Noupe: 15+ Incredibly Useful Mac Apps For Freelance Web Designers

Noupe: 15+ Incredibly Useful Mac Apps For Freelance Web Designers . <== This is a great blog, don't dare not to subscribe to their RSS Feed.

1. Espresso

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Extremely powerful web development tool, created by the minds behind CSSEdit. Providing a powerful editing, sleek projects, live preview, real publishing and synchronization tools.
Espresso features an immensely powerful rule-based syntax engine, CoreSyntax, that transforms your text documents into semantic structure. Espresso has an extensible Navigator that’s best compared to the CSSEdit styles list.

2. CSSEdit

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CSSEdit’s unique focus is on style sheets, it offers a wide range of features for any level of expertise. Starting out? Selector Builder, advanced visual editors, Live Preview, intelligent source environment and a powerful X-Ray web page inspector for an unbeatable CSS debugging suite.

3. Pixelmator

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Pixelmator, the beautifully designed, easy-to-use, fast and powerful image editor for Mac OS X has everything you need to create, edit and enhance your images. Pixelmator is a layer-based image editor. You can quickly create layers from your photos, other pictures, from selections or even your iSight. Pixelmator can add a layer to your composition directly from your Mac’s little camera. With Pixelmator’s powerful, pixel-accurate collection of selection tools you can quickly and easily select any part of your images to edit and apply special effects to portions of your pictures.

4. Coda

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Panic Coda is a great all-in-one Web development environment tool, keeping many of your commonly used tools in separate tabs. Tools include: text-editor, css editor, file transfer, svn, terminal & smart Spelling. All of the usual languages are supported and styled appropriately including: CSS, HTML, Javascript, Java, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, SQL, XML, and straight text.

5. Lineform

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Lineform is an ideal Mac app for vector art, diagrams and illustrations. Lineform has all of the most popular tools, including everything from freeform gradients to compositing effects, enabling you to create the designs you want without getting in your way with superfluous “features” you don’t need.

6. Fontcase

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Fontcase is a font management application that provides an elegant and powerful workflow to help you organise the fonts you have installed on your system. Designed to be an iTunes for your fonts, Fontcase has a powerful tagging system, which is designed to let you control your fonts like you control your music.

7. Deep- Image Search

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Deep calculates the range of colors used in each of your images by analyzing the pixels and calculating the most popular colors. This is what makes the palettes in Deep powerful, you can find images that have similar colors, which is great when you are looking for the perfect picture to go on your web site. In fact, just drag any image on to Deep and it will find and rank all the images on your computer that are similar.

8. Cyberduck

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Cyberduck is an open source FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, Mosso Cloud Files and Amazon S3 browser for the Mac. It features an easy to use interface with quickly accessible bookmarks.

9. Flow

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Flow is another file transfer coming in style. Flow brings the best of the Mac to your server’s files and folders. Put simply, Flow makes working remotely every bit as intuitive and natural as working locally with the Finder. With Flow, you can edit files directly on your server, connect to (FTP, SFTP, Amazon S3, WebDAV, and MobileMe iDisk servers), Quickly Upload Without UI and many other features.

10. Sequel Pro

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Sequel Pro is a Mac OS X MySQL Database Management app. Sequel Pro gives you direct access to your MySQL databases on local and remote servers with support for importing and exporting data from popular files including SQL, CSV and XML.

11. Things

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Task management has never been this easy. Organize your to-dos with Projects and Areas of Responsibility. Features include: A smart Today list automatically gathers all you need to look at, Repeating To Dos, Every list can easily be filtered and sorted by due date, iPhone Sync and many other features.

12. xscope

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xScope is a powerful set of tools that are ideal for measuring, aligning and inspecting on-screen graphics and layouts. Quickly available via the Mac OS X menu bar, xScope’s flexible tools float above desktop windows and UI elements making measuring a breeze.

13. KeyCue

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KeyCue gives you an instant overview of the overall functionality of any application, plus lets you automatically start working more efficiently by making use of menu shortcuts.

14. TextExpander

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TextExpander saves you countless keystrokes with customized abbreviations for your frequently-used text strings, code snippets and images.

15. OnTheJob

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On The Job has a lot of power under the hood but maintains it’s reputation as the easiest to use time and expense tracking solution available for Mac OS X. On The Job offers flexible invoice creation. Create invoices for specific date ranges, covering a single job, or spanning multiple jobs.

Other Mac Apps you will find interesting

- TextMate

- Billings

- Littlesnapper

- MAMP

- Inkscape

- Picturesque

- Layers

Ruby on Rails and Oracle on Mac Os Leopard

Overview

The nightmare is over.
Just until the latest Oracle libraries update (finally released a X86 library pack for mac) it was nesecerry to use 2 versions of ruby, a universal and a ppc version. Sadly, when running PPC, the benchmarking were terrible and it had some very annoying freezes and other stuff that would simple make you want to jump off the roof.
BUT! (:) ) times had changed, Oracle (as mentioned) released an X86 Intel compatible library pack for MacOs users and therefore ended my misery,
Woohoo! That makes the entire process of connection Ruby on Rails and oracle on Leopard about as 100 times less complicated than before, so I’ve posted it here to let everyone enjoy.
I assumes that you’re using Rails 2.0 or greater (Why not really?).

