Monday, March 13, 2023

Indispensable Developer Tools

David Smith:

This isn’t comprehensive, but my hope is to surface potentially less well known tools that I have found super helpful. The obvious ones like Xcode and Terminal are obviously essential, if not particularly interesting.

Sim Genie is an absolutely required tool for anyone doing development involving GPS. Curtis has put together a fantastic tool that can do all manner of things for improving the iOS simulator, but its GPS Simulator function is amazing. You load up a GPX file and it will play it back and various speeds and various rates.

[…]

Pastel is essential for anything involving color (which is probably every app).

[…]

The iOS Simulator’s video recording can export gifs, but I can’t easily edit those outputs. So instead I would often record to video there, then roundtrip quickly to Final Cut to tweak something, then export them in Gifski for sharing.

[…]

I was constantly juggling GPX files for this update and found the best place to preview/compare them was the website GPX Studio.

From this article, I use Soulver, Sketch, and Kaleidoscope a lot. Other key apps for development: BBEdit, Dash, Tower, Hopper, LaunchBar (opening headers, snippets for coding and customer support), DropDMG, Script Debugger, EagleFiler (issue tracking, customer support history, and documentation searching), Apparency, and Base.

Previously:

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I like (in kinda the order of importance)
- VoodooPad
- Fork
- TextMate
- PaintCode
- Charles
- AquaSwatch
- Monodraw
- A Companion for SwiftUI

And CodeCows is obviously indispensable 🐮

Remember that naming (variables, functions, etc.) is the hardest job of a programmer! I use the (built-in) Dictionary app all the time for its Thesaurus :)

My favorite and most used:
- Fork
- Proxyman
- Reveal
- Nova

- devutils for all these tiny conversion tasks that constantly happen
- Nova, BBEdit, TextMate. Each has its own benefits
- CodeRunner for the little tasks in between
- FNable (I use function keys a lot)

As embedded developer I spend most of my day with the excellent BBEdit.

Other useful tools:
- Araxis Merge (it supports editing while merging)
- Fork
- CodeRunner
- Dash
- Synalyze It! Pro (hex editor with support for self defined grammars)
- iTerm
- Serial
- Wireshark
- Monodraw

Old Unix Geek

* vim with syntax editing on
* iTerm
* jupyter notebook
* Unix utilities such as hexdump
* whatever interpreter/compiler I'm using
* XCode if working on iOS / Mac things
* Xee for looking at images if working on them
* Preview for pdfs
* Web browser for looking stuff up when I can't remember it
* nvAlt & TexMacs for notes / documents
* Cog/VLC for background noise
* Windows VM (now box) with Xara for making graphics

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