On this page I list a bunch of (developer) tools I enjoy using in my work and elsewhere.

Database viewers

• TablePlus
• Postico

These are about the same price, but TablePlus offers more features. I just happened to purchase a license for Postico. It works very well. Could I make the choice again I’d probably just purchase TablePlus.

Redis

• DBeaver
• Valentina Studio

Website monitoring (uptime)

webcron is cheap, and sends texts (SMSs) when your website goes down. It even sends texts to Denmark where I live! This is nice if you run websites for clients or websites that a lot of people use. (Link)

Alternatives: Pingdom (expensive, but industry leader), UptimeRobot (free and I really like it, but doesn’t send texts to Denmark), monitor.us (free, sends weekly statistics (uptime percentage), but doesn’t send texts)

Continous integration (git hooks)

drone.io is free, integrates with Github, and has simple and intuitive interface. Doesn’t have all the bells and whistles, but I don’t need those so drone.io is just perfect for me. (Link)

Alternatives: TravisCI (a cross between Jenkins and drone.io – more advanced, slick UI, but I never tried it), Jenkins (free, open source tool but I don’t get the interface and you have to host yourself)

SystemRescueCD

This Bootable Linux CD has saved me time and time again. If you mess up your partition table, if your OS is no longer bootable. It has never failed me.

Link

OS X Utilities

f.lux

f.lux alters the colors of your display slighty in the evening (actually checks your position, and when the sun goes down and times the dimming with that). This helps your internal (biological) clock, so you will get tired at the right time. The standards colours of your computer screen are slightly blue-ish which tells your brain that it is daytime, and that you should be awake.

I really like it and I feel like it works but I can’t say for sure.

Caffeine

Prevents your computer and display from going to sleep (useful for presentations and reading)

ScreenShade

At first I didn’t see the point of programs like Shades, because you really shouldn’t sit in the dark with your computer and never did (back then). But sometimes you may, and those times it’s nice to have screenshade so your retinas don’t burn from your bright, bright computer screen.

Window managers

Having trouble finding that Finder window buried beneath your browser and editor windows? On Linux there’s xmonad, awesome and dwm (and others). Now you can get similar functionality on OS X.

Amethyst

Amethyst A tiling window manager like xmonad for OS X. It often fails to layout windows, for example it likes to fill the screen with a MacVim window even though the current layout should actually be two-split vertical with MacVim and Safari.

xnomad

xnomad uses private API calls meaning that is a bit of a hack. And for the time being doesn’t work on Mavericks (OS X 10.9). xnomad is the inspiration for Amethyst.

osxmonad

osxmonad is a wrapper of xmonad for OS X.

osxmonad depends on xmonad which again depends on X11. So first install X11 for Mac (XQuartz). Next install the Haskell library for X11.

The XQuartz installs X11 in /opt, this means you need to install the Haskell X11 library like this:

CPPFLAGS="-I/opt/X11/include" LDFLAGS="-L/opt/X11/lib" cabal install X11

It also means that when you run xmonad you need to have /opt/X11/bin in your $PATH and needs to occur in before /usr/X11/bin in the $PATH. Otherwise running xmonad will ask you to install X11 (even though you already installed it) since the binaries in /usr/X11/bin are shims that asks you to install X11.