IMPORTART!!!

If you already connected Oracle and Ruby on Rails using the old way, please preform the "Cleanup" step first.

Oracle Libraries

The new Intel Mac versions are available from the Oracle downloads site. Install them in /Library/Oracle/.
You can do side-by-side installations in folders with whatever names you want, since apps find them by using the $ORACLE_HOME environment variable (and it’s friends). I’ve got mine in /Library/Oracle/instantclient_10_2.
Also make sure that you’ve got the files required to run sqlplus and the sdk along with the basic. You can drop those in the same directory.

Symlink the libraries

In the directory where you’ve installed the instant client, run this:

ln -s libclntsh.dylib.10.1 libclntsh.dylib

Set the environment variables correctly

You’ll probably want to put these lines in your /etc/profile , but they also must be run from the command line to take effect (you can also "source /etc/profile"):

export ORACLE_HOME=/Library/Oracle/instantclient_10_2 <= Change to your library!
export TNS_ADMIN=$ORACLE_HOME
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$ORACLE_HOME
export DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH=$ORACLE_HOME
export PATH=$PATH:$ORACLE_HOME

Oracle! giddie up!

First you'll need to install the Active Record Oracle adapter,

sudo gem install activerecord-oracle-adapter --source http://gems.rubyonrails.org

which is how ActiveRecord deals with Oracle.
It doesn’t, however, install the Ruby oci8 driver, which is how Ruby talks to Oracle (yeah, annoying).

Important!!!

Have you installed the Oracle Instant Client SDK ?
good.


Get the lastest the oci8 library. Download it and unpack the file in the finder: it should unzip into ~/Downloads/ruby-oci8-x.x.x.

Now we can finish configuring the environment before we compile the library.

cd ~/Downloads/ruby-oci8-x.x.x
export SQLPATH=$ORACLE_HOME
export RC_ARCHS=i386
ruby setup.rb config
make
sudo make install

oh joy, scrolling lines of doom will pass in front of you and hopefully you'll see no errors and burst into tears.

Show me!

At this point, we’re almost done. Let's see it working.

irb
require 'oci8'
==> true

or

irb
require 'rubygems'
==> []
require 'oci8'
==> true

Configure your database.yml

In your database.yml, use the following to make it work:

development:
adapter: oracle
database: your_instance_name
username: your_user_name
password: your_password

The database name = > comes straight out of your tnsnames.ora file. You don’t need to specify any other connection information in database.yml, since the tnsnames.ora file has everything you need.

if you are using the oracle Express edition, it should look something like that.

development:
  adapter: oci
  host: //db_hostname:db_port/xe <== Oracle port is usually 1521
  username: username
  password: password
  cursor_sharing: similar
  prefetch_rows: 100

note: last 2 lines are some tweaking for a better Oracle performance.

Cleanup: Fix the ruby_fat and ruby_ppc setup

if you have installed Oracle libraries using the old way, you'll be happy to remove the mess it made out of your ruby installation and happily, it’s quite simple.
Just remove the ruby_ppc files, and the symlinks to them (called ruby, and rename ruby_fat as ruby:

cd /usr/bin <== or wherever you put them.
sudo rm ruby
sudo rm ruby_ppc
sudo mv ruby_fat ruby

and

cd /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/bin
sudo rm ruby
sudo rm ruby_ppc
sudo mv ruby_fat ruby

Then, you should also remove the 2 management scripts:

sudo rm /usr/bin/ppc_ruby.sh
sudo rm /usr/bin/fat_ruby.sh

And that’s enough for the cleanup.

TextMate Bundle of Bundles: getBundle

From Macroomates
There are 124 bundles for TextMate where only 36 are included by default. Until recently, the way to get more bundles has been to install subversion and then do a checkout of the bundles needed (from the shell.) or download a .tmbundle file.

Now there is a much easier way: the GetBundle bundle by Sebastian Gräßl. All you need to do is download and double click it to get an “Install Bundle” command which you can invoke from inside TextMate (hint: use ⌃⌘T and enter “install”.)

There is also an “Update all Bundles” command which you can use to update your custom installed bundles to the latest version. A future version of the bundle is likely to offer a launchd Daemon that you can install to have updating taken care of automatically.

All bundles installed via the GetBundle end up in ~/Library/Application Support/TextMate/Pristine Copy/Bundles.


Get it here, since the original repo isn't working.

Simple install Git on Leopard


mkdir -p ~/Downloads/src
cd ~/Downloads/src

# Set options since we don't have GNU gettext installed
export TCL_PATH=`which tclsh`
export NO_MSGFMT=1
export GIT_VERSION='1.6.0.2'

# Get and install git
curl -O "http://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/git-$GIT_VERSION.tar.bz2"
tar xjvf "git-$GIT_VERSION.tar.bz2"
cd "git-$GIT_VERSION/"

# When on Mac OS X
./configure
make
sudo make install

cd ..

# Install Man Pages
curl -O "http://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/git-manpages-$GIT_VERSION.tar.bz2"
sudo tar xjv -C /usr/local/share/man -f "git-manpages-$GIT_VERSION.tar.bz2"