I am now the proud owner of an Apple laptop! I use Macs all day at work, but still used an old Dell laptop for personal stuff. It was time to upgrade. So with my shiny, aluminium toy I immediately went to Twitter to ask what apps people use to code on as well as their top 5 apps. I had a huge response, and here are the top 5 mac apps for web designers:

Sublime Text 2 ($70) – sublimetext.com

Sublime Text is a sophisticated text editor for code, markup and prose.

Now, before you stop reading – I still use Dreamweaver, but purely as a text editor, and use Notepad++ on my PC, but this app had so many positive comments I have to check it out.

Coda ($75) – panic.com/coda

We revolutionized the process in Coda (of coding for the web), putting everything in one place. With Coda 2, we went beyond expectations.

First impressions are this is the nicest looking app – you can see why they won their Apple Design Award and this is equally as loved as Sublime Text 2. Tough choice here, but I think I’ll go for ST2.

Alfred App (free) – alfredapp.com

Alfred saves you time when you search for files online or on your Mac. Be more productive with hotkeys, keywords and file actions at your fingertips.

I can see how power users relish an app like this. Whilst this laptop won’t be my primary machine, now I have seen this app I want to check it out on my work machine.

Hammer ($23.99) – hammerformac.com

Forget writing front-end code the old way. Hammer will save you time.

Built not too far away from me by the Riot team in Bath, another beautiful app that has some very cool features to build static sites with the flexibility of things like header includes and variables.

CodeKit ($25)- incident57.com/codekit

CodeKit helps you build websites faster and better.

Another web development app that seems to do a lot of things by ‘magic’ including image optimisation and file minification.

TextWrangler (free) – barebones.com/products/textwrangler

TextWrangler is the “little brother” to BBEdit, our leading professional HTML and text editor for the Macintosh.

Although not as jazzy as some of the other apps listed, it is free – which is always a good price!

Other Apps

I had loads of apps suggested to me; far too many to list in detail so here is the full list:

Web Development Apps

• Mixture.io – http://mixture.io/
• Espresso – http://macrabbit.com/espresso/
• Transmit – http://panic.com/transmit/
• Forklift – http://www.binarynights.com/

Image Editing Apps

• Pixelmator – http://www.pixelmator.com/

Writing Apps/Text editors

• Writeroom – http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/writeroom
• Skrivener – https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php
• BBEdit – http://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit/
• Textsoap – http://www.unmarked.com/textsoap/
• Ommwriter – http://www.ommwriter.com/
• IA Writer – http://www.iawriter.com/mac/

Productivity Apps

• Flux – http://justgetflux.com/
• Divvy – http://mizage.com/divvy/
• Caffeine – http://lightheadsw.com/caffeine/

Other Apps

• Curio – http://www.zengobi.com/products/curio/
• Billings – http://www.marketcircle.com/billingspro/
• Screenflow – http://screenflow.en.softonic.com/mac
• Homebrew – http://mxcl.github.io/homebrew/
• iTerm2 – http://www.iterm2.com/

Thanks to the following

This list was compiled thanks to tweets from the following people, @bobthomson70, @amberweinberg, @steffanwilliams, @sturobson, @caleuanhopkins, @lurkmoophy, @joaoserpa, @relequestual, @henderslam, @irphunky and @cole007. Thank you!

* prices as of 2 July 2013