Last night I attended a Web Meet-up group down at Roxies in the hope of networking and conversing with others in my field. Unfortunately half of the participants were unable so show because it was postponed to Tuesday (normally it’s held on the first Monday of the month). Overall it was pretty cool and informative. I’m not much of a full blown programmer so the Ruby presentation was pretty much over my head. The CSS frameworks presenter was of those unable to attend, which was my secondary purpose for being there.

The only thing that really irked me was one particular member scoffed at the fact I use Photoshop, Dreamweaver and Fireworks on a daily basis. I blew it off at first then it began to grate on me a bit. Maybe this particular person thinks I use the completely useless “Design Mode” during development, who knows. I typically only use code view and code almost everything by hand. I’ve used coders such as Coda and TextWrangler but both have issue with code highlighting. As far as the others I use them for what they were meant for…

Photoshop – high end design comps, complicated photo manipulation, patterns, backgrounds, etc.

Fireworks- web and UI layouts, final web graphics (as it tends to do a much better job of compressing images than Photoshop) and quick design comps.

I just had to get that off my chest since I’ve never been scoffed at for using “Industry Standard Applications” before. I wanted to ask what said participant was using? Some trendy free open source application probably.