Mac Essentials Part 3
This is the final part of my mac essential series, where I present my favourite Macintosh applications. I previously covered some essential apps for every Sysadmin and my favourite day-to-day Internet applications. Today I will write about my essential applications as a Web-Developer.
Here are my top 10 applications as a Web-Developer (in no particular order):
Firefox
Firefox is the most extensible Webbrowser I know. And there a some really great extensions targeted at web developers available. You have heard of the web developer toolbar, didn't you? But the extension-to-have is Firebug (covered later) and therefore you will need Firefox as a web developer.
Firebug
With all this Web2.0 hype AJAX got pretty widespread today. If you ever developed ajax-applications you also know that debugging this stuff can be a pain in the ass. With Firebug this isn't true anymore. Firebug is also very handy to browse the DOM tree and "debug" your CSS code.
I could write much more about this great tool, but I will stop here and recommend that you download it and play a bit with it - I'm sure you will fall in love.
SmallScreenX
If you are building web sites for a living, I assume you will have a larger screen than 1024x768 because a bigger screen will boost your productivity. But you have to keep in mind, that many people are still using lower resolutions than you and you have to optimize, or at least check, your webpages in these lower resolutions. There are many approaches how to do that. You can switch your resolution, or you can have a desktop wallpaper with rectangels for the different resolutions, but I got stuck with SmallScreenX. This tool allows me to set a floating rectangle to any size I want and I then can manually fit any browser window inside this guiding frame.
Gimp
I'm sure you heard about Gimp before. In one sentence: It's an aproach to be a free Photoshop alternative. One caveat: Gimp will only do RGB image manipulation, no CMYK, so it's not really a tool for print productions - but I'm writing about web development here. Gimp has up to today fullfilled all my image manipulation needs as a web developer and it's totally free!
Update: Gimp.app is obsolete, try Gimp-on-OSX instead.
Opera
If you develop web-applications on a Mac you want to cut the time using windows to troubleshoot your applications to a minimum. You will need Windows to test in ie6 and ie7, but why not natively install Opera on your Mac to check your apps? I'm assuming that Opera on the Mac renders pages the same way as on the Windows platform, but I think this is a valid assumption.
ie:mac
Using the ie:mac as a web developer covers others aspects than e.g. using opera. This browser is obsolete and unsupported, but I still like it. Why? Because it does a pretty good job at rendering CSS. The Internet Explorer for Mac is totally unrelated to it's windows pendant and it is, despite of some quirks, standards compliant to a very high degree. I still have this browser on my harddisk for testing my CSS code, if I'm unsure if something displays strange because of my code or because of some browser disabilities.
This browser may be omitted while making a website cross-browser-compliant, but I will not delete it, because I really like the ie:mac.
Mamp
Mamp is a complete web hosting environment in one application. I had written about installing your own Mamp environment (Mac + Apache + MySQL + PHP) from scratch before, but this application makes your life so much easier. It's self contained and even includes a pre-configured phpMyAdmin. Mamp is, in my opinion, not suitable for real webhosting on a Server, but it's the tool to have for every web developer working on the macintosh plattform - your are up and running within minutes. And you can even choose if you want to have PHP4 oder PHP5 on your Mamp Server - very convenient.
PhoenixSlides
As a web developer you are ocassionally confronted with some design tasks and therefor you may need to choose suitable images. I have a large image collection sitting on my harddisk but the Finder is not really the right tool to browse those. PhoenixSlides is an image viewer, written with performance in mind. Try it out, it's free and it really kicks ass.
TextMate
I already mentioned TextMate in the first part of this series, but I cannot write about web development without telling you about TextMate. In my opinion this text editor is a must-have. Try the 30-day trial and become addicted!
Cyberduck
The same as with TextMate, I have to mention Cyberduck a second time in this series. It's a very nice tool for a web developer. Cyberduck handles all your upload tasks and, as I mentioned, you can edit files directly on the server with your favourite editor - this is very handy for some small post-deploy fixes, where it doesn't make sense to replay the whole deployment process.
I'm afraid I'm going to have to contest your inclusion of IE. Use of this browser, or anything older than 7 (if you absolutely HAVE to use IE) should not be advocated. Improvement of design technologies could be vastly improved if everyone kept up-to-date with the latest browsers. It'd also help immensely if Microsoft released versions of their browser for Mac. I'd love it if Mozilla stopped making Firefox for Windows.
Quite surprised that Camino and Transmit aren't on there
Geschrieben von Jasper 3 Monate, 2 Wochen nach Veröffentlichung des Blog-Eintrags am 29. Juni 2007, 16:03. Antworten
Hi Jasper,
in this part of my mac essential series I present the tools which I use as a web developer, and I really like the css implementation of the (old) ie:mac, because it adheres very much to the standards and helps you to spot bugs in the css layout which otherwise would go unoticed.
Camino is my favorite browser and is, of course, included in part 2 of the series.
Transmit is not on the list, because I use Cyberduck, which is free and I prefer it over Transmit.
thanks for sharing your opinion.
Geschrieben von Arne 3 Monate, 2 Wochen nach Veröffentlichung des Blog-Eintrags am 29. Juni 2007, 16:10. Antworten