As you (hopefully) know, I’m a web developer by trade. Whenever possible, I try to take time to help other aspiring designers and developers get their feet wet when they make the switch to Macs. There’s a refreshing amount of excellent software for Mac that will allow you to dive headlong into web development with a minimal investment on your part. Here’s a list of what I consider the essential software that you can get for free or inexpensively, as well as a few paid alternatives.
The Foundation: Text Editors
There are a veritable plethora of text editors for Mac and nearly everyone you ask uses a different one they’re fanatical about. This speaks volumes of the quality and diversity of the software available, but in the end it really comes down to your personal preference.
The best way to describe TextWrangler from Bare Bones Software is to say that it feels like TextEdit on steroids. You can use it as a simple text editor for sorting out content, but it also supports syntax highlighting for over 30 programming languages, one of the most robust find-and-replace actions of any text editor out there, and the ability to open and save files via its built-in FTP browser.
Though no longer under active development, Smultron is another free text editor that feels decidedly more Mac-like in its appearance. It utilizes an always-open sidebar similar to iTunes where you’ll view small (but resizable) thumbnails of all your open documents. Some extra niceties that Smultron has over TextWrangler is the ability to edit in full screen mode, view code in split view, as well as a pretty nifty snippets manager for quick access to frequently-used code.
You can’t talk about Mac text editors without a very vocal show of support for Textmate. It’s easily one of my most used applications and for very good reason: it’s literally packed with features and functionality, some of which can’t be found anywhere else. The web development features that are particularly useful include a built-in code preview (using Webkit), inline W3C validation for all of the HTML-ers, code snippets, and bundles, which can be written freely by anyone and add even more functionality to the editor. Textmate isn’t free, but for all it does, the $55 price tag is a steal.
Moving and Shaking: FTP
The clear winner for free FTP program (and possibly coolest icon) on the Mac goes to Cyberduck. It supports multiple protocols including: FTP, SFTP, WebDAV (MobileMe), Amazon S3, and even Rackspace Cloud Server access. It has excellent OS-wide integration and, perhaps more important, plays well with most text editors. You can right click on a remote file from within Cyberduck and edit it with your favorite text editor, then once you save it Cyberduck automagically uploads the file back to the remote server with no intervention needed on your part.
The guys over at Panic know great design, which is why it should come as no surprise that Transmit is one of the best looking and most functional FTP clients on the Mac. One of its killer features is the ability to create droplets: think of them as mini-Transmits that allow you to upload files without even opening the program. Additionally, it supports nearly every protocol you can think of and sports advanced editing of a variety of files remotely (most notably images). All of this packed into an elegant, intuitive UI makes Transmit the best $29.95 you’ll ever spend.
A relative newcomer to the Mac is Flow, a robust FTP program that was a big part of the last MacHeist and has been gaining more and more momentum. When you launch Flow, you’ll immediately notice it breaks away from the standard FTP interface for something that’s considerably more Finder-esque. Compound that with some advanced features not found in many other Mac FTP programs like multiple connections for simultaneous file uploads, right clicking to copy remote URLs, and bulletproof QuickLook integration and you have yourself one fine file transferrer. $25 and it could be yours.
Save the Environment
As far as I’m concerned, the only testing environment you need to set up on your Mac is MAMP, which stands for Macintosh, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. The latest version clocks in at a hair over 200MB. It’s self-contained and can live anywhere on your hard drive, essentially making it the ideal portable development environment. All of your webpages are viewable in the htdocs folder contained within the MAMP directory and can be accessed, by default, simply by visiting http://localhost:8888 while MAMP is running. Get MAMP absolutely free now and start your rapid development.
Test Your Code, Not Your Patience
The bane of any web developers existence is Internet Explorer and while we might not like it, it needs to be accounted for. Boot Camp is a good idea in theory, but would severely break your workflow should you have to reboot every time you made a change. That’s where virtualization comes in: boot up Windows (or any other OS, really) from within OS X for rapid testing and debugging.
Sun’s VirtualBox has come a long way over the years and in many respects can stand toe-to-toe with the paid virtualization clients out there. It fully supports multiple versions of Windows all the way back to 2000, many distros of Linux, and even BSD variants. It’s fast, intuitive, and gets the job done while leaving your wallet intact.
Holy layer of abstraction, Batman!
I won’t get into the Parallels vs VMware Fusion speed debates (though I already have) because with each new version released one becomes faster than the other. Priced identically at $79.99, these programs offer incredible speeds, loads of configuration options for power users, and enhanced graphics capabilities (for when you take a break from coding for a quick frag-fest). You can sometimes get Parallels at a discounted rate if you follow software sales like MacHeist or MacUpdate Promo (actually happening right now, including Parallels!), so some users opt to wait for that and save a bit of green. Beyond minor aesthetic details, each of the programs behaves similarly and in the end should cut your Windows testing time down significantly.
That’s All, Folks
Hopefully with all of the aforementioned tools you’ll be able to quickly and effortlessly jump into Mac web development while keeping your bank account at a respectable level.
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