Tools

These are applications which I use and personally suggest are the best tools around for doing certain tasks. Some have to be paid for unless you download a crack, torrent or use a shareware program.

Adobe Fireworks

This is a very simple yet advanced image editor which supports layers, objects, vector and raster graphics. It is very useful for creating shapes and text with simple effects like shadows, bevel, emboss and glow. You can set gradients and other various options to quickly produce web graphics or other simple things like buttons and borders. It is not free but a trial version can be downloaded here.

Adobe Dreamweaver

This is a nice WYSIWYG/HTML editor which I use mostly for creating HTML faster than you would with Notepad. It supports syntax for most of the common web languages and tools to upload files to your web server. It is again not free but a trial version can be downloaded here.

Notepad++

This is a free text editor which has many cool features. It supports syntax highlighting for many common programming and scriping languages and allows you to create your own syntax colouring schemes for if you were scripting in a language that was not supported like game scripts. It also comes with useful plugins and has information on how to create your own, you can download it from it's official site.

MySQL Query Browser

This is a good MySQL database editor which is free. It allows you to send queries to a MySQL database and generate queries in table form. It comes with a table generator and a help information on MySQL commands. You can download it here.

RealVNC

RealVNC is a application used for controling remote computers. It has many settings for maximum response and seems to be the best out of all the remote desktop applications I have seen. A free version can be downloaded here.

Visual Studio 2008

A very nice IDE for Visual Basic .NET, C# and C++. This is probely the best IDE as it has a good syntax scheme and quick IntelliSense to help you code as fast as possible and as much help as possible with the popup tooltips displaying the function syntax. Visual Studio is not free but you can get seperate free express editions for each language which don't have many limitations to if you had the full version. These express editions can be found here