Demon Slushy just asked a question about minor alterations to a theme so I figured a list of useful web dev add-ons would be worth having. I once said that, knowing what I know now, if I was writing SMF docs I'd start with a list of software to download and tell the n00bs to get that first before installing SMF and TP.

Here's my personal favourite list of software I wouldn't be without.

These are all free downloads.

1/ Get Firefox. It leaves Internet Explorer for dead.
It's free. It's stable. It's secure. It has an awesome range of add-ons.

2/ Get the Web Developer add-on. This thing will do everything except make coffee and give you orgasms, and I'm not sure about the latter. Seriously it is an extremely useful tool for site and theme work.

3/ Install the ColorZilla colour picker. It'll give you the hex code for any coloured pixel on your screen, as well as having palettes and a few other handy things. Hovering the pointer over any element on your screen will give you the css class for it.

4/ MeasureIt - Allows you to measure stuff on websites to the pixel. Very useful for checking alignment and dimensions.

5/ FireBug - Another good Firefox web developer tool. I don't use this one much myself as I find it rather intractable, but some people swear by it and it is very good.

6/ For file editing Notepad++ is indispensable. It's a far better format than the live editing in your SMF admin centre. The direct link to the download page is here.

5/ Another good file editing tool is WinMerge. Unlike Notepad, Winmerge allows you to display two files side by side. It's useful for comparisons and for editing the same code blocks into different files when installing mods.

6/ Once you've edited your files you'll need to transfer them. My weapon of choice is CoreFTP. It's easy to use and does everything that needs to be done.

7/ If you don't have access to Photoshop try GIMP. Although it isn't perfect it is very capable and you can do a lot with it. It's also less fussy than Photoshop in some ways. It'll happily process some files that Photoshop wont touch. I have both and use one or the other depending one which is more convenient at the time.

If you install this lot you'll be well on your way to achieving anything you want.

Got a few more good tricks here. At the moment I'm pretty right for cross browser testing. I still haven't set up Chrome because it's largely the same as Safari for rendering and I don't like the thing anyway, but I suppose I'll set it up at some point.

However what I have found is a way of running IE5.5, IE6, IE7, IE8 and Firefox 2, Firefox 3 and the new Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 all on the same drive without using a virtual box. Yup. Can do, and it gives you a lot of testing options.

For IE: I have a base installation of IE7 on XP. I also have a standalone version of IE6 from Tredosoft.com. I only use it for IE6 but it will also install earlier versions (everything from 3 to 6) if you're mad enough to want to test with them. It works very well on the whole, although it can be a bit unstable at times. Easy to reinstall anyway. 

What I installed today after being reminded of it is DebugBar. Hadn't tried it before but it's great for testing of rendering. It will run the rendering engines of IE5.5, 6, 7 and 8 on a base installation of 7. You can open a new tab in any of those four versions of IE, just like opening any other tab in a normal browser. Very handy.

I've also found a way to do parallel installations for different versions of Firefox. Details are here.
This is a great trick. They all work pefectly and you can run them all at once if you need to. Add-ons install to each version independently. I now have the renowned Web Developer add-on running on Firefox 2 and 3 and am typing this on Firefox 3.5 Beta 4, which is a very nice piece of work. I'm keeping it stripped to the minimum for smooth and fast browsing and will use 2 and 3 for design and testing work.

Oh yeah talking of browsers, another good one is Opera 10 Alpha. For an alpha release it's great. Opera 10 is really going to rock.

I still prefer Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 myself as it seems equally fast and is more customisable.

Hey I found a good little app today. PNGGauntlet.
Ok, so what is it? Well it squashes PNG images and makes them smaller. Seems to work very well with no loss of quality. It will handle both png-8 and png-24 images, and you can even feed gifs or whatever into it and it will spit them out as png's.

I've been doing a bit of testing and depending on the image I've seen file size reductions of between 20% and 60% compared to a png-24 exported straight from Photoshop and around 10% to 20% on png-8's.

It comes with a simple and easy to use GUI, which is handier than some of the other command line tools around, and it seems to give better compression than the others as well. Highly recommended if you're looking to get your images loading faster and using less bandwidth.