I have had a MacBook Pro for a few months now, and I’ve found a few favourite tools for WordPress development. I’m open to other recommendations, if there’s anything you’ve found particularly useful.
Development Environment
- XAMPP provides me with the right Apache and MySQL environment for my test sites. It makes it easy to use the WordPress one-click install into this environment.
Coding
- NetBeans is a useful IDE for manual coding of WP themes, CSS and plugins. No Intellisense or anything terribly clever (idea: wouldn’t it be good to have a sort of Intellisense for WP template tags built into an IDE?).
- Firebug is an excellent utility for debugging CSS and markup issues in Firefox.
Image and photo editing
- Gimp for Mac is good for image editing. It appears to be a clone of Photoshop and it takes a while to get used to the way it works – I’m still at the early stages of learning how to use it.
- iPhoto comes with the Mac and is good for quickly editing and cropping photos…
- …but I think I prefer Picnik.
Copying to Live
- Cyberduck is a good FTP tool specifically written for the Mac.