I always find it interesting to know what tools other people use for their web development.  Here’s my list:

• MacBook (black) – I love the portability
• Bluetooth Mighty Mouse – Apple please fix the scroll ball.
• TimeCapsule 500GB – Backups, to be honest its mostly got videos on it.  I need more space.
• LinkSys ATA – VOIP to the office in NZ.
• Software:
  • Firefox 3.0.9 – Im getting tired of how long it takes to open Firefox.  Being a developer, I usually have lots of tabs open… right now I have 34 tabs open.
  • Firebug – Best development helper ever.
  • Coda – panic.com/coda – Best code editor I’ve ever used, but please fix the search feature (why doesnt it find all strings that match the search text the first time?! – I have to to a Search/Replace multiple times to get all matches, ew)
  • Versions – versionsapp.com – Subversion client.  Love.
  • Things – culturedcode.com/things – Keeping track of to-do’s, ideas etc.  I also have the iPhone version.
  • Terminal – multiple windows always open.  I made a custom theme that looks like the first computer we ever had (black background with yellowy-orange text)
  • Mail – Great built-in mail app.
  • VMWare Fusion – vmware.com – All my development is done on local virtual machines (VM’s/VPS’s) running Debian Etch/Lenny.  I always have at least one open, often more.  I generally run them with only 128MB RAM each (my MacBook only has 2GB RAM which doesnt seem to be enough).
    I also have non-cli operating systems installed for testing code on different browsers.
    I would love to move this off to another machine to save me some memory: http://twitter.com/robertkern/status/1605041064
  • VPN – Built-in Mac VPN client for connecting to the office.
  • Adium – Chat connected to multiple chat systems including our own OpenFire installation for internal communication.
  • Transmit – panic.com/transmit – Great FTP client.  I dont need to use FTP too often, but when I do, this is a great app to use.
  • Photoshop – When I need to make image edits I use Photoshop, although I think i’d like to move over to Pixelmator.
  • FileMerge – For diff-ing files.
• Pot of tea with damnfinetea.  Or a plunger of coffee.  Bottle of water.

I generally have most of these apps open at the same time (excluding probably Transmit and Photoshop which I dont use often enough to keep open).

I received my copy of Cocoa Programming for Mac OSX this week. I started reading it and have learnt alot already just from the first few pages. I am looking forward to learning Xcode, Interface Builder and more importantly developing for the iPhone. I figure that when I have learnt programming for OSX, I wont have too much trouble developing for the iPhone. Having developed Windows software in the past, I am not too concerned about learning a new platform, but am very excited!

I stumbled across an excellent article today that assists in starting to code for a Mac. It covers some of the very basics of coding with C and is a good introduction.