2007-03-14

Urgent Apps - Mac Development Kit

After yesterday's post, I got to thinking. I had pulled some items out of that list because they were highly developer-centric applications. However, that does mean that some really top-notch programs didn't make the list, and I think that's unfair. There are some apps that I really can't live without when it comes to development work.

Before we begin, I should point out that my particular development tasks typically include the administration of a MySQL database, editing PHP, Java, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files, and operating revision control; the tools laid out here are centered around those tasks.

Now, without further ado, the list:

jEdit

jEdit calls itself "the programmer's text editor", but that's selling it short. jEdit is, to put it lightly, a god among executables. I've never seen another program come close to its level of flexibility, modularity, and customizability. The sacrifice for all this goodness is that it's a bit of a RAM-hog, particularly running under the MacOS JRE (I highly recommend updating to the 1.6 JRE available on apple's website, and completely switching over to 1.6; it provides some vast performance and footprint improvements.)

NetBeans
NetBeans is, of course, the Java IDE, unless you're one of those people that thinks that Eclipse is the Java IDE, but I'm not.

SmartSVN (payware)
The best SVN client I've seen for the Mac. Unfortunately, there aren't many good free options.

MySQL GUI Tools
The real deal, straight from the source.

Platypus
This nifty little app lets you take any shell or other script file and turn it into a Mac application package.

ArgoUML
Java-based UML designer.

Subversion
Revision control extraordinaire. Any box I do development on has a local Subversion server for anything I happen to want to keep a history for.

Trac
I've recently fallen in love with Trac, which is why it made the list. It's not exactly an application - it's a web application. However, it can be installed on a Mac, so it made the cut, and I do love it dearly. Go check out their page; the Trac site runs on Trac.


Anything I'm missing? Post in the comments!!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You forgot the TextMate (http://macromates.com/)

Unknown said...

I hadn't heard of TextMate - I downloaded the demo, but it'd have to be REALLY good in order to be $60 better than the various free alternatives (such as jEdit and TextWrangler from BareBones)