mlsamuelson.com

I'm setting up a new MacBook Pro for development work. Thought it might be nice to have a list of programs installed and customizations made. Perhaps others will find it helpful, too. This setup is fairly well road-tested by this Drupal and web application developer.

Firefox

Find these via https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/

• Firebug (Developer tool. Great for CSS and Javascript work.)
• Web Developer Toolbar (Developer tool. You should know it. Great for turning off Javascript, messing with cookies, measuring parts of a page.)
• Delicious (Bookmarking, of course.)
• ReadItLater (Just like it sounds.)
• Download Statusbar (See downloads just above the status bar. No more messing with the download window.)
• Faviconize Tab (Shrink tabs for Gmail and Google Reader down to just the favicon.)
• Tab Mix Plus (For setting all tabs to 140px wide. Makes it easier to close multiple tabs quickly without repositioning the mouse.)
• Live HTTP Headers (What's going on in that HTTP Header of yours?)
• Zotero (A researcher's tool, sure, but works great for keeping code snippets, and references to documentation pages - the sort of stuff you want to document and keep, but aren't right for bookmarking in Delicious due to the amount of notes-to-self involved and because this info doesn't really benefit anyone by being out there for others.)

Bonus Firefox Tip: Turn on "Search for text when I start typing" in Preferences > Advanced > General tab!

Safari and Opera

Because when you're working with Drupal, you need more than one browser to easily test user permissions, etc.

MuCommander

http://www.mucommander.com/
Keep those pesky .DS_STORE files out of your SVN commits. (Think I was wrong about that...) Manage your files in a two-pane interface from the comfort of your keyboard, rarely needing to reach for the mouse. Experience a Java app that doesn't feel like a Java app. One of my favorites.

OS X Spaces Improvment

Know your boundaries. Make OS X's Spaces a sane experience by turning off the wrapping (for the upper left and lower right corners). This makes Spaces feel a lot less like a game of Ms. Pac Man. At the command line: defaults write com.apple.dock workspaces-wrap-arrows -bool NO

Growl

http://growl.info/
Let your programs keep you in the loop.

Witch

http://www.manytricks.com/witch/
Improved tabbing through windows.

VirtualBox

http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads
Run other OSes within OS X without rebooting. Browser testing, you know?

Quicksilver

http://www.blacktree.com/
You can do a lot with this. I mostly use it as an application launcher.

MAMP

http://www.mamp.info/en/index.html
A nice bundle of tools to keep the web application developer developing web applications instead of playing server admin.

XDebug

Call stacks with your PHP errors. Beautiful var_dump() output. Step-thru debugging. The instructions at http://technosophos.com/content/debugging-your-php-code-xdebug-mamp-text... work well in light of the other software in play here. It's recommended to turn Zend Optimizer off in MAMP when using XDebug.

iStat Menus

http://www.islayer.com/apps/istatmenus/
All kinds of rad system monitoring tools.

Iconographer

http://www.mscape.com/
Icon creation software. Work at the pixel level. Software was pay-for, but now as it's discontinued, it's provided with a free registration code.

Pipette

http://www.charcoaldesign.co.uk/pipette
Color picker.

Photoshop

Not installed yet, but will be.

KeepassX

http://www.keepassx.org/
Password safe. Unlock a database of all your usernames and passwords and URLs with only one master password.

Sequel Pro

http://www.sequelpro.com/
I mostly work with MySQL on the command line, but sometimes, it's just quicker to edit a few rows of content in a GUI. Sequel Pro is the successor of CocoaMySQL.

.bash_profile

.vimrc tricked out for working with PHP and Drupal