The Website of UX Designer Matthew Stephens

This is the first in a new series of blog posts where I review software related to the average UX professional.

For Mac users, there are countless options for coding environments. From full-featured WYSISYG editors such as Dreamweaver and RapidWeaver to the most basic text editors, the Mac platform can accomodate any coding style. My app of choice is TextMate. I was originally introduced to the program by a co-worker who had recently switched to Mac and found it to be his favorite. Another co-worker highly encouraged me to try BBEdit as well, since it supposedly had a much better community of developers working on plugins. As a long-term Dreamweaver user and even author of “Foundations of Dreamweaver”, I was highly critical and expected only the best. I spent a few days in each program and eventually narrowed it down to a few of my favorites. The final 3 were TextMate, BBEdit, and Jedit.

I chose TextMate in the end, due to it’s simplicity, usability, customizable interface, and bundle support. It made my life much easier in every way. I found that it had all the plugins that I needed and could customize things to improve upon Dreamweaver’s features, such as code completion, auto-formatting, etc. All the little hangups that I had become accustomed to with Dreamweaver were gone and all that was left was a pure, exciting coding experience.

My final rating of TextMate: 9.3 out of 10.

My final rating of BBEdit: 8.6 out of 10

My final rating of Jedit: 8.3 out of 10

Ratings were based on the following criteria: Usability, performance, flexibility, features, support, and community.

Smashing Magazine has written yet another amazing article for web developers. The tips include:

1. On-page text search
2. Drag controls for oversized content
3. Subtle hover effects
4. Comment count bars
5. Full-page slider

Five Useful CSS/jQuery Coding Techniques For More Dynamic Websites – Smashing Magazine.

Smokescreen has released a conversion tool that, if successful, could deliver a major blow to Adobe’s Flash format. Finally, SWF’s will be a thing of the past. 10 years ago, it would have been impossible to imagine a world without Flash. But here we are! Good times ahead!