's the most common way we speak to servers and tell them what to do.  And if you ever need to command-line to more than one server, you end up with plenty of PuTTY windows open, each connected to a different server, only with an obscure, arbitrary server name or IP address to differentiate.

Enter PuTTY Connection Manager .

I recently heard about PHP Designer from Boagworld.com. They gave a nice review in one of their podcasts that I’ve started listening to. They made it seem all fancy and cool, and I just had to find out if it was really all that fancy and cool.

Pros

I must say, it feels very nice using it. I p...

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