Alfred App is a great application for quickly finding and launching things on your Mac. It’s similar to LaunchBar, Quicksilver and Google’s Quick Search Box (plus many more similar apps).
What I love about Alfred is that is quick, very quick in fact, and simply to use. I don’t really need all the extras that Lunchbar or Quicksilver offers, although they are handy — I just want to be able to quickly find stuff on Mac, launch Applications and lookup contacts — job done!
Alfred is free, but there is a paid add-on called Powerpack, and since version 0.8.1, Powerpack users could create their own colour themes. Now with version 0.8.2, you can export/import themes meaning you can now share them with friends.
I recently archived and reformatted my Mac so I could do a clean install of Snow Leopard, as a result I wanted to reinstall some of the apps I used to use, one of which was VisualHub, a video conversion tool that unfortunately is no longer developed — yes I know there are plenty of other apps out there, but VisualHub works perfectly with my current setup/workflow.
Smultron: A free text editor for the Mac which is both easy to use and powerful. It is designed to not confuse newcomers nor disappoint advanced user. I have been using Smultron for well over a year, and it has become my default text editor of choice for .txt, .html to .php
CSSEdit: This little application is quick, clean and offers superb CSS styling of absolutely any web page. It is the fastest, easiest CSS editing application I have used, and find using anything else a real pain in the …
Adobe Photoshop: Possible slightly over the top, in price terms, for most web-designers, and can be a bit daunting to use for the first time. But I’ve been using Photoshop for fifteen years now and know it like the back of my hand – so I never start a new design project or website without mocking it up in Photoshop first. It is always running on my Mac and allows me to edit any image instantly.
Transmit 3: If you design your site locally like I do, then you need a way to get it from your desktop to your server! For pure simplicity I have used Transmit for years now, as it does just that. It is the FTP app of choice for a lot of Mac user, allowing perfect Synchronisation between Your Stuff and Theirs (local and server).
Parallels: If you build it you really (really) should make sure it works in every browser! I must confess I am slightly cynical on the whole browser testing thing because I use Safari for most of my browsing these days, and generally it seems to work with 99.9% of every website I visit. Firefox does come a close second, and I do use it for writing and editing posts on my WordPress sites as this is one thing that Safari doesn’t like (sigh!).
Security is always a good idea, it protects you from all those nasty viruses and evil hackers that you just know are lurking in the darker corners of the web, waiting silently to slip into you computer and take over your life!