My Web Toolkit

A new friend of mine expressed an interest to learn a bit about web development, if only to maintain his own website. I sat down to look at my toolset. What do I use?

For Design

Photoshop

A staple in any designer’s arsenal, Photoshop has become the de-facto standard for web design. I’m hoping that another company will come out with a true competitor. Pixelmator is looking promising, but it’s not quite there yet.

I have one of the suites, but it seems like Photoshop is the only one I actually use in any regularity.

Fontcase

Fontcase, by Bohemian Coding, allows a designer a way to manage their fonts that isn’t the default font book in OSX, which leaves much to be desired. This tool allows you to not only categorize your fonts and tag them, but to give a line of text several treatments in seconds.

xScope

I found this little tool on accident, and I’m glad. The price, at $27, is a little steep. What the tool does is give you a measurement tool on steroids. It lets you find dimensions, gives you rulers, previews screen-sized viewing ports, magnification, guides, rules, and crosshairs right on your screen. This has been invaluable for PSD to HTML work.

For Development

Coda

I started with Panic’s Coda when I first got my Mac and it hasn’t failed me since. It provides an easy, clean way to edit HTML, JavaScript, PHP, and CSS files. One of the beautiful things are snippets, which allow me to create new pages from templates or to toss in quick bits of saved code.

TextMate

Sometimes I need something bigger than Coda, or Coda’s easy workflow becomes too much for a PHP script to be written in. Strip it down to it’s basics, and you get TextMate, which touts itself as the missing text editor for the Mac. I’m inclined to agree with them.

MAMP

Once in a while I run into something that I have to test locally. WordPress Theme development is easiest when done in an environment where a refresh of the page is all you need. Working on the server can be a nightmare, and that’s where MAMP comes in handy. It gives you all of the LAMP stack, but chops off the L to give it to you on your M(ac).

Cyberduck

I’m not sure I’m willing to pay $35 for Panic’s Transmit, so I’ve stuck with Cyberduck, which is a free FTP client for the Mac. It’s reliable, saves the bookmarks, and asks if I want to overwrite files. What more do I need?

For Administrative

Billings

When I first struck off in the freelance market, I dug around for an invoicing software for quite a bit. I tried several web-based products, a few software-as-a-service bits, and finally settled on Billings. It does basic things, like estimates and invoices, while allowing me to do freelancy bits, too. Retainers are standard, as are what Billings calls “slips”, which allow me to break a website into design, coding, and anything else I’d like. Most of the custom bits are templated, which allow you to create defaults that you reuse again and again.

Pages

Pages is Apple’s version of Word. At $80 for the whole iWork Suite, it’s significantly less than Microsoft Office’s similar Home & Office Suite which rolls in at $150. It has some absolutely gorgeous built-in templates, which provide numerous layout options. The best part is that it’s not difficult to create your own templates, in effect allowing your corporate branding to be consistent between all documents.