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One of the main reasons we started the One Month App is because people always seem to be interested in our development process. One of the aspects of our development process is naturally the software and tools we use. The following is a list of the tools that we have used on this project and others, covering our full technology stack that includes desktop, hosted and server applications. We would be very interested to hear about any tools that you use in your development process as well.

 

Ruby On Rails

Rails is an open-source web application framework that is geared towards developer happiness and sustainable productivity. This is currently our preferred framework and we have been using it for the past couple of years.

 

Textmate

Textmate is a text editor for Mac OS X. I found this editor a few years ago. Soon after that, I started seeing it used in a lot of screencasts that showcased various web development technologies. It appears like a simple editor, but it packs a lot of useful features under the hood.

 

Skedit

Skedit is another text editor for Mac OS X. We'd argue that Skedit is more designer friendly than Textmate because some of it's default features sets such as special characters helpers and remote file capability. Skedit makes writing clean markup a breeze for a web designer.

 

Adobe Creative Suite

A standard suite of software for any designer, we use Adobe Creative Suite for everything from design mockups to slicing up graphics for the web.

 

SnapNDrag

A very simple piece of software for Mac OS X that allows you to take screen captures and simply drag them from the software to another piece of software (such as Adobe Photoshop). This is great when you are considering a UI change and you want to take a quick screenshot, pull it into Photoshop, and make a quick mock-up.

 

Parallels

Parallels is an essential tool for allowing cross platform/browser development. We use this as we are testing our web applications in various web browsers and platforms.

 

Firebug

Firebug is a plug-in for Firefox that has many web development tools. The main use that I have for it is the inspect feature. This allows me to inspect the HTML at any time including after AJAX calls have taken place.

 

Basecamp

We use Basecamp to communicate and collaborate on all of our projects. It allows us to set up a schedule with milestones and keep our messages and to-dos all in one spot.

 

Lighthouse

Lighthouse was developed by our friends at Active Reload. It's a reasonably priced web based hosted tool for dealing with bug/issue tracking in software projects.

 

Subversion

Subversion is an open-source revision control system. I'm not really sure how we developed websites without using subversion in the past. What I do know is that I do not want to go back. Not only does subversion keep track of our revisions and protects us while multiple people are working on the same things, but it is also the reason that I hardly ever open up an FTP client. Sorry Transmit, I still love you.

 

Warehouse

Warehouse was also developed by Active Reload. It is a web based tool that lets you browse through your subversion repositories. Unlike Lighthouse, you can install this software on a server of your choice.

 

Terminal

Terminal is my second most used application. I use it while working in my local environment as well as interfacing with our servers. I have always liked Linux over Windows, but I felt that some of the user experience was a bit lacking. When OSX came around with its BSD foundation a lot of us web developers started making the switch. It has great user experience, but you can open up the terminal and feel at home.

 

Incubator

I found this great piece of software about 3 years ago when it was known as pyramid. We use it for all sorts of various tasks that require organizing thoughts.

 

SQLEditor

I have been lightly searching for a simple Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD) tool that was native to OSX for the past few years. This is a tool that I found when I started this project. It certainly fits what I am looking for.

 

MySQL

MySQL is an open-source database that we use for most of our web applications. Another great package that we occasionally use is PostgreSQL.

 

MySQL Query Browser

MySQL Query Browser is a GUI application to help you take a quick glance at your queries. With features that allow you to save and bookmark queries, as well as built-in documentation on the available features of MySQL, this tool makes developing and working with schemas an easy process.

 

Linux

Linux has been my preferred server operating system for nearly a decade or as long as I've been developing web applications. All of the tools that I use are at home on this platform.

 

Mongrel & Mongrel Cluster

Mongrel is a fast HTTP server for Ruby applications. Mongrel Cluster is a GemPlugin that wraps the mongrel HTTP server and simplifies the deployment of web applications using a cluster of Mongrel servers. Mongrel Cluster will conveniently configure and control several Mongrel servers, or groups of Mongrel servers, which are then load balanced using a reverse proxy solution.

 

Nginx

Nginx is a lightweight HTTP server that we use as a reverse proxy for our Mongrel Cluster. It also serves up our static and cached files.

 

Monit

Monit is a utility for managing and monitoring, processes, files, directories and devices on a UNIX system. Monit conducts automatic maintenance and repair and can execute meaningful causal actions in error situations. We mostly use monit to keep track of our Mongrel processes. If one fails or starts using too much ram, it will automatically restart it.