I need some advice: I want to travel with my iBook instead of a Windows-based notebook. I need two programs, which I either have on my OS X iBook and don’t know are there — I’m new to Macs — or I have to download or buy.
- An HTML editor. I’m using some old rev of Dreamweaver on the PC to maintain IT Conversations, so I could buy Dreamweaver for the Mac, or I could switch to something like BBEdit, which I’ve never used but hear is good. (I do most of my editing in HTML mode, so I can live without GUI-based coding but I need an easy-preview capability.)
- A GUI-based FTP client. This might already be on my disk, but where?
Blogarithms 
A few suggestions:
Editors:
1. Subethaedit: http://www.codingmonkeys.de/subethaedit/edit.html
Live HTML preview, rendevous collaboration and other good features. Free for non-commercial use otherwise $35.00. Won an O’reilly Mac development award I believe
2. Enhanced Carbon Emacs: http://www.inf.unibz.it/~franconi/mac-emacs/
Emacs takes some learning but I am gradually moving to it as I learn it. Just having keyboard shorcuts for next line, end of line, beginning of a line, next word, previous word is stuff you do all the time when editing html, php perl, etc…
3. jEdit http://www.jedit.org. About like using Dreamweaver in “code” mode. Open source – written in Java. Lot’s of plugins available including intergrated ftp.
BTW – Emacs and jEdit available for windows
FTP
1. Cyberduck: http://icu.unizh.ch/~dkocher/cyberduck/
Does ftp, sftp an ssh in a Cocoa/iTunes looking interface. Also open source.
2. I find myself using command-line ftp and sftp a lot too lately. It’s easier than I thought it would be.
3. Rbrowser/ Rbrowser Lite : http://www.rbrowser.com/RBrowserLite/RBrowserLite.html
of NEXT heritage
Hope that gives you a start
LikeLike
I’m not a Mac user but I’ve heard good things about Panic’s Transmit.
http://panic.com/transmit/
LikeLike
Editing…
I use BBedit but it is rather spendy if you are just doing html/css.
Smultron is really nice and GPL… http://smultron.sourceforge.net/
HyperEdit does html/php with live preview and is inexpensive… http://www.tumultco.com/HyperEdit/
http://FTP...
I use Transmit, very nice app… http://www.panic.com/transmit/
Good luck!
LikeLike
I use BBEdit and if you need to do serious HTML editing it’s basically the only option on a mac. DO NOT buy dreamweaver for the mac, it’s bad. If you just need basic editing you can use the mac’s built in textedit program. Make sure under preferences you check the “ignore rich text commands in HTML documents” option or else your HTML will get mangled. Also you may want to set new documents to plain text instead of rich text.
I’ve only ever used Transit for FTP/SFTP because until recently it was the only option for SFTP. I think there’s another now called Captain or something like that I’ve never used it.
LikeLike
For HTML, I use TextMate, a relatively new, very nice text editor.
http://macromates.com/
For (S)FTP, I use Interarchy.
http://www.interarchy.com/
LikeLike
Another thumbs up for both SubEthaEdit and Transmit, barely spend any time away from them.
LikeLike
I use Sub Etha Edit for all of my text editing needs – I don’t do much HTML though.
For FTP, I use Fetch. I don’t know if it does SFTP, but it has this great dog barking noise when a background transfer completes.
LikeLike
Hmmm…as HTML and CSS are just text, doing them on a Mac, shouldn’t be that much of a problem, but BB edit is excellent, don’t know about FTP clients for the Mac just google your query.
LikeLike
BBEdit sounds like it’s your speed: awesome text editor with SFTP built in. Great Terminal-like shell “sheet” features. I use it to run and capture “curl” output as well as to code files. You can open a file remotely over SFTP for security and save directly to the server the same way, even incrementally while editing.
LikeLike
Just noticed Text Wrangler 2.0(essentially BBedit lite) is free from http://www.barebones.com. Comes with a 258 page manual (pdf) and an offer of $70 off for upgrading to BBEdit.
LikeLike