Being a web designer, there are 2 questions I always get asked about my work.
1. Do you use a Mac or a PC?
2. What software do you use? (Usually followed by something about Dreamweaver).
To answer question 1, I use both. I prefer Mac for designing and developing, but you do need a PC to test your sites in IE and windows browsers. Some people use a Virtual Machine running on the Mac with windows installed. I prefer a separate PC as I also use it for file storage.
To answer question 2, I thought that I would just snapshot my dock on my Mac. After all, these apps are the ones I use daily!
My Dock
Above is my dock, here is what’s on there, and why:
Textmate – Textmate is a really useful code editor. It is very similar to any notepad app, but with some extra bundles and features that make it a fast and efficient tool for coding.
Coda – Coda really is a favourite of mine, it is designed to be a code editor with built in FTP, CSS editor, Preview, Terminal and Resource Books. It’s style is very ‘mac-like’ which makes me love it even more.
Safari – My browser of choice, it’s fast, functional and renders pages correctly (cough… IE… cough).
Firefox – My second browser of choice, I keep this in the dock as I have a few toolbars and plug-ins attached to Firefox that makes testing websites easier and faster.
iCal - My calendar/diary/personal organiser. This tells me everything, from when my next deadline is right through to when our local rubbish recycling day is!
Postbox – I have only recently discovered this mail client, but I love it. It is fast, full of features that are really useful. Best of all, it attaches images to a message, without embedding it like Mac Mail does. I use this mail client.
Mac Mail – Until recently, this was my mail client of choice, but 2 things put me off it. The first is that you can only embed images, rather than attaching them to a message. This isn’t a massive problem, but if the receipiant then tries to forward the email, the image is lost and isn’t included in the forwarded message. The second problem seemed to be something with my machine. It wouldn’t save my mail passwords in the keychain. </rant>
Adium – The swiss army knife of IM. I use this for my MSN (x2), AIM, Google Chat and Facebook Chat.
Skype - Oh, how I love Skype. I use this for VOIP calls, and my office number is liked directly to Skype allowing me to answer my office calls wherever I am in the world.
iTunes – Self explanatory, although I do admit that I rarely use it since discovering Spotify.
Photoshop – Is there any web designer that doesn’t use/own a copy of photoshop? I use this to create all of my graphics.
Quicktime – Rarely use it, it’s just for sampling MP3 files and listening to downloaded podcasts occasionally.
Spotify – Quite possibly the most intensively used app on my mac. Rather than explain how great it is here, why not check it out for yourself?
Tweetie – I am an avid twitter user, I use tweetie to update and read my twitter streams.
Papaya – This has been mentioned in one of my previous posts. I use this for quick and easy file sharing with colleagues/clients.
Billings - This app is insanely useful, I use it for time-tracking and invoicing clients. It has some great reporting tools too.
Preview – Sometimes, I just want to preview a PSD or JPG without having to wait for Photoshop to boot up. Drag and drop on the preview icon, and BAM, the file is ready to preview.
Color Meter – This is a tool that ships with OSX (hidden away in the utilities menu), it is a colour picker. That’s it. You hover your mouse over a colour, and it returns the colour in HEX.
Transmit – Really useful FTP application.
Silverback – I actually rarely use Silverback, but when I do, I love it. It’s designed for usability testing.
MAMP – This is a folder stack for my development server
Applications – This is a folder stack containing all of my applications
Documents - This is a folder stack containing all of my documents
Dropbox – I can drag an drop a file here, and it’s backed up onto the interwebs thanks to the magic of DropBox.
Downloads - This is a folder stack containing my downloads.
There are lots of alternatives to the software that I use. I use these because they work for me, if there are alternatives that you use, I would love to hear what they are in a comment below!
