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10 Essential OS X Apps for Pro Web Developers

techradar.com — Tools for coding, testing, uploading and tracking costs with web development. Note that with the exception of Enkoder, a script for encrypting web addresses online, these are commercial software tools.

Who dugg this? Made popular Oct 13, 2009

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  • NoNamesLeft, on 10/12/2009, -1/+34Why no mention of TextMate? I couldn't live without TextMate, a minimal interface with tons of shortcuts and works great with Transmit for live editing (a la Coda). It also has ROT13 encoding built right in, no need for a separate app. Also, VirtualBox is free, and even though it is not as as fully featured as the paid for products is a truly excellent application. This list feels a little under researched to me.
  • soopafly, on 10/13/2009, -0/+11I didn't know they had a Sidekick app?
  • generalalcazar, on 10/13/2009, -2/+9How could you leave out Eclipse? o_O
  • pixelguru, on 10/13/2009, -2/+9Looking at my dock...
    TextMate (worth every penny) http://www.macromates.com
    Bazaar (free) http://bazaar-vcs.org
    P4Merge (free) http://www.perforce.com/perforce/products/merge.ht ...
    Sequel Pro (free) http://www.sequelpro.com/
    Eclipse (Free) http://www.eclipse.org/
  • obeythefist, on 10/13/2009, -0/+7@ohplease

    Sorry, now I see that you're talking out your ass and I shouldn't have made a serious response to you. Please make it clear in all future posts that you are a windows fanboy with nothing valuable to add to any conversation about what tools are valuable for web dev. Thanks.
  • mochaman, on 10/13/2009, -0/+7I'm not sure about Coda but no TextMate?
  • s73v3r, on 10/13/2009, -0/+6Not many people use IDEs for web stuff.
  • rssej, on 10/13/2009, -0/+6No TextMate or Cyberduck. FAIL.
  • G-RaZoR, on 10/13/2009, -0/+5Versions is also a nice SVN client if your into that sorta thing.
  • kevinmoore, on 10/13/2009, -1/+6Yes, because everyone knows that GIMP is a 100% feature-complete competitor to Photoshop!
  • Hilyin, on 10/13/2009, -1/+6I used PCs for 13 years, and have been a Web developer for 10. I switched to Mac a little less than a year ago, and it has made web development much more enjoyable. You are a fool if you think PCs are better for web dev.
  • leamanc, on 10/13/2009, -0/+5I have six of these ten. The rest look good too, except for VirtualHostX. $19 because you are too lazy to edit some Apache config files? Creating virtual hosts is one of the more easier config file edits you'll ever do.
  • dmcaudio, on 10/13/2009, -0/+4I'm still using Frontpage 98 and don't have any complaints. What else do you need?

    /s
  • svensko, on 10/13/2009, -2/+6I'm an Apple user and I think this is pretty funny. If you don't think this is funny then something's wrong with you.
  • tehfink, on 10/13/2009, -2/+6i bought cssedit, it's pretty awesome, despite not being updated in 2 years (it does have some annoying bugs though, but no showstoppers)

    i prefer cyberduck over transmit, and you can't beat the price, plus it's updated constantly: http://cyberduck.ch/

    virtualbox ROCKS! mac netbeans is also coming along, and is supposed to get django support soon…
  • jwdav, on 10/13/2009, -0/+4It is funny ... what's not funny is the constant barrage of troll-clowns that show up in every thread remotely concerning Apple.
  • MacParrot, on 10/13/2009, -0/+3Windows 7 is now an OS X Pro web developer's app?
  • MikeSD34, on 10/13/2009, -0/+3You've got to test in IE somehow...
  • guytoronto, on 10/13/2009, -2/+5Take a look at Forklift for FTP and Espresso as a text editor. Love them both.

    BTW, "encoding" your email address to protect it against scammers is a joke. Don't want your email harvested? Don't put it online. Create a contact form.
  • GelfTheElf, on 10/13/2009, -0/+3I use CyberDuck (ftp) and TextMate and it's fine for small updates/fixes to simple sites.
  • kevinmoore, on 10/13/2009, -0/+3Possibly not, but Coda has almost everything to do with it.

    My point was that professionals do indeed make money using Macs, despite what the growing horde of digg's anti-Apple fanboys would like to believe.
  • prolikewhoa, on 10/13/2009, -0/+3I still like Dreamweaver and I hand code. Having two monitors and the code inspector in one monitor with the design pane in another is nice. DW has a lot of useful indispensable features for site management, like Library Items. Turn up your snobby noses all you want but I get a lot done with Dreamweaver. Coda is cute, Dreamweaver is more solid.

