johng Blog

The thing that surprised me the most since getting the MacBook has been the wealth of quality software available. I had been content using the same cross platform software and online apps that I had on Windows to do my day to day stuff but have found myself using superior native applications more and more. So without further ado here are some of my favourites.

CSSEdit - Holy cow this is good. I have always found CSS a bit of a chore especially when dealing with multiple stylesheets but this makes it crystal clear. X-ray mode and the selector builder are lifesavers that actually make me think I can go for more extravagant designs for my sites. Awesome.

Textmate - Hands down the best text/script editor I have used. Great bundles for every language under the sun with appropriate shortcuts and text styling for each make it really powerful. It’s not an IDE but even without code completion I find myself getting stuff done quicker.

CocoaMySQL - Fast and simple MySQL database GUI. Have been looking for something to replace phpMySQL for a while now and this is it.

Adium - Multi network IM client featuring a big green duck that squawks in my dock - whats not to love about that. Also uses growl which I had never heard about before but find incredibly useful.

Transmit - Great FTP client supporting all encryption standards I use.

FlickrExport for iPhoto - Does exactly what it says on the tin. Makes the already stupidly easy to use iPhoto even more useful by removing the gap between it and Flickr.