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Ask HN: What's your Mac/OSX web development software set-up?

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Ask HN: What's your Mac/OSX web development software set-up?

#1
After over 10 years of becoming gradually removed from development (as a director of a 50+ person company), I've taken a head-first dive back into it while I travel around the world and freelance.

What tools/software do you currently use for web development, on a Mac platform? I'm not attached to anything, and want to use whatever will make me most efficient (even at an initial cost). Here's my current set-up (mostly PHP development). I should also note that, because of intermittent wi-fi access while traveling, I usually prefer native desktop apps to web apps.

* MacBook (aluminium) with a small Verbatim back-up drive and hard case (I'm traveling the world at the moment), plus Time Machine

* DropBox for real-time backing up my ~/Sites/ and other important directories

* MAMP Pro for easy administration of the LAMP stack

* Quicksilver (I find it fractions-of-a-second faster than Spotlight, which makes a difference)

* InstantShot and Paparazzi! for website screenshots (for pitches, etc)

* SimpleTask (for To-Do list)

* Mail.app (managing multiple accounts, including Gmail)

* TextWrangler (as my main text editor / IDE - I'm especially not tied to this)

* Filezilla (SFTP/FTP/etc)

* Terminal (love the multi-tabs; always have a tab open with a grep -R ready for searching; find it much faster than using an in-IDE search across files)

* Chrome (with the Web Developer extension) as my main browser; also Firefox, Safari

* Parallels with Windows 7 (to run Internet 8/7 natively with debugging tools; prefer it to WineBottler, etc)

* Skype (for cheap/free conversations and screen-sharing with clients)

* OmniGraffle Pro (UX, Wireframing, sketching)

* Fireworks (Graphics work)

* Flux (for making late-night work semi-comfortable)

* Silverback (usability testing)

Anything I should switch-out or add? I'm looking for efficiency and speed over detailed configuration, open source / licensing or price. Thanks in advance, HN'ers!

Re: Ask HN: What's your Mac/OSX web development software set-up?

#2
I'm a big fan of Coda for the actual IDE. Well, more of a text editor, similar to TextWrangler. Not free, but it has the built in SFTP client, so it covers that.

Also suggest balsamiq as an alternative to omnigraffle; both are excellent products. Might want to try balsamiq (free for a month) just so you know what else is out there.

Re: Ask HN: What's your Mac/OSX web development software set-up?

#6
post #3

I've been working with MAMP and Coda for about 8 months now and I love it. I'm just working on personal projects so I don't have a need for a whole suite of tools

Well that's two votes for Coda, I should definitely give it a go. I've just this second installed Aptana too (for an AIR project that I've been asked to look at).

I like to keep things as simple as minimal as possible too, so if MAMP and Coda works for you, I suspect it might for me too. Thanks.

Re: Ask HN: What's your Mac/OSX web development software set-up?

#7
post #4

ies4osx and macports are handy.

I've found that ies4osx doesn't reproduce the behaviour of IE browsers closely enough - always a corner case here or there. If you can get VMware and a copy of Windows or as the OP mentioned, Parallels, it's the more desirable way to test IE.

Re: Ask HN: What's your Mac/OSX web development software set-up?

#9
My setup is quite a bit like the OP's.

Macbook pro with:

* TextMate for code editing (with the Ack in Project/AckMate bundles for searching through a large codebase, and updated bundles for Ruby on Rails, RSpec, Cucumber, Shoulda, etc)

* rvm for Ruby version and gem management

* Terminal (nothing special added here)

* Quicksilver for quick tasks and app launching

* Transmit for SFTP or simple Amazon S3 management

* Photoshop when graphics work is needed (or sometimes Acorn when it's a simple resizing)

* Skype for co-worker coordination and calls

* OmniGraffle for wireframing

* Chrome & Firefox with web dev related plugins (web dev toolbar, firebug, rulers, color pickers, etc)

* Mail.app for all email

* GitX for easier viewing of repo history/diffs (one of the alternate forks with added features) - still mainly use CLI for day-to-day operations

* SequelPro - a great, free MySQL app for mgmt, queries, etc

* pgAdmin - the same as above, but for Postgres

* and iTunes for the background music

Re: Ask HN: What's your Mac/OSX web development software set-up?

#10
FileZilla for Mac is a disaster. I was pretty happy with it on Windows but the OSX build has some serious issues. CyberDuck is another OSS FTP client that's a bit more reliable for me, but it lacks the two-pane synchronized browsing of FileZilla. I think I'm going to break down and buy Panic's Transmit.

+1 for f.lux, OmniGraffle, and Dropbox

A major hardware mod you should consider is an SSD. Really really noticeable improvement.

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