My Favourite Mac Web Development Programs
Posted by baal | Filed under Blog
OK, this is a geeky post. I’ve long held an enthusiasm for creating, well, just about anything; and this enthusiasm of course extends to making web sites, too. I use a black MacBook (refurbished, so I could justify the price!) to create web pages; not that this website is a great advert for these programs, but anyway… What follows is a list of programs that have blown my mind. I’ve also said whether they’re open source, freeware, or otherwise.
1. Eclipse with the Aptana Plug-In (open source and free if you get the Community Edition)
Aptana is a fully-featured IDE (which I THINK stands for “integrated development environment,” though I might be wrong…). It supports (X)HTML, CSS, PHP, (via a plug-in), Ruby On Rails, Javascript, etc. etc. What I really love about this program is its live previews (in multiple browsers) and auto-code completion, which allows for crazy-ass experiments with formatting and floats. In fact, it can do pretty much everything you’d ever need, and in a way that seems to develop as you learn; it combines perfectly with the W3 web-building tutorials here.
Aptana is code-based, rather than What You See Is What You Get, which suits me fine; however, if you’d prefer to use a Mac WYSIWYG editor, I’d recommend either Amaya or Kompozer, which are both open source (though beware - when I tried that last program, it kept on formatting my source code in very odd ways when I switched between code and design views; and Amaya seems not to be able to render web pages properly - even well-made ones, like Google; but all WYSIWYG editors mess around with your code to some extent, I think.) Alternatively, Goldfish looks very good, though it’s £34.90 for the Professional Edition, and I couldn’t find a way of viewing the source code, which was extremely frustrating (though this might have just been me). Oh, yes: the only downside (for me) of Aptana is that it’s programmed in Java, which means it can get v-e-r-y s-l-o-w if you’re editing large files. I like to use Smultron (donationware) in these cases, as it’s swift and light, and can cope with all kinds of code.
2. CSS Edit 2 (commercial - €29.95)
A great way to easily manipulate, alter, and generally fuck around with CSS stylesheets. This program has many great features, including live editing, and makes CSS simple to understand (which was an achievement in itself for me). The CSS Edit developer is also in the process of creating a full html editor called Espresso; I’ll let you know about that when the testing has finished.
3. Cappuccino (open source)
Yet another coffee-inspired programming environment; this one is for developing web applications only; and it uses a language called Objective-J (which is based on Javascript). It’s ace, though please note this is NOT for building web pages; it’s only meant for creating apps.
4. Cyberduck (donationware)
If you have a remote server, it’s rather important to be able to upload content to it, etc; Cyberduck is a great FTP and SFTP program with an enormous amount of features. Download it and buy the developer a pint.
5. Seashore (open source)
A good, basic image manipulation program.
6. GIMP (open source)
Almost a Photoshop rival; and it’s open source, so it’s free to use and to customise, too.
7. AFELO (donationware)
A useful batch image compressor and simple editor.
8. Audacity (open source)
Great for recording and editing MP3s, etc., for podcasts.
9. Journler (commercial - $34.95)
A good, simple way to add video recordings for vlogging; and (more to the point, perhaps), it’s a full-featured file storage database as well, with top search features, etc.
Also,
10. Flux (commercial - £40)
This definitely deserves a mention - it uses a very nice, innovative, graphic way to develop web pages; however, I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone just starting out, as it appears quite complicated to use at first. There is a nice manual to go with it, though, and its developers seem (rather ambitiously) to want to out-weave Dreamweaver. An exciting idea, though I haven’t played around with it enough to know exactly how great it is right now. It looks like it could be quite special.
