In a press release issued earlier this morning, Apple has announced that Bertrand Serlet, SVP of Mac Software Engineering, will be leaving the company.
Craig Federighi, Apple’s VP of Mac Software Engineering and Serlet’s long-time protégé, will assume his responsibilities and report directly to chief exec Steve Jobs.
Federighi has been managing the Mac OS software engineering group for the past two years.
Bertrand Serlet originally joined Apple in 1997 and has played an instrumental role in the development of Mac OS X.
Before joining Apple, Serlet spent four years at Xerox PARC, then joined NeXT in 1989.
“I’ve worked with Steve for 22 years and have had an incredible time developing products at both NeXT and Apple, but at this point, I want to focus less on products and more on science,” Serlet said in a statement.
Craig Federighi also worked at NeXT, followed by Apple, and then spent a decade at Ariba. He returned to Apple in 2009 to lead Mac OS X engineering.
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For any web developer, making sure your workflow stays streamlined and efficient is essential. Even small projects can grow quickly in size and go through several iterations and stages of development. You want to have an editor that’s flexible but unobtrusive, source control that works, with lots of options, and tools to keep it all organized, just a few keystrokes away.
Last week, we took a look at some great Windows, Mac and Linux productivity applications that you may not have heard of. Now we’ll take a closer look at eight more applications for web developers. These tools have a variety of uses, but they all share one quality — they allow you to spend more time writing good code and less time dealing with project overhead.
Since we love efficiency so much, let’s dive right in.
If you’ve been in the industry for any length of time, chances are you’ve heard of Sublime Text. Sublime is a powerful and flexible code with a robust feature set and a powerful Python language-based plug-in system, so you can further add functionality to the application. The $59 price tag may seem a bit steep (Sublime is free to try for as long as you like), but this program delivers.
With Sublime Text 2 Alpha currently available in Windows, Linux and Mac OS, Sublime offers up tools such as Goto Anything‚ a fuzzy-find utility that lets you quickly search and navigate to any project file, multi-select capabilities for fast multi-column editing, project management and instant project switching. It also offers many other features you’d expect a great editor to have — line syntax highlighting, regexp find and replace, and code snippets libraries.
Looking for something a little different? Kate is the default text editor for the KDE shell, but it’s also available for Windows and Mac (and works just fine in other Linux window managers).
Free and open-source, Kate has a wide array of great features for code editing. Some of Kate’s features include regexp find and replace, syntax highlighting and code folding, support for multiple encoding types, block selection and auto-indentation. Kate also has customizable keyboard shortcuts and a scripting language to extend the editor via plug-ins.
Git has rapidly become one of the most used and most popular version control systems around. The basics of Git are easy to learn, but its more advanced features can get confusing fast, especially when not everyone on your team is a die-hard code monkey. Enter SmartGit.
SmartGit provides a streamlined, powerful graphical interface for Git. Available for Windows, Linux and Mac, SmartGit (written in Java) makes browsing, cloning and committing to repositories easy, thanks to a familiar file browser interface and a graphical histories that easily diagram commits, branches and tags. SmartGit is free for non-commercial use, and commercial licenses start at $69, with bulk discounts available.
Anyone who’s ever worked with CSS knows how quickly a stylesheet can get out of hand. Keeping your CSS neat and well-organized isn’t always easy, and utilities like Sass aren’t always an option. For situations like this, CSSTidy comes to the rescue.
This free, open-source application for Windows processes, cleans and compresses your stylesheets. CSSTidy can strip out duplicate rules, remove whitespace and comments, correct misplaced semicolons, and convert rules to shorthand syntax, and more. A quick run through CSSTidy before going live makes sure your CSS files are neat and fast-loading.
Another great, free Windows application from the folks over at PortableApps, Toucan is backup, synchronization and encryption utility that will help you keep your private data secure and safe.
Make, restore, synchronize and encrypt all of your code and sensitive information (like all of those passwords) quickly and easily using Toucan’s simple GUI. Toucan offers more advanced features, as well, including rules that let you specify guidelines for file management, a command line interface and a powerful scripting system using the Lua programming language.
