Tools of the Trade

From time-to-time here at Pixel Vector we get asked by clients ‘how’ we make websites – which tools and applications etc. do we use. So, partly inspired by Grace Smith’s interesting ‘Show me Your Dock’ Series, I’ve put together a little guide to how we get things done at Pixel Vector!

Mac or PC?
A debate that could quite easily take up several blog posts itself! The short answer is quite simply – both. We primarily use Macs, however our programmers prefer PCs. We actually have a lone Windows laptop whose only purpose is for testing web-pages on Internet Explorer (for more on this please see my post on IE6) and e-mail marketing on Outlook.

Personally, I moved to Mac 7 or 8 years ago and I wouldn’t go back to using PC’s (for anything other than testing!)

Applications

Above is my Mac’s Dock – these are the applications I use on a daily basis. From left to right;

Finder
Finder is the file browser on the Mac – I personally don’t have any problems with the way it works – so I stick to it!

Mail
Apple Mail is the default e-mail application for the Mac and I personally prefer it over the alternatives. I find the Smart folders especially useful for filtering through e-mail relating to different projects.

Address Book
Another Apple product. I like how Address book seamlessly integrates with Mail and iCal – there are also extensions for syncing with Google Contacts – which are very useful for working remotely. Finally, integration with my iPhone is very important!

iCal
I use iCal to schedule meetings. We operate a shared calendar which is synced across the office which is particularly useful.

Adium
Adium is my personal messaging application of choice. It combines multiple IM’s such as GoogleTalk, MSN, Yahoo, AIM etc. Plus the icon looks pretty cool!

Safari
Safari is currently my ‘personal’ browser of choice – It’s so quick and elegant compared to some of the alternatives and it is become more and more powerful to develop web pages, however Firefox is still better…

Firefox
Firefox is my daily ‘development’ browser. I’d be stuck without some of the plugins – especially Web Developer and Firebug. I also use Foxmarks, which syncs my bookmarks between Safari and Firefox.

Tweetie
Tweetie is my preferred Twitter Client – I use both the desktop and iPhone client.

Spotify
Only in the last 6 months have I discovered Spotify – until recently you would have found my iTunes icon here! Spotify is fantastic (even with the ads) and their music catalgoue is growing all the time.

OpenOffice
I’ve found myself using OpenOffice far more than Word these days. The majority of our site plans, quotations and technical specs are written in OpenOffice.

OmniGraffle
I use OmniGraffle to produce great-looking site maps. Site maps are especially key when planning complex web applications and the OmniGraffle interface is great to use.

Preview
When I think about it, I use Preview a hell of a lot! Any images I quickly need to look at or crop, any PDFs etc. – all get dropped into Preview.

Fireworks
Others will disagree… but I still prefer Fireworks as a graphics application for web graphics. I am still running MX2004 here but it still does a great job!

Photoshop
While I prefer Fireworks, the majority of design work at Pixel Vector is done in Photoshop. My job regularly involves taking photoshop layouts and coding these up in CSS and HTML.

TextWrangler
About a year ago I stopped using Dreamweaver for buidling web-pages & CSS and moved to TextWrangler – a pretty basic text editor. I find that coding in this environment is much more flexible and a lot quicker!

MAMP
MAMP is used for testing dynamic websites locally.

TextEdit
I leave TextEdit here in case I need to make any quick notes.

Transmit
Transmit is my preferred FTP client for the Mac.

HP Scan Pro
Used for scanning!!!

Digital ColourMeter
A nice little app. hidden in the Utilties folder of your Mac – I use this to source colour hex codes, usually from mock ups or existing web pages.

Terminal
Used for accessing certain servers.

Browsers (Stack)
This stack includes links to all the browsers I test on for Mac; Camino, Fennec, Firefox, Flock, Fluid, Chrome, iPhoney, Navigator, Opera, Safari, SeaMonkey, Shiira, Stainless and Sunrise.

Applications (Stack)
A link to all the apps on my Mac.