Filezilla – very well done. There is even a free FTP server version.

LeechFTP – has been around for a long time. Very popular.

SmartFTP – a lot like CuteFTP… but free.

Google Alerts: View it here.

Let Google do the leg-work for researching and staying on top of any topic. Google will notify you via email once a day, as-it-happens or once a week.
Only get information you want!

For Flash Player: Visit Adobe Site for stats

For OS’s, browser, screen size, colour depth and Javascript: Visit W3C Site for stats

It becomes obvious why publishing in Flash Player 7 is a good idea and testing sites to make sure they work on both IE and Mozilla-based(Firefox) browsers is another good idea. And why maybe avoiding trying to get a site to work perfectly in all browsers (Opera), is not the best investment of time. There are advantages in doing so, but that is mainly if your site is targeting Europe.

Photoshop by default handles a wide variety of file formats. But still there are some formats that require specific plug-ins. Case-in-point, Nikon-Raw formats.

Download the Photoshop plugin to render RAW formats: Click Here

Raw formats are the “digital” negatives for pictures. They retain all raw information that a digital-camera captures. Most off-the-shelf digital cameras convert to the most widely supported image file-format JPEG. But in reality, the picture taken is in RAW format, and then converted into JPEG for viewing purposes.

Little Snitch – OS X firewall application

With almost every type of application now making network connections without user approval it is vital to have a firewall application that is able to alert you when network access is being attempted from your machine out to the net. Most basic firewall settings for OSX allow outbound connections with no alerts or blocking.

You can either learn the ipfw command or just download Little Snitch.