Dreamweaver: -if that's your tool of choice- is available for mac.
Adobe even has a "crossgrade" program (you need to call them to get it).

FTP: well there's a command line ftp client, but I'm sure there are tons with a fancy GUI.

dailypress,

Welcome to the Mac Side!

I have been building sites on a Mac since 1995. Everything you could ever need to create quality web content is available for the Mac.

We have been using Fetch for FTP since it first came out I have had no reason to change, another favorite is Transmit. But Swa is correct, contact Adobe for their crossgrade, then you should be covered.

excellent. thank you so much guys.

CyberDuck FTP is a good free client.

I love TextWrangler for editing html.

I'd have Firefox installed just in case some things don't work for you in Safari.

Get comfortable with Terminal, it can be your best friend at times.

You can download for free FileZilla (FTP) and TextWrangler (text editing).

If you know Unix/Linux command line, the Terminal app on your Mac will give you a familiar bash shell.

For serious web development you might consider a virtualization app (VMWare Fusion or Parallels) to run Internet Explorer (or even several versions of it) on the Mac. Or else set up your PC to share its screen and use Remote Desktop Connection for Mac. (The third option is running over to the PC to test IE, which is a drag after a while.)

There is also an Apache web server on your Mac. Check out Personal Web sharing.

Yes, in answer to your question, and my staples are:

Text Wrangler, Transmit, Navicat, DreamWeaver, FireWorks, and FireFox

If you don't feel like running VMWare Fusion or something similar you can also use Boot Camp and do a native install of Windows... You can't launch / switch back and forth without rebooting, but it runs just like a PC... It'll lock up, crash, use exhorbitant amounts of RAM and everything else your old PC did. It's just like the real thing! (Every time I've used it I remember why I don't own a PC. In all honesty, it was so close to the real thing I deleted... I 'phone a friend' if I want to know how something looks in Explorer now.)

Something to note if you do design / graphic work is: You will want to change your Gamma Setting on your monitor. System Preferences -> Displays -> Color -> Calibrate -> Continue -> Change from 1.8 to 2.2 (Television) -> Click continue through the rest of the settings.

As mentioned Cyberduck is a pretty good free ftp. I used to use dreamweaver for coding and such although I've switched to Panic's Coda over the last few months ($99) which I find a lot less clunky and has built in ftp and terminal access.

For testing on IE I use parallels and have Multi-IE installed so I can view IE6,7 & 8.

Firefox with web developer toolbar and firebug plugins installed is I must.

I have tried a bunch of stand alone FTP apps. YummyFTP works the best for me and is the most feature rich; especially when dealing with changing permissions of files on a server. I do a lot of shopping cart installs and found DW's permission feature to be buggy - YummyFTP gets it right every time. Plus, nice GUI.

I also use Virtual PC. It's great for doing cross browser checking without having to actually have a PC laying around.

I just bought an iMac, it's in shipment right now. I called Dreamweaver yesterday, they're sending out the Mac version.

I have a Windoze box on my home network so I can just VNC to it if I need anything Windoze done.

What is a good FTP synch software? I currently use WS_FTP Professional and I like the synch utility, I use it daily. I need a similar replacement software. Free is nice but I'd be willing to pay, I just want the best software right off the bat.

Thanks.

What is a good FTP synch software?

Everyone I know using Dreamweaver on a Mac uses Fetch.

FTP = Cyberduck

Design/development: Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Flash.

FTP: Transmit. I've played with Cyberduck and it seems fine. Haven't used Fetch since OS9 days.

Testing: VMWare to test sites on Windows.

I've never used the Terminal and never intend to do so.

Mac can do all that any *nix machine can do. Besides that it is more than capable of running GUI (we know that).

FTP: CuteFTP, Terminal FTP, AppleScript running Terminal unattended.
Perl is my main programming language that does anything including watering flowers in the house and running alarm clock.

Besides that all my sites made on my Macs and they check my bank and PayPal account daily, keep Internet connections refreshed.

I mean I do not know what you can not do on Mac! Any takers?
On the top of that 3 of my home Macs run 24/7 talking to offices around the Globe (literally) updating orders, printing invoices in appropriate office. You name it - I probably have it running already.

If you familiar with Windows and know shortcuts - they mostly the same on Mac. You can add your own shortcuts on Mac.

I find Fetch is 'the biz' for ftp and scp. It's not free but imo worth paying for.

On another subject, CSSEdit is handy if you aren't a CSS genius.

If you are making the move to Mac, dump the Dreamweaver and just use TextEdit or CSSEdit. So much leaner. I have never looked back.

FTP: I have been using Yummy forever now. Hard to move away from it, it works perfect for me.
Forklift is pretty cool, I used it a for a bit.

Another vote for TextWrangler and Transmit.

Switching to Mac has probably been the single most profitable thing I have ever done as a webmaster. The time saving has just been enormous.

CuteFTP is crap. It always messes up the chmod and you can't remove old ftp accounts. The Mac for Webmaster stuff is not the best tool. When I want to be really productive, I bring my PC (I'm forced to use a Mac by my employer).

It's not true that the Mac has better graphics. All of this cult about the Mac being supremo for multimedia is just empty PR from Apple and Mac apologists. Adobe programs are buggy as hell and miss many of the features.

When I was hired, we had our Web site server on a Mac. Within a month I got frustrated with the limited capabilities and the problems with enforcing security and proper taxonomy for Web development - people can get away with putting blank spaces in files names on a Mac-hosted Web site. I had to move everything to Linux/Apache and never looked back.

