tomdringer

I am often interested in seeing other developers set-up’s i.e how they go about doing their projects and what software and hardware they use. So for the first time, here is mine.

I have made the transition from Windows to Linux and finally over to Apple Mac through my career so far. I am currently using a Mac Mini with dual monitors which works nicely.
As for software I go about making mock-ups in Photoshop CS5 or sometimes in iWork Keynote after seeing an article in MacUser magazine (16th July issue) titled “Keynote Vs. Photoshop – Not as crazy as it sounds”.

For the actual build of sites I use Panics Coda. As the name suggests this is for coding sites rather than using WYSIWYG drag and drop utilities.
Why do I use Coda? Actually it was a face-off between Coda and MacRabbit’s Expresso. Both are premier products and theres little between them, but for me the projects looked better and the block editing is an excellent feature especially when making small changes to list items.

I sometimes work with PHP files, so to get them to run locally (i.e on my machine) is a valuable tool. For this I use MAMP (The free version) which allows you to run your Mac with Apache, Mysql, and PHP. Its basically the same idea as WAMP for Windows or LAMP for Linux. This also works nicely when working with Open Source CMS’s as I can work on templates locally.

Along with MAMP I use VirtualHostX. This enables easy virtual host management. I am a bit lazy with this as adding Virtual Hosts is just a case of editing the Apache files, but to have a GUI program to do it for you is a nice touch.

When the site is completed locally I can then put it on my staging server which I use via Heart Internet and then onwards to the clients domain for launch.

So thats the stuff I use to do my work. Let me know how you it. You can also see a bit of my workspace on my about page!

Edit: The pic is from my pre-Mac days!