Out with the old, in with the new. 2008 was, by far, the hardest working, yet most productive year of my life. I have been fortunate to discover an incredible useful array of different tools that have made my life as a web developer MUCH easier. Now, I want to share them with you!
Here they are:
Rescue Time
Over the past two months, I have been using an online tracking program called RescueTime which has allowed me to track how long I am working and how productive my work has been. Rescue Time allows you to assign numerical productivity values to different tasks, so it has ben useful to see how efficient my time spent on the computer has been.
You can use this to keep track of how often you are slacking off, or how long you are spending on a particular project.
Coda
Coda is a text editor + file transfer + svn + css editor + terminal + resource center. It is by a software company called Panic and it is only for Mac. Why do I use Coda?
It is extremely easy to manage and work on multiple projects with its visual CSS editor and built in file transfer. Combined with Apple Mail and Photoshop, Coda is my MOST used application. You can check it out how awesome Coda is here.
Twitter is great for getting new ideas. I follow a wide variety of other talented web developers, so it is always interesting when they tweet what tools they are using to make their jobs easier. Many of the tools on this list I found only through following people on Twitter. You will see Twitter go mainstream in 2009, meaning it will receive significant press coverage and more non-tech savvy people will start using it. Don’t forget to follow me and UBD on Twitter!
1Password
If you are a developer that works with clients, you know the pain of having to keep track of hundreds if not thousands of passwords. 1Password is the solution for managing A LOT of passwords. Again, if you are not a Mac user, you are out of luck.
1Password is also universal across all the browsers on your system, so if you use FireFox and Safari, you have will have access to the same passwords in both browsers.
MAMP
The abbreviation MAMP stands for: Macintosh, Apache, Mysql and PHP. With just a few mouse-clicks, you can install Apache, PHP and MySQL for Mac OS X! If you setup lots of client sites, you will appreciate the speed of being able to test files on your own system.
Since installing MAMP, I have saved a lot of time from having to upload to various test servers.
Those are my top 5 web development tools from 2008. What tools do you use that makes your job as a web developer easier?
