San Bei Ji

My Favorite Mac OS X Apps

What are your favorite/essential apps? This game keeps coming around every so often, and now’s a good time to play since I’m ludicrously busy with multiple design projects and am making full use of every scrap of the 1.25 GB of RAM my PowerBook has. I even saw my first low memory alert yesterday.

Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004

This version of Dreamweaver features full Unicode support, excellent standards support for technologies such as XHTML and CSS, and has excellent server behaviors built in to speed up database-driven website development. My favorite all-around productivity tool for writing code for the web.

CSSEdit

This little app has proven itself very handy when having to edit existing complex CSS stylesheets to fit a certain theme. I usually use Dreamweaver to code CSS from scratch, but CSSEdit is awesome for showing a huge array of existing style previews and letting you make quick modifications with ease. I have this program set as my default CSS editor in Dreamweaver.

BBEdit 8

Since it’s all about the code, BBEdit is an essential tool for any web developer. While Dreamweaver has a great coding environment, sometimes you need that fine-grained control and text manipulation power that only BBEdit provides. BBEdit integrates beautifully with Dreamweaver, Interarchy, and MacSFTP.

Interarchy

Interarchy is the name of what used to be called Anarchie, which was a popular FTP tool for the earlier Mac operating system versions. When the program first got it’s name change and Mac OS X compatibility, it left much to be desired. But as time went on and feedback poured in, these guys have turned it into an awesome FTP and SFTP client. The tool features a very Mac OS X interface complete with column view. The FTP/SFTP disk feature lets you mount a local mirror version of a remote directory and it keeps itself in sync - a real productivity enhancement if you find Dreamweaver’s FTP capabilities to be a bit slow and you need to keep working.

MacSFTP

MacSFTP is a no-frills graphic SSH client for Mac OS X. It just works and works fast.

Firefox

A better web browser. Well mostly. I haven’t made the switch to it from Safari yet, but it makes a great second browser. Additionally, I’ve found some of the tools for Firefox to be indispensable, such as the Web Developer extension.

Microsoft Entourage X 2004

The new version of Entourage from Microsoft features S/MIME support. The overall tool itself is the best way I know how to keep track of my messages, tasks, appointments, and contacts. I had flirted with switching to Mail/iCal for a while, but that setup just isn’t quite as sophisticated as what I need to manage my web design business.

NetNewsWire Lite

This is still my favorite RSS subscription manager.

Macromedia Contribute 3

I use this tool more and more often lately to provide content management functionality to my web design clients without letting them break my design. The Mac version works with .Mac subscriptions.

Macromedia Fireworks MX 2004

This program is the best tool for the task of editing graphics for the web.

Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign

These are essentials for graphic design. I find Illustrator to be my favorite vector graphics program. Photoshop has helped me sort through hundreds of scans of old and deteriorating negative film shots to make beautiful pictures. And I have long abandoned QuarkXPress for Adobe InDesign as my page layout tool of choice.

MYOB AccountEdge

I do all my business accounting through this thing. It has a nice time billing feature with a stop clock so I can bill my clients to the minute with ease.

PGP

Don’t send your emails as postcards where anyone can read ‘em. Stick ‘em in an envelope. PGP makes that envelope out of solid forged steel that is six meters thick.

Harmony Assistant

I love that this music scoring application is only $70. It is quite good when compared to Sibelius and Finale, at a fraction of the price. Sibelius is quite good too, if you can afford it.

Tags: Dreamweaver, Mac OS X, PHP, Security