Useful applications

Here’s a list of software that may be useful for working on the source code or uploading files:

Textpad is a plaintext editor with syntax highlighting for Windows. This is generally a nice application, except that it cannot edit Unicode documents with characters other than from the Latin1 character set and except that it’s not free.

SciTE is a free multi-platform plaintext editor with syntax highlighting and lots of other cool stuff. Notepad++ uses SciTE’s editor component in a free plaintext editor for Windows, with syntax highlighting and lots of other cool stuff. Another similar editor is Notepad2 (Windows, free).

The Notepad application that comes with Windows is not suitable for editing language files, because it can only write UTF-8 files with the byte-order marker (BOM) which will confuse PHP. And don’t even think of using any rich-format editors like Word or Wordpad, they will likely not support UTF-8 or mess up files with some kind of more or less ‘intelligent’ formatting.

Since handling source code files and translation PHP files with all those encodings and the infamous Byte-Order Marker seems to be a bit tricky for some, I have created a tool that does file conversions quite easily. You can drag any files you want to convert on the window, select input and output encoding, optionally select use of the BOM, specify an output directory for the converted files and click the “Convert” button. This way you can easily edit the files with any text editor, using any Unicode or your local system codepage, and afterwards convert the files to the required encoding. You can also leave the window open and re-do that work later by clicking “Convert” once again.
You’ll need Microsoft Windows and the .NET 2.0 framework. Released as freeware, ask me if you’d like to see source code.
Download FileConvert version 1.1 (2005-11-27)

SmartFTP is a free FTP client for Windows. Available in several languages. Supports SSL connections.

Beyond Compare is a commercial directory and file comparison tool. It can show differences in two directories or files and synchronise them. Supports (unencrypted) FTP connections and ZIP archives.

ExamDiff, a free visual file comparison tool for Windows, should be good, too. Another one is WinMerge (Windows, free, untested).

UltraEdit is a commercial plaintext editor that aims to be good for software developers. There’s also a file comparison tool, UltraCompare from them.

You can also use the command-line diff & patch tools, free and available for multiple platforms. Windows versions: diff.exe, diff3.exe, patch.exe.