I have worked on all three major platforms, Windows, then Linux for some years and finally Mac. I do on my mac my daily coding and wanted to list the software on which I rely daily.

If you are new to web development, I usually recommend tizag.gom which is where I started learning most of my php skills.

I hope this list is useful to any fellow coders newcomers to the Mac 

  • Cyberduck
    Among many  file managers I had tried, this is the one I used the most, it is simple but powerful. Supports FTP, SSH, WebDAV, Amazon S3, etc. and makes use of  OS X Keychain, so passwords are centralized in the system. I would though appreciate a better bookmark organizer, as all your servers are displayed in a simple level, you cannot put them into folders, but as an alternative, each server can be saved as .duck files which you can in turn organize how you wish.

  • Transmit
    As with Cyberduck, Transmit is very well built in with the OS X environment and supports all the above. I did eventually end up paying for this one for the extra organizational features and stability. It is now my daily file manager.

  • Dropbox
    I guess most of the people already know dropbox, but I didn’t want to skip it from my list since it is one of my best allies. I have two computers and an iPhone, and I have all my university files in there synced up as well as my local “websites” folder. I have invited tons of friends, so I have to date, 37Gb of free space. A handy option not so many people know is that you can use it to sync program settings by syncing system directories. I will post how to do soon, meanwhile, google up: dropbox symbolic link

  • TextWrangler - (or free BBedit)
    My favorite text editor. I first tried the free BBedit trial as I read about it on the net, but then discovered TextWrangler, which is made by the same people and has a few features less than its big brother. Honestly, I never missed anything here. Combined with Cyberduck, I can easily edit files on the servers and save them online straight away. The syntax coloring is very good and supports all my PHP/SQL/CSS needs.

  • MAMP - standalone Apache/SQL Server
    I have been using this for quite some time. It is a variant from the linux “LAMP” and is the easiest and fastest solution if you wish to have a local server to work with. Installs in a snap and you can easily enable it or disable it.

  • Persistent Color Picker
    This little tool is just about what its name says.  A color picker. The fact is it comes handy when you need to spot some color for any CSS you are doing on some site.

  • Server Auditor (mobile app)
    I was looking for a good SSH terminal for my iPhone so I can have a look at some running processes on my servers if I am on the move, (or in bed and feeling lazy). I came across this tool. It lets you save all your servers and is quite intuitive. I just noticed it is available for both iOS and Android.