OK, you want to be a website designer or developer. Or maybe you already have several sites under your belt and are new to the Mac. I thought I would give you a list of some nice web tools for OS X. These tools will be helpful for users with any skill level or no matter how they work. Coder or designer, here are some of my favorites. Besides we love lists here on ReelSmart.

Site Design
Adobe CS3 Web Premium Standard and Premium, US$999 to US$1,599 with upgrades and crossgrades available from $399. There are educational discounts available – This is the big commercial kahuna. CS3 Web Premium Standard includes Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Flash, and Contribute. Web Premium Premium adds Photoshop Extended, Acrobat, and Illustrator. Of course all these products are available separately. These are complete suites that have a pretty steep learning curve for beginners, but lack little in capability. Foe simple and personal sites you certainly do not need this.

Freeway Express and Freeway Pro, US$69 to US$199 with crossgrades and educational pricing also available – You can build sites without writing a single line of code. Use the available templates or Freeway excels in allowing you to build your own site and template.

Sandvox Regular or Pro US$49 – US$79 – Drag and drop content, allows you to create your site, and make it available to others with Sandvox’s publishing assistant. Sandvox is that simple—and that powerful. You no not need to write any code and pick from over 40 site designs available.

Rapidweaver, US$49.00 – create and publish beautiful, modern sites, compliant with today’s web standards without writing code. Don’t be fooled Rapidweaver is pretty powerful and very easy to use.

Nvu, free – An Open Source complete Web Authoring System for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X that rivals GoLive, FrontPage and Dreamweaver.

ShutterBug US$39.95, – website creation with photo albums, movies, journals, image rollovers, contact forms and a selection of more than 80 fully customizable free themes.

Stone Studio, US$299 – Create, PhotoToWeb, TimeEqualsMoney, SliceAndDice, PStill, PackUpAndGo and GIFfun.

Stone Works, US$399 – 17 apps, a screen saver & a widget: Create, Videator, iMaginator, PhotoToWeb, TimeEqualsMoney, SliceAndDice, PStill, PackUpAndGo, GIFfun, StampInStone, GlobalWarmth, FontSight, PreferenceCommander, StarMores, XaoS, TrueBlue, Qouija, VideationNation screensaver and StoneWorks widget.

GoodPage, US$99 – full featured HTML CSS Editor for Mac OS X.

Taco HTML Edit, free – full featured HTML and PHP editor.

Text Editors
Which text editor you use can be like discussing religion with some developers. Here is a list of my favorites.

BBEdit, $125 – is the holy grail of text editors for the Macintosh. It includes built in validation, preview in any browser, auto indenting, and HTMLTidy.

Coda, US$79, – Web development tool – text editor + transmit (FTP) + css editor + terminal + books + more. Coda is more than a text editor as from its inception it was vying to combine multiple tools. I love this app and use it regularly. It lacks a regular WYSIWYG view and uses previews instead. The text editor included is based on SubEthaEdit and the included FPT is based on the wonderful Transmit. If you are purely a visual designer, you may need something else. For all others dive in.

HyperEdit, US$19.95 – is a lightweight HTML editor with a preview pane that displays the web page live as you type. Great for testing HTML and executing PHP code to make sure it looks exactly as you want it.

skEdit, US$34.95 – Simple, flexible, powerful text editor for the web.

Smultron, free text editor for Mac OS X Leopard 10.5 which is both easy to use and powerful with all the advantages of an Cocoa application. Features tabs, line numbers, support for syntax colouring for many different languages, functions list, support for text encodings, snippets, a toolbar, a status bar, preview, split window, multi-document find and replace with regular expressions, possibility to show invisible characters, authenticated open and saves, command-line utility, full screen editing and running commands and scripts from within the application.

SubEthaEdit, Education $19.95 / Commercial $35, OS X only – powerful and lean text editor. And it’s the only collaborative one you can actually use. Great for education and collaborative note taking.

TextMate, 39euros – Powerful text editor that combines the power and flexibility of UNIX text editors such as Vim and Emacs with the simplicity and elegance of a Mac.

TextWrangler, Free – light version of BBEdit text editor.

CSS Editors
cssedit, US$29.95 – Fantastic CSS editor, a must have for any web designer. My favorite CSS editor.

Style Master, US$59.99 – OS X and Windows – very good CSS editor.

Xylescope, US$19.95 – nice CSS debugger and analysis tool. Extremely helpful in figuring out CSS sites.

Image Editors
There is no shortage of image editors for OS X.

Acorn, US$39.95 – nice image editor for OS X.

