In school, I had an entire class on Dreamweaver and even though the class showed you how to do everything with the program, I think I immediately forgot how to use anything to do with the Design view. I have always and always push others to hand code everything. Being a Windows guy, I don’t get to use the popular Coda or Textmate editors, but I’ve found a few for Windows that kick some ass.

1. Notepadd++

This was the editor that I felt comfortable enough with to drop Dreamweaver. It’s open source and 100% free, which is something everyone likes. It’s lightweight and customizable. Plus, it’s got one little feature that I need in my editors, it lets me move the tabs around. It doesn’t feature code hinting not does it close tags for you but I’ve found that has actually made me a better code.

2. Intype

Intype is my editor of choice right now. So why isn’t it at the top? Well, it’s an alpha version, 0.3. So it’s got some bugs but I’ve found it’s a pretty good Windows alternative to Textmate. My main pet peeve with it is small and probably won’t matter to anyone else, but I can’t drag the tabs to reorganize them. If it’s the editor I use right now, why isn’t it the number one on the list? Well, it is an alpha version and when they release the finished version, it won’t be free.

3. Aptana

Aptana is a great editor and features things like code assist and is can be considered an open source version of Dreamweaver. I found it easy to use because it’s Eclipse based and I’ve found it comfortable because I’ve used Flex/Flash Builder. But, unlike the previous two, it’s not lightweight and, while it’s highly customizable, it’s not as easy as Notepad++. It’s the editor I use when I’m working with PHP.

4. Dreamweaver

For the first couple of years, this was my editor of choice. And like most Adobe products, they’ve added more and more features with every new release. But with every feature, the program gets bigger and bigger and a lot it, I don’t use. Waiting a minute or two for the program to load up when I just want to make a couple of text changes can get a little annoying, plus I don’t have any use for the design view or the new Live view.

5. Microsoft WebMatrix

Surprisingly, Microsoft has actually made a lightweight and pretty nice editor and it’s free. It’s not all that customizable but it’s got a few interesting features, such as being able to log into databases and even has a SEO report function. I’m really surprised at Microsoft for putting this out and if it was more customizable, I think it would be higher on this list. I want to be able to change the tag colors and font which WebMatrix won’t let me do that, but it’s a beta so they might add some features.

Growing up I owned a Commodore 64 when it was the computer to have. That was the last time I had a top of the line computer until I moved out, went to university and bought my own. My parents were not and are not technology people. When I was in junior high, the school I went to was an experiment where it used computer networks for the first time(yes, I’m that old…). I loved messing around on the computers and even got to do a presentation in front of the school board showing my awesome multimedia project. When I moved on to high school, I took a computer programming class that taught me QBasic because it was 1995 and that language still mattered, a bit. The next year I was excited to take the more advanced programming class, which taught C++. I lasted 2 weeks. Not because it was hard or because I wasn’t interested. It was because I had a bad teacher.

What made him a bad teacher? He wasn’t interested in teaching, he just wanted to talk programming with the students that already knew C++. I can recall to times I asked for help and he got frustrated that he actually had to answer questions. Myself and another student made it two weeks into class and fell far behind because we didn’t have computers at home and the teacher had no interest in explaining assignments in class to us. He was much more interested in talking to the students whose dad’s taught Computer Science at the university. This wasn’t the only class I’d had him for, he also “taught” me French in junior high. I use the word taught lightly because when I took grade 9 French, I realized I had no idea what was going on despite getting an 80% grade in grade 8 French.

Am I bitter? Maybe just a bit. I rediscovered programming later on after I discovered and fell in love with web design. Eventually, when I really got into ActionScript 3.0 and while it’s not a hardcore language, it showed me how much I really love programming and it makes me wonder what I would have been able to do if I’d learned programming in high school and not later. But, luckily, I discovered web development and had some great teachers at college. I was just struck the other day, thinking back, at how differently my life could have been if I’d had a teacher that wanted to teach me something that I would have loved. But at the same time, who knows, I might have ended up being a drone, programming rocks at EA. I love what I do and I very happy that I ended up doing what I’m doing, but it’s amazing how one person can change the direction of your life, good or bad.

I was listening to CBC radio in the car last weekend, I can’t remember what show it was, but it was a panel of people from the book world, a couple of authors and a publisher and they were discussing the future of books. The main point of the discussion was the authors wanting their work protected and how much harder it was to do that with the spread of digital books. The host mentioned Amazon and the 1984 controversy where Amazon deleted copies of the novel people had downloaded for their Kindle because they didn’t have the proper rights to sell the book. The big deal was Amazon did this without telling the Kindle owners. This lead the conversation to the idea that companies like Amazon could, I don’t know if they do or not, track what pages you read more than others in a book you’ve downloaded. This came as a big surprise to the authors.

These are people fighting to have their books on Amazon raised from $9.99 to $13.99 when the book is in hardcover because they want the money they loose when people buy the digital book and not the physical one that costs $30. The fact that the two authors on the show didn’t have even a basic education about how digital technology works is a perfect example of the bigger problem that is going to affect the Internet over the next few years. The people making the decisions and those fighting for things like extreme copyright protection don’t understand what they fighting against. I strongly believe that their “victory” against Amazon to raise the price of their books will lead to a loss in money. People that were willing to pay $9.99 for a book might not be willing to pay $13.99 and will either wait until the price goes down or more likely, will download the book from a torrent site.

If the decisions made on things like access to information on the web or to the Internet itself, it will only lead to a backlash that would be worse than if they had left things the way they were. But with issues like Net Neutrality and censorship being fought in countries like Canada and Australia, this is a problem that can only be solved with education. We need to educate not only the people in charge but younger people, so they when they move into positions of power, they know how things like the Internet work and they can make the right decisions, not ones fueled by money. I think it’s been proven that you can be open-source and make money. If you make a good product or proved a good service, people will pay for it, you don’t have restrict access to your product to do it. Maybe in the near future, schools can add a basic Internet education class and show people how the Internet really works, so in the future, decisions won’t be made based on things people have seen in movies or by what they’ve been told by lobbyists.