The Tools we use

Written by Rob | 12.13.11

EMC23 - Web Development Blog

Although we work with Joomla everyday and this blog and our work at the Irish Joomla User Group stand testament to that, Joomla is not the only tool that we have spent years studying and working with. When we organised ourselves into an entity back in 1996, our main tools were the Netscape browser for viewing AND editing html pages, and the Adobe products - Photoshop and Premier for graphic and live video editing.

Rob had worked for Corel Graphics so was pretty adept at Corel Draw, Bryce and Poser (which were made by Kai). Once he left Corel, he quickly moved over to the Adobe products, recognising clients' expectations and a superior product.

Cubase 3.5 was the audio sequencer of choice at the time, and we used Cool Edit Pro for Audio editing. Since then, CoolEdit2 was bought by Adobe and became Audio Audition. We still use version 1 after 15 years.

Photoshop, Cubase, After FX and Premier have all continued to upgrade though the diferences become less and less 'must haves' and we tend to skip versions, only upgrading when we are upgrading machines, and sometimes, not even then. We use a Wacom tablet and shuttlecock for interfacing with Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere and AfterEffects..

We use Dreamweaver less and less, mainly to create tables quickly and for that it is overkill. I'd happily still be using version 3 for that. We use notepad++ for CCS, Javascript, HTML and PHP. Sometimes we use Eclipse but it can be hard on resources in an XP machine, so it is really only used on the development machine for the Joomla Game System JiGS.

We use Windows XP and Ubuntu 10 (the old and the new) I don't like upgrading windows because each successive upgrade takes more memory from Ableton Live. The graphic stations are both windows XP based. We use Firefox and Chrome for our daily browsing.

Ableton Live and Resolume are the new kids on the block in that we have been using Live for the past 7 years and Resolume for the past 4 years. Both are tools that move away from the timeline sequencer paradigm to a live based grid setup. In fact, we often use Live to control Resolume via an old special edition Phatboy 2. We control Live via the Ableton Akai collaboration the APC 40 and a Korg Pad Kontrol to trigger drumbeats and effects.

And finally there's our beloved lil van, a Citroen Berlingo, which we use to travel Ireland to hold Joomla meetings, organise workshops and perform at gigs. And speaking of gigs...