    I also use Transmit, sometimes Textmate, Jumpcut for clipboard history (very handy)..and Photoshop. I'm a front-end designer.
  • peterc18st, on 10/13/2009, -2/+4techradar the place of useless lists about mac software.
    I see the point of all of these lists for the newbie mac owners.
    But honestly techradar just over does it.
    Every other week they have something on new mac software.
    Next weeks list. The top 10 pieces of software to make you want to twitter on your facebook.
    dugg for it being on 1 page though.
  • Sembei, on 10/13/2009, -0/+2Where are Textmate or Aptana?
    I don't think to encode your mail is essential btw GNU users aren't pro then? o.0
  • obeythefist, on 10/13/2009, -1/+3I have two machines at my desk from which I develop and administer 10 company websites on LAMP servers. One is a PC with XP and the other a Mac. Though I started out with the PC as my main dev workhorse, after 18 months of slowly expanding my use of the Mac the PC has basically just become my IE 8/7 test machine.

    The UNIX underpinnings of the Mac coupled with the mainstream tools that are available for it make it vastly superior to Windows for web dev.
  • markstory, on 10/13/2009, -0/+2Buried for lack of TextMate.
  • mrBitch, on 10/13/2009, -0/+2Need to delete everyone's photos, contacts and calendar data? Microsoft has an app for that!
  • s73v3r, on 10/13/2009, -0/+2Tried Notepad++ on the Windows side? Its free, open source, and has a ton of plugins available for web development.
  • wanderson, on 10/13/2009, -0/+2I prefer Billings over OnTheJob, and as far as text editors go, I'm partial to MacVim over TextMate. The only thing I use TextMate for these days is for LaTeX; it's got great support for calling pdfTeX and previewing the resulting PDF, etc. Everything else, SVN etc., I just do it via the command line.

    I think for new developers apps like this are great, but once you get used to it, I think it's faster to just keep your hands on the keyboard and do it the old-school way without spending $50-80 here and there on text editors and SVN clients.

    I will give props to VMware, though: the level of integration, etc. and the sheer performance makes it well worth it. Plus, the support is great.
  • IllBeBack, on 10/13/2009, -0/+2Sorry guys. It was only a joke. I own three iPods, an iMac and a Mac Mini (for a media center application) myself. I knew going into it that I would be dugg down.

    I am of the opinion that Apple is going to have a big announcement before October 22 when Windows 7 debuts. A quad-core iMac would be sweet.

    http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/10/macrumors/
  • jayhawk, on 10/13/2009, -0/+2same here. Dreamweaver is nice to get stuff done quickly. i use Textmate and Transmit for live editing after stuff gets posted. but for whole site management, Dreamweaver is tough to replace.
  • Sheco, on 10/13/2009, -0/+2Essential OS X Apps for Pro Web Developers:
    * Terminal
    * Vim
  • mellenger, on 10/13/2009, -0/+2try E text editor. it's like textmate. i'm pretty sure you can use the same bundles even. http://www.e-texteditor.com/
  • jayhawk, on 10/13/2009, -0/+2i switched from BBEdit to TextMate and haven't looked back . . . and i also use it for live editing with Transmit. great combo with full features.
  • Zippo, on 10/13/2009, -0/+2I've never been able to justify Transmit over Cyberduck. Cyberduck does just about everything Transmit, but it's open source and free.
  • jpdbaugh, on 10/13/2009, -0/+2Clearly, ohplease you do not understand how MAMP works. LAMP is just a stack of technologies, you can use Apache, MySQL, and PHP on Windows, Mac, or Linux. LAMP just means Linux is the OS. I do personally prefer Linux to both Windows and Mac though, the tools tend to be less expensive and more efficient, if you take the time to learn some things.
  • samuelcotterall, on 10/13/2009, -0/+2These are hardly “essential”—I’m a web developer and I only use Transmit and MAMP from this list.

    My list would be: TextMate, Transmit, Versions, MAMP, Photoshop Firefox (with Web Developers Toolbar and Firebug) and the appropriate browsers for testing.
  • Hilyin, on 10/13/2009, -0/+2Obviously I use Linux in production. I hope you can visualize me rolling my eyes at your angst ohplease.
  • xtremesniper, on 10/13/2009, -0/+1I used to use Parallels and I was getting frustrated by a few things including slowdowns... So I switched to VMWare Fusion just to give it a shot, and I was impressed by the increased speed.

