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Showing posts from June, 2012

Mac Software I Can't Live Without

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I've had a Mac Mini for a few years now, but have continued to use a Windows box as my daily driver. I've decided I want to get into IOS and Mac OS development and recently ordered a new MacBook Pro. With that in mind I've been working to build up my collection of applications - below are those that I use and value the most. I'm always on the lookout for good development/design/productivity applications - let me know if you have any recommendations.     Alfred (with powerpack ) Mac OS has an embarrassment of riches with respect to available 3rd party launchers. The in-built Spotlight is actually pretty good and reminds me of the Windows 7 "run" functionality (I assume spotlight hit the market first…) which I use countless times daily. There are many great alternatives, however, allowing applications to be launcher, files to be found and commands to be executed with ease. I ended up using Alfred (with powerpack) mainly because of its simplicity and low bar

Using localtunnel to allow external access to IIS Express

Why Bother? There are varying reasons why one might want to tunnel through the internet to allow external access to his/her development web server. It's useful in a variety of reasons (providing someone remote with access to your dev environment, testing web applications on mobile devices, etc.) and I personally find it especially handy when testing callbacks from 3rd party sites. For instance, I recently worked on the integration of a new payment vendor into an existing ecommerce website. This involved sending a customer to the third party site and receiving a callback from that site when a payment succeeded or failed. This is easy in production, but a real pain in development, when you need to the test the 3rd party's (test system's) callback integration. Obviously passing a localhost:80 as the callpack URI won't work and, short of hosting my development environment online and having a static IP or DNS entry, this was something traditionally difficult to te