Some lesser known Mac apps we love and don’t cost you an arm and a leg!

Xscope

• By: Iconfactory
• Cost: $16, 1 license

X-scope is probably one of my favorite applications we use. Lining page elements up in Photoshop is easy because you have horizontal and vertical rules to help you; but this isn’t possible in a browser.

Until we got this application, I would either use a piece of paper (suprisingly effective!) or take a screen shot and apply the rulers in Photoshop, especially when it came to cross browser testing.

Most frequently used features:

The guides – Great for lining elements up.

The rulers – Great for pixel measurements.

Loupe tool – (magnification and colour picker). Before we had this, if we wanted to know a colour value on a site, we would have to take a screen shot and colour pick the value from Photoshop.

Parallels

• By: Parallels
• Cost: $80

Parallels is well worth the $80! Plus we got a free £25 gift card with it, which we used to donate money to open source software developers. Parallels allows you to run a virtual copy of Windows on your Mac.

Our main use for this application is cross browser testing (although we do use it for good games that you can’t get on a Mac!). We run Parallels in ‘OS Window’ mode, which means that Windows is running as if you have opened another application on your Mac. It makes switching from Windows to other applications on your Mac very easy. Parallels allows us to drag and drop files between Mac and ‘Windows world’ with ease.

Coda

• By: Panic
• Cost: $80

Coda is our preferred text editor. The application not only works brilliantly, it also has some nice design touches too! In the ‘Sites’ section, each of your websites is displayed as a site thumbnail taped to a background (see below). This makes finding the site you need out of a long list much easier.

It is very easy to publish local changes to the remote copy of a site. After you have saved your changes, a small upload icon appears next to your file, which you just click to publish.

There are two editing modes for CSS; text mode and visual mode. The visual mode is great for people who are learning because you can click on your element and use tools such as colour pickers and drop down boxes to create styles.

MAMP

• By: Living-e
• Cost: free

MAMP is an open source application that enables you to host sites on your local machine. Having the ability to set up an Apache server with just a few clicks has been really useful for testing sites and demoing Pixie to potential clients.

Integrity

• By: Softpedia
• Cost: free

Integrity is a free application that checks for broken links on your website. Using this application means that you don’t need to open up every link to check it works! You simply put in the url of the site you want it to crawl and voila! Need we say more on this one!