    I don't know how much of a difference there is between the two products now, but I'm sticking with VMWare until Parallels convinces me to try them out again. Things just work with Fusion that didn't when I used to have Parallels.

    My advice? Just try both out (even side by side with an unactivated copy of Windows) and see for yourself.
  • CraigGrannell, on 10/14/2009, -0/+1TextMate was omitted largely due to its lack of updates of late and because I didn't want three text editors in the mix. As for VB, I don't rate it compared to VMw F. Given that I've been doing web design on the Mac for over a decade now (starting with SimpleText and then moving on to PageSpinner), I've done plenty of research over the years!
  • magic6435, on 10/13/2009, -0/+1Yup.
  • DonCarcharo, on 10/13/2009, -1/+2Actually I really like Windows 7. I recently switched over my Hackintosh Dell Mini 9 to Windows 7 and also tossed my Mac/Apple TV media center solution for Windows Media Center 7 with extenders. In both cases, Windows 7 was just a better solution. It's got a good looking UI, the new taskbar is great and of course it's got the benefit of running on just about any hardware I've got.

    If you haven't checked out 7 simply due to brand or platform loyalty, you're missing out.
  • jpdbaugh, on 10/13/2009, -0/+1I am not saying that a pro web developer doesn't hand code but I am saying that tools are needed. I just finished a massive PHP script for a web application I am helping developing at my internship and without Zend Studio I would have died. Debugging tends to be handy when you get into 1000s of lines of code, not to mention the company I work for takes advantage of things like CVS repositories, and the database view of Zend. Clearly, all of these things can be done with just a textedit and the command line effictively.
  • DonCarcharo, on 10/13/2009, -0/+1"For that matter what kind of crap are you doing that you can't write CSS using your IDE???"

    Who says I'm not writing my CSS? What I like is the ability to see my edits live, hence CSSEdit. And the "crap" I'm doing has been featured in multiple high profile publications. In fact at the moment I'm working for an Oscar winning movie production studio.

    Remember, just because someone isn't using the same workflow as you, doesn't mean they're doing it wrong. It's very likely that you and I have totally different job responsibilities, and therefore we need to adapt our workflows as such.
  • DonCarcharo, on 10/13/2009, -2/+3I'd love to see a comparable list for Windows. I use my Mac for web design and my workflow involves Coda for text editing and light ftp, CSSEdit for CSS, Transmit for heavy FTP and synchronization, TextSoap for cleaning text for the web and automatically applying markup (ul lists, paragraphs, etc.), Versions for subverison, MAMPro for local server management and of course Fusion for testing.

    However on the Windows side I've yet to find tools nearly as elegant. Sublime Text editor and e-text editor are both adequate, but neither compare favorably to the Mac text editors in terms of UI experience. Filezilla is about the best FTP app I've found and it's as ugly as sin. Textsoap actually exists for Windows though it's not nearly as robust and I still haven't found a good subversion client or WIMP server solution.

    In fact, Stylizer is the lone gem on windows. It's an AMAZING CSS editor and is perfect for doing live css edits for IE compatibility. I actually use this as part of my normal development in fact. That said I'd still love to see a windows list, because as a Mac guy I'm sure there's plenty of apps I'm overlooking in the Windows world.
  • gamepr0, on 10/13/2009, -0/+1When you seriously tried to develop websites on both OS X and Windows you'll immediately understand the quality on OS X vs quantity on Windows argument about software. Don't know about linux.
  • s73v3r, on 10/13/2009, -0/+1Ahh. In that case, Notepad++ probably won't be what you need. I think it does have hooks to load the current files into IE and Firefox, though.
  • DonCarcharo, on 10/13/2009, -0/+1I haven't actually so I'll have to give it a shot. As I'm a front end designer, what I need most out of my text editor is a robust preview system and virtually none of the Windows editors I've tried even bother to integrate with a local server as Coda does. Zen coding is also nice, as is robust snippets/clips management.
  • prolikewhoa, on 10/13/2009, -0/+1Not everyone wants their users to use a form.
  • jpdbaugh, on 10/13/2009, -0/+1That is like saying a master carpenter only needs a hammer and some nails...
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