Tools of the trade
Posted on July 2, 2008
It’s always fun to compare tools. Who works with what and especially, why? Following the example of Flickr and some others, let me list my tools, see if you match:
Working:
- Main machine: MacBook Pro. I have an Ubuntu PC, but that’s just ‘extra’. I do everything on my Mac, from working to living.
- Editors: Zend Studio 6 for all the main development tasks, completed by TextMate (and the handy ‘mate’ cli-command) and vim for serveral minor things.
- Transmit: used for access to (s)FTP code locations, and to manually check whether (s)FTP import applications do what they should
- iTerm with usually about six tabs. I traverse folders, grep through them, use CVS/SVN commands and access MySQL from the commandline. And of course I connect to development and production servers using ssh, but that goes without saying.
- MySQL Query Browser: I can usually do what I want by just using the commandline client, but every now and then I need a little more visual help.
- Zend Core: used as an all-in-one package for Apache and PHP. I also use MAMP to run a good old PHP4 environment because at one of my employers we’re still in the midst of upgrading to PHP5 (I know, shut up).
- Xdebug: I use it for profiling and I love the way it adapts var_dump() to a more usable way of displaying variables
- FireFox and FireBug: very important indeed. I can’t image having to work without FireBug. I still remember trying to think really hard about my HTML/CSS and placing alerts in my JS as a way of doing some poor-mans-debugging. FireBug is a godsend.
- YSlow: a man needs performance, and YSlow helps me determine what to do. Very nice!
- CSSedit: editors for CSS don’t do a lot more than text editors, but they help a little and a little is enough.
- OPML Editor: I keep my notes, todo’s and more in outlines. The best outline editor used to be the one from Radio UserLand, until Dave Winer took the tool and released it apart from the weblog editor.
- VMWare Fusion: although I love working on my Mac, I’m still missing what I already mentioned before: the combination of Krusader and Kompare (and to a lesser degree, Cervisia) for development work. For that, I am trying out using an Ubuntu virtual machine which uses the three beforementioned apps and sshfs to mount the (development) servers I’m working on. Works like a charm!
Living and working:
I take my Mac everywhere. I work on it at work, even though it is a private machine. At home, I use VLC to watch video’s and DVD’s, NetNewsWire for the daily read, Celtx for screenwriting, Mail.app for.. well duh, RealPlayer to listen to BBC Radio 1 or iTunes for my music collection, Twitterific for Twitter and Unison to eh, browse newsgroups.
Well, that’s most of it. What about you?
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