I compiled this list of apps I use on my mac to help with productivity. As a web designer, I’m always looking for cool apps to make life easier for myself when it comes to getting things done faster and easier. All of the apps listed are Freeware and/or Open Source with the exception of BBEdit, but its well worth the money!
Paparazzi!
Paparazzi! is a small utility for Mac OS X that makes screenshots of web-pages. Paparazzi! allows you to define minimum size and capture size, so you can capture the best screenshot according to your needs. You can choose between saving the resulting picture as .jpeg, .pdf, .png or .tiff, also adding a thumbnail and thumbnail icon.
I was just surfing the web looking for new ideas to talk about and I came across Google’s SketchUp 7. It’s free software straight from Google that you can use to create things like a mock-up of a piece of furniture, a skatepark for your hometown, or you can get really creative and design an addition for your home. You can build models from scratch, or you can download what you need from Google 3D Warehouse. It’s a huge, searchable repository of models, and it’s all free!
Check out this promo video for Google SketchUp 7:
In the design community there is a huge movement to get users that use the outdated browser to upgrade to a more modern browser. Why you ask? As a web designer, my personal experience with Internet Explorer 6 has been an utter nightmare. I have worked on projects where I had spent 8 to 16 hours trying to get a design to look right in IE 6 where as the same site looked fine in every other browser including IE 7! I would have nightmares and lose a tremendous amount of sleep over it. Most of the time these issues would cause a project to go over budget and still would not work as it should. Take my site for example, below are two screen shots of my portfolio page. One is how it looks in every browser and the other is IE 6.
