Ask HN: What are the Must-Have Apps for OS X as Web Developers point of view?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5303804

by jalan • 13 years ago

9 6 13 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I just purchased a new MacBook Pro and I am planning on completely transitioning from Linux(Ubuntu) to Mac OS X for my Web Development Environment. I primarily work with PHP and Ruby, and use Sublime Text 2 on Ubuntu as my source code editor.

What apps should I know about to maximize my Web Development production on Mac.

I am a Mac newbie, so any suggestions regarding maximizing Mac OS X performance(in general) is most welcome.

Thanks in Advance.

(P.S. => This is my first post on HN, and I love this community)

0Y5T2• 13 years ago

stop calling it apps

jimbobjim• 13 years ago

That's what Apple call them now, like it or not.

0Y5T2• 13 years ago

Obey

Conform

Consume

jalan2• 13 years ago

Honestly, I like the term "Apps" more than "Applications" or "Softwares", and guess what, it's even Official now "Mac App Store".

jameswyse• 13 years ago

Welcome to HN!

Here's my favourites, I won't drop any links as they're all pretty easy to find and it's not all Mac specific.

* Alfred - It's like spotlight on steroids. Bind it to cmd+space and you're a tap away from everything on your computer. The powerpack is worth it.

* Sublime Text 2 (using 'Made of code' theme ('Tomorrow Night' is also nice), with JSHint and some other plugins) * Sparrow (for email)

* Sketch (vector graphics) - It's not quite good enough to replace the Adobe suite but it's getting there! Great for mockups.

* Mou - Markdown Editor.

* Virtual Box - With the free IE VMs from modern.ie

* ImageOptim - Little tool to optimise images.

* CodeKit - I use this for simple sites - It compiles CSS, JS, HTML, etc from pre-processors and template languages as you work. I've found it has some performance problems but still quite handy.

* XScope - Various tools for measuring things on your screen. Really helps if you do a lot of PSD to HTML work to check everything is pixel perfect! It also has an iPad app which mirrors photoshop or your display to the iPad screen.. not terribly useful but cool none-the-less!

* Littleipsum - Menubar item to generate Lorem Ipsum

* iStat menus - Menubar addons - Provides a nicer clock and various performance monitoring widgets.

* 1password - Now I have a unique, long and complicated password for every different website and I don't have to remember them!

* Keka - Decompress all the files.

* Onyx - Preference Pane with various tools for system maintenance

Quicklook is also quite useful, press the spacebar on any file to see what's inside. There's some tweaks you can do to get the most out of it:

* Enable text selection (type in terminal):

    defaults write com.apple.finder QLEnableTextSelection -boolean YES;
    killall Finder

* Keep quicklook open when you switch applications (type in terminal):

    defaults write com.apple.finder QLHidePanelOnDeactivate false;
    killall Finder

* There's plugins for loads of additional file types, but I like this hack to preview any file as plain text: https://coderwall.com/p/dlithw

Stuff for the terminal:

* Tomorrow Night theme

* Homebrew - apt-get for mac.

* ZSH + Oh my ZSH - ZSH is a great bash replacement and Oh My ZSH adds a lot of useful stuff. I epecially enjoy the git integration. My prompt looks like this: "➜ dirname git:(master) ✗" (the X means I have uncommitted changes)

Ehhh I think that's about it!

jalan2• 13 years ago

Thanks a lot, will surely look at each one of them. Pretty excited to get started on Mac for production purpose as soon as possible.

Ask HN: What are the Must-Have Apps for OS X as Web Developers point of view?

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