Guimikko

As a web designer, and a developer, I've come across some nifty apps for my line of work over the years and here's the essential tools of my trade.

I'll start off with the one that gets started up first: no, not Photoshop, I am talking about when starting the development phase here. Nope, not Dreamweaver, either, although both of them are essential.

First, I fire up the MAMP server. It is just awesome when I'm working on a site and don't want to work on an actual web server all the time and don't want that top secret confidential hot new upcoming site to be public before launch. Obviously, it saves time, too, and the old rule says it's always a good idea to test things thoroughly before going live. And well, test again on the live site and server. MAMP (Mac/Apache/MySQL/PHP) - ever heard of L(inux)AMP? - this is basically the same, but for Mac. This is probably the simplest way to set up a MySQL/PHP web server locally on your Mac. Honestly.

CyberDuck is my no.1 ftp client for the Mac. It's simple, intuitive and Mac-like and covers about 99% of my needs. Ftp is ftp, fairly straightforward and you probably know it, so I'm not filling any more text space with mindless jargon about it.

For that occasional 1% and also when using Windows I use FileZilla. Although FileZilla is geeky like Linux, not sleek like Mac, it has saved my derriére a couple of times. On Windows side I have also had good to great experience with FlashFXP in the past.

And for testing I like to use Opera a lot, although it is not my casual browser. Reasoning being is that Opera follows the W3C guidelines precisely by the book. Even to the point when it's not funny anymore, but helps you maintain the quality of your code. If your code works in Opera properly, chances are, it works on other browsers, too. Never forget the separate Internet Explorer testing and optimization, though..trust me on both claims. I think Opera has failed me only once, and even then there was actually a bug in Opera's rendering engine that caused one css element to render improperly.

File sharing and such with clients, collaborators and whoever over the net is what the DropBox makes simple. Free version already gives you 2GB of space and money buys you more. Most of you probably have it already, but if you don't, grab it. It's also available for iPhone and Android, but not yet for Nokia, so put it on your phone, too, to really maximise its benefits. Oh yeah, one time I put a recipe for pancake on mine as a text file so I didn't need to lug my MacBook over to kitchen. It also installs Growl, if you don't have it yet, so don't be surprised. Just turn Growl off if it bothers you. That's what I've done.

Sometimes I need to fiddle with language files, too, and for that I use PoEdit. So it's not that polished and sometimes the Mac version acts buggy and crashes, but hey, when the job needs to get done, it gets done. No excuses. Period.