Although I spend the majority of my day developing ASP.NET MVC Websites in Visual Studio, I can't help but spend a few hours each evening doing Rails, PHP, etc. on the Mac.
Normally you will find me developing on the Mac using Espresso and RubyMine, but today I got a licensed copy of RapidWeaver, which is a web design and development tool for the Mac. Amazingly enough, RapidWeaver is built by the same company that develops LittleSnapper, one of my favorite tools for snapping screen images on the Mac.
I played with RapidWeaver for about an hour creating a blog using the Blog Plugin. Developing a blog using RapidWeaver is an interesting alternative to installing blog software on our website. It has all the basic blog features, such as categories, tags, permalinks, summaries, etc. You also have the ability to quickly change the theme of the blog by selecting a built-in template. After about an hour I got the hang of developing my own blog using RapidWeaver as well as adding a homepage for the website and a PHP-driven contact page. Another couple of hours and one can probably learn how to customize the sidebar, inject custom HTML, and customize the styles.
If you are looking to build a simple website or blog on the Mac, you might want to download a trial of RapidWeaver. It might give you the biggest bang for your buck given its built-in templates and blog plugin that shelter you from digging too deeply into HTML, CSS, etc.
Learn more about RapidWeaver here.
David Hayden
Mac Web Development Posts