MacAttapp: Apple Software and Application Reviews

AppMenuBoy is an OS X application that puts a hierarchical menu of applications in the Dock

When OS X 10.5 (Leopard) changed the way that folders are represented in the Dock, I lost a handy start menu made by dragging the Applications folder to the end of the dock.

This is a small Cocoa application that creates a hierarchical menu, in the dock, and when it is the frontmost app, in the menu bar, of your apps. It only shows apps. If a folder has a single app, it hoists the app up, so no subfolders of exactly one app.

After adding AppMenuBoy to your dock it takes a few seconds for it to fully launch, it needs to go through every folder in your Applications Folder and find each app to add to its file structure. Once loaded it works pretty sweet and it uses less resources that expected. By checking your Activity Monitor located in your Utilities Folder you can see that AppMenuBoy uses zero CPU usage, and a modest amount of virtual memory, 776MB on my machine with about 100 applications loaded on it. This is a great app for power users that switch and load programs frequently, like me.

AppMenuBoy is also open source. Excellent!!!!

Thank you David Oster for writing this great little app.

Get it here FREE at the Google Developer Center

Coda 1.1 is a Web Development Application for the Mac developed by Panic Software

MacAttapp REVIEW:
If you’re looking for a low-cost alternative to expensive Web design suites like Dreamweaver and GoLive, Coda is a good alternative. This one-window Web design app has all the tools you need for creating great Web sites, except for WYSISYG. Coda’s tools let you seamlessly work together with others, and includes and easy to setup and use FTP sidebar– using the power of Panic’s Transmit–helps you get your site updated quickly via HTML coding. Hand coding experts will like the full-featured CSS and text editors, with tools that are always only a click away. Time savers like the Clips feature make frequently used code handy and convenient, but not for the novice, these features can be overwhelming.

So in case you haven’t already guessed, from within Coda you can use FTP, terminal, preview, a CSS editor, and of course live edit your remote files on the fly. When I first launched Coda it was easy to grab a site via FTP or load one from a local directory.

The real nuts and bolts of an app like this is its live editing feature. Some of the other work-flow apps I’ve used really don’t handle the remote editing of files that elegantly. Working live on sites that are on servers states or countries away is a snap with Coda, live FTP enables you to do quick edits to a site quickly.

Which brings us to the built in code editor. All of the usual languages are supported and styled appropriately including: CSS, HTML, Javascript, Java, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, SQL, XML, and straight text. Again, I’m leaning towards recommending Coda for advanced users looking for more control of sites over those provided by Dreamweaver or even others that I’ve reviewed.

Coda also comes packed with a CSS editing tool, a VERY Cool one at that. I’m by no means a hard coder and found this CSS editor far superior than anything I’ve worked with in the past, blew away the included CSS editor in Dreamweaver. If you are a novice with CSS, Coda might just be your best friend. Stashed off in one of the tabs is a books section which was outfitted with the PHP manual and 3 others. I didn’t see an option to add your own books, or how this could even be done, but having all of my dev literature in one place is a pretty remarkable concept.

We’ll see how it goes, but after a few hours working with Coda I’m already a fan of many aspects, the included Terminal is very useful to those hard, hard coders, and the nicely designed code editor are the best features. It’s almost guaranteed to be a huge hit with other OS X developers. Be sure to check out Panic’s site to get your own copy. The copy I have expires in 14 days (up on Monday), and we’ll have to wait and see if I really shell out the $79.

Bottom Line:
Coda is really short for Coder, Coda is for Coders and those that want a powerful and easy to use CSS editor. I would recommend Coda an addon to your web development arsenal, but not a the lead program.

Get it:
You can grab a 14 day trial here or jump right into a license for $79.00. From the looks of their buy page that price may go up to $99 in the near future.

For now, of the three reviews of Mac Web Development Tools under $100 my vote goes to RapidWeaver 3.6.6. (Click here for the full RapidWeaver review by MacAttap)

NEXT ON MacAttapp.com: Several reviews are coming of smaller apps, many Freeware, so stay tuned the best Mac Software Review Site in the World!

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Nvu (pronounced N-view)

From the Nvu Website:

Finally! A complete Web Authoring System for Macintosh, Windows and Linux desktop users to rival programs like FrontPage and Dreamweaver. (Well that’s what Nvu says anyhow). Nvu (which stands for “new view”) makes managing a web site a snap. Now anyone can create web pages and manage a website with no technical expertise or knowledge of HTML.

Nvu is 100% open source and released under the Mozilla Public License (MPL). Anyone is welcome to download Nvu at no charge, including the source code if you need to make special changes. Developers are encouraged to get involved and help make Nvu even better.

I’ve always been a big supporter of open-source, especially since we run all Linux web servers here at Maine Hosting Solutions.

Review:

Nvu is an easy-to-use free WYSIWYG web editor with many features that allow you to create and maintain a fully functional website, complete with forms. Great for a simple editor, but not nearly as powerful as RapidWeaver, but what do you expect for FREE. I guess what I should really be saying is if it sounds too good to be true it probably is. Nvu is limited, but if you’re looking to do simple edits to an existing website it can be an easy workaround. With limitations right off the bat I limited my review a bit, not many of you are too interested in a web dev app that isn’t full featured.

The moment you go beyond the basics, or move beyond table-based layout to follow current web site development practices Nvu’s weaknesses start showing. Any current ‘How-to book’ will guide a web-site developer towards using CSS and DIV tag controls. Once you start moving beyond the basics site management, HEAD tag editing, and HTML editing become increasingly important. In all these areas Nvu struggles, significantly limiting its appeal. Still FREE though, gotta give it that.

One thing I really found lacking was the site manager, Dreamweaver and GoLive set the stage for site managers and most modern web editing apps out there have some form of one, not Nvu. You keep all your files online, or open them one by one in the editor from a folder on your drive. This makes it difficult to do relative linking, but not impossible.

All in all Nvu wrote pretty clean code, functioned well (no bugs or crashes noticed on an Intel based iMac running Leopard), was simple to install and did what they say it does, edits webpages. Downside is that’s where it ended, don’t think your going to do some killer designs with this package.

Recommendation

Perfect for users who have had their site designed by a professional and need access to their files online to make simple edits to text and photos. Great replacement for anyone using FrontPage that doesn’t want to spend ANY money to keep editing their site, with some frustrations, as they are already used to. This review series of web editors under $100 will show better aps than Nvu, but for FREE this is the best FREE app I’ve seen, and it runs on OSX, Win and Linux.

You can download Nvu at no charge!

NEXT: Coda 1.1, this thing looks really promising. Stay Tuned!

April brings our series of Website Creation Mac Apps under $100.00.

We’re destined to flush out the best web creation software that is not only affordable, but easy to install (Aren’t they all on a Mac?), easy to use, and most importantly easy to publish to your web space. Our First review is of Realmac’s RapidWeaver, appropriate for our First review since they just released an important update V3.6.6:

Realmac Software today announced an update to RapidWeaver, its award-winning website creation application for Mac OS X. RapidWeaver 3.6.6 sees numerous improvements to the application including a significantly enhanced exporting process, along with a number of other minor fixes designed to improve the handling of QuickTime movies and images.

Read the rest of this entry »

15 Essential FREE Applications for OS X. Keep these apps handy on a CD or DVD for the next time you do a clean install — they’re that good. Where possible, we’ve checked for Leopard compliance. Read the rest of this entry »