For Web Dev, there's just not enough powerful tools on the Mac and I gotta rely on my PC all the time to get the job done.

I have a dual something with huge terrabytes drives. It's warm enough to warm up my office without heat in the winter. But all that hardware is crap next to my good ole laptop PC.

If you do Web dev, multimedia authoring and even graphics, just stick to a PC. It will be less painful, cheaper and you'll be more productive.

For Web Dev, there's just not enough powerful tools on the Mac and I gotta rely on my PC all the time to get the job done.

That's nuts! How can you beat Textmate + Transmit? Textmate is such a strong text editor, I write HTML, CSS, PHP and Javascript in it and really enjoy using it. Yeah, Transmit can sometimes be a little buggy but not often. What else do you need?

Never mind..

Textwrangler for building pages and Fetch FTP for uploading them.
We've used them solidly for 5 years on Tiger OSX without a glitch.

Not interested in Leopard.

Coda (by Panic) for everything.

I second buckworks' comment. Then for project management throw in Things for Mac and troubleshoot using either firebug or the built in tools on the webkit browser and you're all set.

Hello,

I am total new to site management, but I am on a mac. I wanted to put up another vote for TextWrangler. It is free and it has built in FTP to upload your code to your server.
For my FTP client I use Cyber Duck. It works great and is free (the developer asks for a donation).

Anyway, back to trying to understand the ins and outs of .htaccess files – he says pulling his hair out.

Evil Lama

One thing that hasn't been mentioned is how the sFTP and text editing are seamless. In my sFTP software, I just double-click the remote file I want to edit, it opens in an editing window, and changes I make go directly to the server.

Years ago I tried to find the same functionality for Windows, but I couldn't. I might have even posted here on WW about it, but I don't think anyone had any solutions. Maybe it's possible to do that on Windows these days, but it didn't seem like it a few years ago. I can't begin to imagine how much time I would have wasted in the last few years if I had to always had to manually upload a file after changing it. Ugh.

I like coda for development for most situations. I also use Komodo IDE and textwrangler for many things.

I use terminal a lot, and have a plugin called visor for terminal so i can keep one terminal window open at all times and it slides down from the top of the screen like i was playing a game of quake. using this plugin, you can also open other windows of terminal and still have the main one hidden up top (i use the visor window for root, and others for normal access).

I know a lot of designers use a program called rapid weaver, i have occasionally help develop themes for them for that. it does a lot of coding and what not for you. like dreamweaver would, but it is mac based, and has a big mac feel.

other then all that, i use evernote (note taking), drop box (file sycning, i use linux machines too, so this syncs linux folder with a mac folder.. its beautiful), cyberduck (ftp), skype (on a mac it can see your contact program, making calling your clients easy), synergy (multi-computer/os keyboard and mouse sharing), trucrypt (encryption software), and xmind (mind mapping, brainstorming, flow charts).

Oh, and i like omnifocus, and the rest of suite of tools they have. omnifocus is awesome, but pretty spendy, things is just as good.

i use it for project management, but they are basically a over featured to do list programs

Oh, another thing: I can log in to my site easily by using ssh through the Terminal. I few years ago I had a hell of a time trying to find out where the equivalent was in Windows. Does it even exist, or do you have to download and install a separate program?

I can log in to my site easily by using ssh through the Terminal. ...equivalent was in Windows. Does it even exist, or do you have to download and install a separate program?

You would probably want to download Cygwin or Putty for that. I use both of those, but don't like either as much as Terminal.

I use open source/ free stuff.

Textwrangler for editor. Cyberduck for FTP (Cyberduck is specifically designed to work with Textwrangler!).

There are free wysiwygs - I tried Nvu and Smultron. But I realized that it was taking me as long to learn them as it was to learn the code, so I just started writing the code in Textedit, then Textwrangler. I highly recommend that you just learn to code and forget about wysiwygs.

I did finally pay for one app - TextExpander. You assign a keyboard shortcut to a code snippet and it inserts it. Type ,D and you get opening and closing div tags with the cursor placed between them. It saves an incredible amount of time and typing.There are other apps that do this also but no free ones that I could find. However, On Snow Leopard you can create keyboard shortcuts like this right in the OS. I haven't used this method yet though.

wordservice is a great little free app. You can do various text manipulations like change the first letter of all words or the first letter of all sentences highlighted into caps, for instance. It really comes in handy when doing any kind of writing. Some of these things ( but not all) can now be done through settings in the 'services preferences' menu of the Snow Leopard OS.

'Preview' now allows you to do full web optimization processes to jpgs. 'Grab' gives you a very good onboard screengrab utility.

for fancier graphic manipulation there is a Mac version of XNview, and also the Gimp. I use both. (No cracked versions of photoshop etc. for me!)

versiontracker and macupdate are great places to find open source, freeware, and shareware.

For fancy coding there is Aquamacs. I have it installed but have never actually used it however. It is a gui for Emacs and has a fairly steep learning curve. someday I will find the time.

Don't forget Firefox and the Webdeveloper plugin. This is a tool I can no longer do without. Everything from page validation to a color picker.

localhost is available out of the box. Go to system preferences/sharing and check the 'web sharing' box and you've got an apache server. put a file titled index.html in your 'Sites' folder and you've got a local website to view your html pages on.

Get an Os X 10.6 manual. David Pogue writes an excellent one. There is a lot of software that comes with the system now which does all the things I used to have to install third party apps for. For instance I had 'Downloadcomment', to insert the url that a file was downloaded from, into the metadata. Now safari does this automatically - find it in the 'show info' window.