Sure, an FTP program may not sound very glamorous, but the $34 Transmit application for the Mac OS is the cream of the crop.
Transmit boasts a slick, intuitive interface with support for a number of protocols, including FTP, SSH and even Amazon S3. Other features include default permissions and auto-continue on error and a flexible UI that supports single or multi-panel layouts (with quick look and coverflow), which make Transmit’s remote file management seamless and simple.
The name alone makes this free application for Windows, Linux and Mac sound like more of a powerhouse work horse than just another pretty GUI, and that’s pretty much exactly what MySQL Workbench is — a no-nonsense GUI front-end for the MySQL database.
Complete with administration tools and powerful query building and table management utilities, Workbench (which comes straight from the MySQL developers), offers a robust desktop application for interfacing with, building, testing, optimizing and maintaining your MySQL database.
If you’re like most developers, chances are you collect code — those little bits of brilliance that crop up here and there, only to prove invaluable a couple of weeks down the road. At $39, the Snippets app for the Mac OS gives you some place to store all of those stray lines of delicious source code.
Snippets sits quietly in your menu bar and waits for you to come along and drop code into it. When you enter a new snippet, you’ll also have the ability to add labels (tags) for faster search and indexing. You’ll also be able to give each snippet a description. Clean, small and unobtrusive, Snippets stays out of the way until you need it and lets you quickly add, browse and search for just the right bit of code when you need it.
Conclusion
As a web developer, getting and staying organized is key. Good software helps you get work done faster and more efficiently, letting you focus on writing great code. We’ve gone over eight applications that go a long way in helping to achieve these goals — tools that let you edit, organize, back up and manage code across multiple platforms, but our list is by no means exhaustive. We’d love to hear about some of the great developer tools you can’t live without.
Series Supported by VMware Workstation
The Cross-Platform Apps Series is supported by VMware Workstation, the most reliable, secure way to run multiple operating systems at the same time. Winner of more than 50 industry awards, VMware Workstation transforms the way technical professionals develop, test, demo and deploy software. VMware Workstation is an integral component of any serious technical professional’s toolkit.
If you have an older version of Workstation, upgrade today to experience its new improved features. As a special bonus, you will receive a free copy of VMware ThinApp Starter Edition with the purchase of VMware Workstation. This offer expires on April 30th, 2011.
AppleInsider is reporting that Mac OS X Lion will feature 53 new high-quality voices with over 40 different dialects to boot. From about a third to over half a gigabyte each in size, the voices sound more human than ever (things have come along way since the early Mac voice from the late 1980s or even Victoria from the 90s), even old Alex from Mac OS X Leopard is put to shame by the new crowd: including American English speaking Jill, Samantha and Tom, Australian English Karen and Lee and the rather British English speaking Daniel, Emily and Serena. There’s even a South African English speaking Tessa.
But it’s not only English that Mac OS X Lion will be speaking, the new OS will be able to speak Chinese, Saudi Arabian Arabic, French, Italian, Polish and Turkish to name a few, too.
It’s reported that the voices will be available for download directly from Apple, so your Mac only speaks the languages you want and need it to.
Click here to listen to some samples provied by AppleInsider
If you have two or more computers at one desk, you don’t want two or more sets of keyboards and mice cluttering up your workspace, too. You can buy a hardware gadget that lets you share a single keyboard and mouse with several computers (which involves a mess of tangled wires), or you could use a free software solution called Synergy. The Synergy application runs on all the computers you're using—the one that has the keyboard and mouse connected and the one(s) that do not—and lets you control all of them from that keyboard and mouse. That means you can move your mouse off one computer's screen and it will appear on the other, where you can type and work as well. Synergy also lets you share Clipboard contents between computers. If you copy information to the Clipboard on one computer and move your mouse to the other, you can paste it there, even though they're two different systems. More »
For any web developer, making sure your workflow stays streamlined and efficient is essential. Even small projects can grow quickly in size and go through several iterations and stages of development. You want to have an editor that’s flexible but unobtrusive, source control that works, with lots of options, and tools to keep it all organized, just a few keystrokes away.
