What I love about Alfred is that is quick, very quick in fact, and simply to use. I don’t really need all the extras that Lunchbar or Quicksilver offers, although they are handy — I just want to be able to quickly find stuff on Mac, launch Applications and lookup contacts — job done!

Alfred is free, but there is a paid add-on called Powerpack, and since version 0.8.1, Powerpack users could create their own colour themes. Now with version 0.8.2, you can export/import themes meaning you can now share them with friends.

Although I like the default Dark theme, I have a thing for Orange, so created a bright orange theme and called it Tangerine, and messing around with the theme editor this morning, I quickly created a Black theme (Dark, but much darker!).

You can download both themes here, and if you are a Powerpack user, just double click on the downloaded files to automatically open/import in Alfred.

Tangerine Theme (Download)

Black Theme (Download)

Don’t have Alfred? Visit www.alfredapp.com and grab the latest version.

After copying the app and finding my serial, I discovered it needed to download a conversion engine before it could work, but for some reason it couldn’t or wouldn’t download it, so after a search on Google I discovered I could just copy the engine from my archived Mac — although the website with the instruction eventually worked, I had to use Google’s cached file to start with.

I’m a little concerned the site might be broken or worse the information might disappear altogether so I though I would republish the instruction, which may be of use to other users?

In order to preserve VisualHub (or AudialHub) if you need to switch computers, you need to back up two things:

1. The VisualHub (or AudialHub) app itself
2. The conversion engine

To back up the conversion engine, Copy the folder at: /Library/Application Support/Techspansion (this is the top level Library folder, not the one in your user account).

…for good measure, you can also back up your Preferences file, containing your registration info in case you lose the original purchase e-mail. It’s at:
/Users/yourname/Library/Preferences/com.techspansion.visualhub.plist
…or for AudialHub:
/Users/yourname/Library/Preferences/com.techspansion.audialhub.plist

As far as I can tell, the two programs will continue to work in Snow Leopard, but I obviously can’t predict the future or what Apple will do in it, though.

Smultron: A free text editor for the Mac which is both easy to use and powerful. It is designed to not confuse newcomers nor disappoint advanced user. I have been using Smultron for well over a year, and it has become my default text editor of choice for .txt, .html to .php

Website: Smultron by Peter Borg. Requirements: Mac OS X 10.4.9 Tiger or later
Price: Free!

CSSEdit: This little application is quick, clean and offers superb CSS styling of absolutely any web page. It is the fastest, easiest CSS editing application I have used, and find using anything else a real pain in the …

Website: MacRabbit. Requirements: Mac OS X 10.4 or higher.
Price: $29.95.

Adobe Photoshop: Possible slightly over the top, in price terms, for most web-designers, and can be a bit daunting to use for the first time. But I’ve been using Photoshop for fifteen years now and know it like the back of my hand – so I never start a new design project or website without mocking it up in Photoshop first. It is always running on my Mac and allows me to edit any image instantly.

Website: Adobe. Requirements: PS CS3 Mac OS X v.10.4.8 or higher.
Price: from $649.

Transmit 3: If you design your site locally like I do, then you need a way to get it from your desktop to your server! For pure simplicity I have used Transmit for years now, as it does just that. It is the FTP app of choice for a lot of Mac user, allowing perfect Synchronisation between Your Stuff and Theirs (local and server).

Website: Panic. Requirements: Mac OS X 10.3.9 or higher.
Price: $29.95.

Parallels: If you build it you really (really) should make sure it works in every browser! I must confess I am slightly cynical on the whole browser testing thing because I use Safari for most of my browsing these days, and generally it seems to work with 99.9% of every website I visit. Firefox does come a close second, and I do use it for writing and editing posts on my WordPress sites as this is one thing that Safari doesn’t like (sigh!).

But if I am building a website for a client, I really need to make sure it works in everything, yes, even the lovely Windows browser Internet Explorer! And that is where Parallels comes in as I really cant see the point in also owning a PC when the Mac can now do both! On my XP install I use the excellent Multiple IE app which lets me test in every version of IE, I can also test in Firefox and any number of other browser I like – all from the comfort of my Mac.

Website: Parallels. Requirements: Mac OS X 10.4+ running on an Intel Mac.
Price: $79.99.

Although this is a Top 5 list, I can’t really leave out two very important application that I use when designing and testing websites. So here are 2 extra apps I always use, and wouldn’t leave home with out!

MAMP: It stands for: Macintosh, Apache, Mysql and PHP, and installs a local server environment in a matter of seconds on your Mac, be it PowerBook or iMac. MAMP is much quicker and easier than fussing around with trying to install and configure a server manually, and to top it all, it’s Free!

iTunes: Yes I know, it is not a design app, it can’t make wonderful website or clean up your messy code. But what iTunes does do is to block out surrounding noise and distractions, thus helping me to concentrate and maximise my time and energy so that I can get away from the computer every once and a while so I can have a life!

My Top 5 web building tools was inspired by Mark over at 45n5, who originally wrote his own Top 5 Website Building Tools. Unfortunately, his website is no longer available!

What do you use? If you want to write your own top 5 and let me know the link, I will add it here.