Kuwait Mac Community

Who knows me, knows that I have a geeky passion for web development. Way back before I made the switch to Mac, I had all the common used web development application installed on my PC. To be frank, one of the most frustrating thoughts about moving to Mac is that I was afraid to lose this privilege.

Now and after almost 2 and half years of completely phasing out to Mac. I found out that developing web applications on Mac can be much effective than any windows release. Well, in this article I thought about sharing all the tools am using each with its weaknesses and strengths.

	Taco HTML Edit What makes Taco HTML Edit so great that its so light, like running a notepad on windows or TextEdit on Mac. Takes very little RAM and loads very quickly to make changes on the go. Taco HTML Edit, doesn't support WYSIWYG so its mostly a highlighting tool that works perfectly with HTML tags & its FREE
	Zend Studio Zend, my all time favorite PHP editor. For me, Zend is the ultimate PHP editor on both Mac and Windows. What makes Zend so special is its ability to autocomplete your own variables. If define a variable on some where in your script and reach a point where you must output this variable or call it for any purpose, you only have to write the first two letters and its will autocomplete. The same thing for PHP built-in functions or functions you wrote and its will automatically show you the required parameters for that specific function. Too bad there is no WYSIWYG editor in Zend even if you are editing an HTML file so everything must be done manually.
	XAMPP - Apache friends If you are dealing with mid size to large size applications, you will definitely need to run your scripts locally for testing. Heck, for me I usually test locally even if its 5 liner. XAMPP saves you the hassle of installing Apache web server, MySQL Database engine and PHP engine. Without manually configuring each and everything, the only weakness I can see about XAMPP is the space its will take on your drive and the memory it consumes but even that is practically nothing compared with any iLife application.
	Adobe Fireworks Very few people know what is fireworks exactly used for, fireworks was originally developed by Macromedia and then which Adobe acquired in 2005. It allow you to use simple drawing tools like the ones found in Adobe photoshop or Adobe illustrator with an extra advantage to slice the photo and export it as HTML. Fireworks will actually allow you to draw the entire page inserting images, drawing lines, borders and you can use the slicer to divide the image into small images aligned using HTML tables. Its mostly, used by web designers to generate HTML source of a particular designed page.
	Transmit If you are developing applications then you have to have an FTP client for uploading your stuff. so, far I find Transmit is one of the best FTP clients that runs on Mac. Its very easy to use and more stable than other FTP clients I used.

Well, that's it for now although I would like to point out that there are other great application for web development out there. Like Dreamweaver from Adobe or Coda from Panic. So, write your feedback and share what applications you are using perhaps I could download and give it a try.

Have a great day,