OSNews

Source Control – (StarTeam by Boreland, JDeveloper by Oracle) Source Code control is a big deal for us and getting more important as our engineering staff grows in size. Fortunately, Borland wrote StarTeam in Java and ported it to the Mac. I use it daily to protect my code from myself as much as anything. The look and feel of the port is not purely Aqua because of the way it underlines the “key” letter of menu commands.

JDeveloper does have source control functionality built into it and in Oracle shops that haven’t yet decided on a source control package, it should be given a serious look.

Application interface testing – Safari, FireFox or Internet Explorer all work equally well. I prefer Safari for no other reason than I like the interface. FireFox is the favorite browser of the web developers here. I use IE only as a tool of last resort because it’s so slow at rendering pages and it doesn’t block popups (Mac version).

Java Coding – (Eclipse, xCode by Apple, JDeveloper by Oracle) This is realy a tossup between two titles, Eclipse and xCode. I really like Eclipse, but it is a huge resource hog on the Mac. It’s the Java IDE of choice in our company and having a Mac version has been really nice. It has a nice implementation of intellisense and some very helpful wizards that make life for novice Java developers like myself quite a bit easier. My next best favorite is xCode. I’ve found the “hard core” approach to coding using a text editor and a Terminal window to be a fun foray into minimalist developer environments but I’m to much a novice to really enjoy coding that way.

Lastly, JDeveloper has a full featured Java IDE too. For shops that want to use a single tool that does it all, JDeveloper is very capable. Its cost however exceeds the combined cost of all the tools needed to replace it.

Flow Charting – (OmniGraffle by Omni Group, Inc.) I’ve found that using a flowcharting application to figure out how to accomplish a data manipulation process before I actually write the code to be a HUGE time saver. OmniGraffle Pro is a superb application for this task! It comes in two versions, Personal and Professional. It’s easy to use and the flowcharts look very nice. I prefer the Professional version because it allows me to share my work with the other developers who use Visio.

Inter-office documentation and collaboration – (Microsoft Office for the Mac, NeoOffice/J, OpenOffice and OS X applications) My employer uses Microsoft Office products for all their documentation, presentations and email. I use the Mac version of office. After I updated my version with the latest downloads, it has been very stable and useable. For those on a tight budget, I recommend NeoOffice/J which is a variant of OpenOffice that runs on the Mac outside the X11 environment. It’s still in alpha release and has the bugs to prove it. But as long as you stick to the basic features, it’ll work for you. If you need to use more features, then OpenOffice is your choice. Both applications share the same look and feel: they don’t use Aqua. But since they’re free, I’m not going to complain.

I use Entourage as my email client because of it includes a calendar and task list that are easily accessible. You can do pretty much the same thing with OSX’ Mail, Address book and iCalendar applications. There are a lot of shareware tools that have been built that add to the features of these applications that ship with OS X. I haven’t tried them because Entourage works well enough for me the way it is.

Project Management – (PMX by JTech Software) PMX allows me to open and edit PMX files exported from Microsoft Project. It doesn’t have the full feature set that Project has, but it has enough to allow me to collaborate in the management of some of the development projects with my Windows using counterparts.

Text Editing – (TextWrangler by BareBones, TextEditor – included with OSX) For simple text editing and document comparing, Bare Bone’s text editor, TextWrangler is powerful and easy to use. It’s every bit as capable as Ultra Edit which exists only on Windows. TextWrangler is loaded with some sophisticated and powerful features. The feature that endears it most to me is its “Find differences” tool. With it I can compare two versions of a document side by side and with the click of a button selectively “sync” those documents. One button allows you to apply the currently selected difference between the old and new version to the old version from the new version and another button applies the difference to the new version from the old version. It’s very slick and easy to use.

TextWrangler also supports syntax color coding, so you can use it as a developer tool. There are developers that like to code this way, I’m not one of them. TextEditor is more a light weight word processor than a text editor. It’s great for simple writing tasks. Since it can save documents as RTF files it can fill in as a word processor in a pinch. However, BareBones recently decided to set the price of TextWrangler to nothing: it’s free. For this contribution to the Mac community, I strongly recommend you check out BareBone’s web site and look at the other tools they sell. They make some high quality software.

Time tracking – (Clock and Time by BDNSoftware) There are a lot of shareware titles for the Mac that allow you to keep track of you time for billing purposes. I use this title because it’s simple to use, has a nice interface and it's cheap. At the end of the week, I use it to print invoices for the various projects I’ve been working on. I use them to fill in the time sheets my employer requires.

Outliner – (OmniOutliner by Omni Group, Inc.) I’ve just recently started using an outliner to make checklists, meeting notes etc. I’ve tried a couple, including Microsoft Word’s outlining feature. I don’t like any of the others as much as I like OmniOutliner. I especially like the ability to add columns, format them in just about any way, the little checkboxes that are included by default and the templates. OmniOutliner will export to the “OMPL” file format which is actually XML. Once there’s a Windows based outliner application that accepts them, it will be much easier to collaborate and share these outline documents with my coworkers. Right now, I export to MS Word. I especially like the templates since I can put together a checklist and then create a new one for each process I need to document doing.

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