GIMPshop, Free – Gimp is a powerful, open source image editing application. For more info on the Gimp visit gimp.org. GIMPshop is essentially the same program with some cosmetic changes.

iMaginator, US$49 – takes advantage of OS X’s Core Image allowing for non destructive Image editing in real time.

Iris, US$79 – image editor for OS X.

Photoline, US$90 – Photoshop alternative application.

Pixelmator, US$59 – beautifully designed, easy-to-use, fast and powerful image editor for Mac OS X.

Seashore, Free open source image editor based on GIMP, but is 100 percent Cocoa and integrates perfectly with OS X.

FTP – Get those files on the server
Captain FTP, US$29 – offers secure file transfer, a tabbed-window interface, local network transfers, file previews, address book, multiple connections, auto-resume.

CyberDuck, Free – FTP and SFTP solid, reasonably fast, and loaded with features.

Expandrive, US$29, OS X – adds SFTP into Finder allowing you to mount remote volumes like local drives safe an securely.

Fetch, $25, – Easy-to-use, full-featured FTP and SFTP client for the Apple Macintosh.

Flow beta preview – supports FTP, SFTP, .Mac, WebDAV, and Local connections.

ForkLift, US$29.95 – powerful file manager for the Mac. Connect to FTP/SFTP or WebDAV servers, manage your Amazon S3 account or your mobile devices over Bluetooth.

Interarchy, $59 – full featured FTP application for the Mac.

Transmit, US$29.95 – One of the best FTP/webDAV applications I have ever used on any platform. It has some really killer features that you might not expect an FTP application to have.

Yummy FTP, US$25 – nice and fast FTP app for the Mac

Blogging from the Desktop
ecto, US$17.95 is a feature-rich desktop blogging client for MacOSX and Windows.

MarsEdit, US$29.95 is a feature-rich desktop blogging client for Mac OS X.

Capture Tools
InstantShot!, Free – Screenshots controlled from your menu bar.

iShowU, $20 – a nice video screen capture tool.

Jing Project, free – capture screenshots or record video of your desktop and allowing you to upload them to screencast.com.

ScreenFlow, US$99 US, Complete screen capture and editing suite for the Mac for creating screencasts. Very close to what Camtasia offers on Windows. Great for creating training and how to videos for the web.

ScreenSteps, US$39.95 or $59.95 for Pro – makes creating visual training and documentation almost effortless. I must for computer training. Outputs to HTML for building training websites.

Skitch, free – capture images, annotate and share.

Snapz Pro X, $29 – $69 – image and video screen capture tool.

Other Helpful Apps
Art Text, US$40 – application to create high quality textual graphics, headings, logos, icons, web banners and buttons.

ArtRage, free – painting package designed to provide a realistic and fun simulation of using paint on a canvas, along with pens, pencils, crayons, and other tools like Corel Painter.

CocoaMySQL, free and open source – great tool for managing mySQL data on the Mac.

ColourMod Dashboard, free – nice dashboard widget to help in picking colors.

ColorSchemer Studio, US$49 – is a professional color matching application for anyone from hobbyists to advanced professionals.

EazyDraw, US$95 – is a powerful vector based drawing application.

GIFfun, free – make animated gifs the easy way.

Locomotive is the complete solution for beginning and veteran RoR (Ruby on Rails) developers to make the best of their time, a single utility to get up and running developing on rails.

MAMP, Free – MAMP stands for Mac, Apache, MySQL, and PHP with PHP MyAdmin.

Inkscape, Free and Open Source – vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, Freehand, CorelDraw, or Xara X.

Paintbrush, free and open source – paint program for Mac OS X, similar to Microsoft Paint and the now-defunct MacPaint.

Painter’s Picker, US15.85 – an interactive color wheel for OS X’s Color Picker.

Pipette, free – handy utility that allows you to quickly and easily grab the color of any pixel on the screen and copy it in hex format.

PixelStick, free tool for measuring distances and angles on the screen.

Rage Domainer, US$39.95 – manage your domains easily.

RAGE MapDesign, US$19.95 – easy way to create image maps for your web site that respond to user actions such as moving your mouse over certain sections of an image.

RAGE SEKeyword, free – examine your website content suggesting your most relevant keywords and keyword phrases.

RAGE SERank, US$59.95 – quickly see and compare where and when your website is appearing in over 50 search engines for the keywords your customers are searching.

SliceAndDice, US$49 – Turn images into web pages.

xScope, US$26.95 – seven tools in one, measure anything on your screen allowing designers to produce accurate results fast.

Let me know if I missed you favorite OS X web tool. I am always looking to check out new ones I may not have seen or used before.

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