Tools

It’s no exaggeration to say that Jetbrains Rider on macOS helped me fall in love with .NET development all over again.

I’m still a fan of Visual Studio which itself is an incredible IDE - but I’ve never enjoyed .NET development more than with Rider, especially now on Apple Silicon.

Given .NET’s Windows origins, just a few years ago that would have been a very strange thing to say.

Update: Recently bumped from 4 to 5 stars following much needed improvements to Razor markup editing.

VS Code tries to be all things to all people, setting expectations high... Then you’re inevitably reminded that it only really excels at a few things, for some people... with the right extensions.

But it’s a great tool nonetheless, and one of the best Electron based apps I use. I also just like the fact that it’s free, and makes available a powerful, cross-platform development tool to anyone who needs one.

It’s a really versatile tool which mops up anything I don’t use Rider for.

Proxyman has quickly become a constantly open window on my machine when working with anything involving HTTP requests… which is now approximately 99.982% of my software development work.

This is exceptionally well crafted software which does everything you want it to do and plenty more that I haven’t even discovered yet. It works flawlessly and is brilliantly designed in every way. It’s amazing value too.

There is also an equally awesome iOS app, and a newly released Windows version.

Beyond Compare is one of the oldest tools in my toolbox. I've relied on it heavily on both Mac and Windows over the years.

It's a superb file and folder diff tool. I've tried most of them, and this one still remains one of the best for its versatility.

Update: Recently bumped from 4 to 5 stars for the addition of the long-awaited Dark Mode!

I recently switched to using Sketch as my main design tool after been a lifelong Adobe user. I wish I'd tried it sooner.

Sketch is a dream to use. It does almost everything I need in my day to day design work. Great for design systems and prototyping too. Even slide decks.

It loses a star for trying to push you into using their cloud ecosystem - especially cloud documents, which are a requirement if you want to preview designs using their mobile apps. But this doesn't detract from how indispensable this tool has become in my day-to-day work.

While Sketch is very vector focused, Affinity Designer meets my need for bitmap/raster editing and serves as a slightly more traditional replacement for both Photoshop and Illustrator.

It's amazing how many little annoyances and usability issues I had learned to live with in Photoshop which are completely solved and done correctly in Affinity Designer.

I'm using Sketch mostly these days, but Affinity Designer is my reliable fallback software for anything that Sketch can't do.

I've used Photoshop for longer than almost any other software in my career. For over two decades it's been a reliable tool for me.

However, some of Adobe's business practices in recent years and bloated crapware like the obligatory "Toolbox" have become a bit grating, and I finally cancelled my subscription.

Some of the new generative AI features do look interesting and may lure me back, but I'm happy taking a break from Adobe for now.

Regardless, it gets a call out on this page due to how influential it was in the early part of my career.

ColourSlurp is a small lesser-known utility app that I use daily. It's a standalone colour picker and colour palette manager. Mapped to a keyboard shortcut, it allows me to quickly capture colours from anything on my screen, without needing design tools open.

It's essential for web/UI design, it complements tools like Sketch and is akin to a carpenter's ever-present pencil behind the ear - small and easily overlooked, but indispensable.

Improvements to its colour palette management features would make it a 5-star tool in my eyes.