5 Must Have Mac Web Development Tools
August 11th, 2009
I first purchased my MacBook about three years ago for school, and had little idea at the time how great of a development platform OS X really is. Here i’ve compiled a list of 5 utilities and apps that i use on a daily basis for web development on my Mac, and a few details about each one of them that make them appealing to me (and hopefully you).
1. TextMate
The self proclaimed “Missing editor from Mac OS X”, TextMate, is a must have text editor for any web developer working on a Mac. Though not a complete IDE such as Zend, TextMate offers syntax highlighting for everything you could ever want and more. Its fairly fast and allows you to group your windows together into projects. Though it is not free (it does have a free trial), it has made html/css/php editing fairly convenient for me.
2. Cyberduck
When you spend 30% of your day uploading and downloading files from your webserver, it’s important to have a reliable and efficient FTP client. Cyberduck is an open source (free is good) FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, Cloud Files & Amazon S3 Browser for Mac OS X. It’s fast, user friendly, and integrates very well into your system providing easy access for editing your files with your prefered text editor or IDE.
3. MAMP
Those of us who work on very active sites or projects know the importance of having both production versions and development versions of our work. MAMP, which stands for Mac, Apache, MySQL and PHP, is an easy to use open source (free!) App which after installation will allow you to host local versions of your site. Forget about transferring files back and forth from the server, do all your development and bug testing locally and just upload the final product. And if you ever decide to delete MAMP, just drag the application folder to the garbage and it’s gone!
4. Photoshop
I know, everyone knows about Mac’s big brother. But lets be realistic, if you’re doing any serious web development the design is probably being done in Photoshop. If you have can afford it, Adobe’s Photoshop is the ulimate image editing software that will allow you to turn your dreams into pixels. If you really can’t pony up the cash though, you might want to consider Photoshop’s free open source cousin, GIMP.
5. Kuler
Last but not least, Kuler is another Adobe product which is free and web based. Yes i know this isn’t just for Mac’s but when it comes to design you need to pick properly matched color schemes, and Kuler is my opinion is the best option for that task. If you check out the website, it will allow you to create color themes from any shade you can imagine, save and share them, and also browse themes created by others for use on your own site.
Tags: cyberduck, kuler, mac, mamp, photoshop, textmate, Web Development
Posted in Web Development | 4 Comments »
I disagree with the choice of MAMP, MAMP is no longer developed. Instead of MAMP I suggest XAMMP that have just release a version with PHP 5.3. The installation is painless and have got a nice control pannel
Are you sure? I looked and it seems that MAMP is in fact still being developed, and is much less bloated then XAMMP.
I disagree with CyberDuck, Filezilla is so much easier and faster to use imo it beats cyberduck in a lot of aspects.
I’m not sure if MAMP is still beig developed or not, it seems they’ve fallen a version or few behind on the PHP version.
Hi !
Don’t forget versionning !
To get a perfect web developper environment with versionning.
You can use SPMPT for MAMP. Its a easy to install package working out of the box ! Its permits you to get Trac (from edgewall) and Subversion server on your MAMP installation. Then because Trac needs Python and mod_python (included in package) it’s a very nice tool for Python programmers.