Chris Mallinson

If you are a web developer, and you spend a lot of time writing code, and you use a Mac, you need to use Coda.

Download it here

Coda is marketed as “one window web development” and it really is. I’ve been going back and forth between Dreamweaver and Eclipse for coding over the past few years, and both are great tools. I still use Eclipse for large sites at work, but I needed something for building small sites, and for quickly editing sites I’ve built in the past.

Coda lets you set up as many sites as you want, and for each site, remembers which files you have open. To make a change, you edit the file, or files and hit publish. It FTPs the files in the background, and keeps everything synchronized. You can even edit files directly on the remote site, which is great if you have specific server config files that you don’t want to be synchronized.

Also, code recognition is available for HTML, CSS, Javascript, Actionscript, Coldfusion, Perl, Ruby, PHP, Python, and several more. Coda is one of those programs that I’m happy to pay for. It’s $79, but will save you time every single day. There is a free trial that I think is fully functional.

Give it a try.

Once in a while you find software that solves a problem you didn’t know you had. I could never have imagined how useful this free little piece of software could be. It’s called “Teleport”, and it allows you to control one Mac with another Mac’s keyboard and mouse. Seamlessly.

You install the software on both machines, and once set up, it acts as though each machine has multiple monitors. your mouse pointer goes off the edge of your screen, and appears on the monitor of the other machine (it will even wake the other machine up it it is asleep). When your mouse pointer is on the other screen, your keyboard switches control also, and you have full control or both machines.

Can it get any better? Yes it can. You can drag and drop files. Teleport seamlessly transfers files in the background, and the drag and drop action of your mouse between two machines acts as a file copy. I use this all the time, and it saves so much time. I can come home from work, open my laptop on my desk, and with the mouse from my desktop machine, drag any files I need from my laptop to my desktop in about 5 seconds. Teleport also synchronizes your clipboard, so copy and paste works between machines as well.

Download Teleport at http://www.abyssoft.com/software/teleport/

If you don’t have multiple Macs, and still want to try something like Teleport, there is an application that has most of these functions, and will work with Windows, Linux, and Macs. It’s not an easy to set up, but there are good instructions on the site. It’s called Synergy.

Download Synergy at http://synergy2.sourceforge.net/