Here's a list of the software we use the most, grouped roughly by activity. And no, we're not being sponsored or anything, we just like these apps!

Acorn

Sometimes a developer needs to tweak an image, or quickly come up with something for a website that doesn't warrant pestering the arty types. In these cases we use the free version of Acorn. Sometimes we don't need the multi-functioned swiss army knife of Photoshop, sometimes we just need a simple blade and Acorn is the perfect app for these situations. It has layers and drawing tools and effects and so on, but is reasonably priced (especially the free version) and doesn't cause developer brain-ache in the same way Photoshop can.

Balsamiq Mock-ups

Halfway between design and development, Balsamiq Mock-ups is a wireframe tool for mocking up site layouts. It uses an intentionally rough appearance when displaying page elements which makes them look hand drawn and has the handy side effect that clients don't get bogged down talking about fonts and colours and instead focus on the functionality.

And as it's based on Adobe Air it runs on most platforms.

Coda

Coda takes all the things you need when web developing; project based views, a decent editor, a CSS tweaker, an FTP client and rolls them all into one great app. Unlike most development IDEs, Coda goes for depth rather then breadth when it comes to features and is always surprising us with 'oh, it does that, cool!' moments.

Versions

Every developer uses some kind of version control to keep their code safe. (You do, right?) Having wrestled with with SVN command lines for a while, we thought there had to be an easier way.. and this is it. Versions takes the rich user interface that we're use to with Mac applications and applies it to SVN source control. And it plays well with Coda.

MAMP

Whilst the Mac can run all the usual web server software natively we'd rather focus on creating stuff for our clients rather than messing about compiling code and installing things. MAMP takes all the things a web server runs and installs them as a single application. We just drop the code into it's 'htdocs' folder and away we go. MAMP stands for Mac, Apache, MySql and PHP. Which is exactly what it does.

Sequel Pro

For digging around in MySql databases we've settled on Sequel Pro. It combines the most often used bits of the official mysql admin and query tools into one tool, which also seems more stable than the official offerings. In fact, thinking about it, database stuff is the one thing Coda doesn't do... yet?

Flow

For day to day development FTP stuff we use the built in project based upload tool within Coda, as it's largely transparent. But sometimes we need to mess about with files on a remote server outside of Coda and this is where Flow comes in. It is a multi-protocol file transfer client that came to our attention via MacHeist (http://www.macheist.com/) but that's another story!

Evernote

This is as much a personal piece of software as it is a business related one. This author has a terrible memory and uses at least two different machines (one being Mac, the other being Windows) and an iPhone. Evernote has native apps for all three, as well as a web version and it allows notes to be stored and accessed from anywhere. It does lots of groovy things like automatically OCR'ing saved images so you can search for text contained within them, they give you an email address that you can send notes to and they appear in your apps, and other cool stuff. Having tried lots of other solutions, this is the best so far. So *we* think, at least!

(In fact, this article was originally written in Evernote so it could be updated from anywhere.)

Things

In a nutshell, Things is the perfect TODO list app. Whilst it's not free it is deceptively simple in appearance, looks great, and does just about everything we need it to do. Doesn't hurt that there's an iPhone version that syncs over wireless too. We also love their blog (http://culturedcode.com/things/blog/)

iWork

We know the rest of the world insists on using Microsoft Office, but we prefer Apple's iWork suite for that kind of thing. (Although to be fair, Excel is probably the better spreadsheet app. Shhhhh!) The much lower price tag, ease of use and comparative lack of bloat are what swung it for us.