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Xorro

macrumors regular
Original poster
Dec 19, 2008
129
0
UK
Just got my first mac this weekend :D

One program I used a lot on my PC was Visual Studio Express, however they don't do a mac version. Is there a similar piece of (free/cheap) software for the mac.

I mainly used it for web page coding, html, php, asp (no .net stuff)

Thanks.
 

r0k

macrumors 68040
Mar 3, 2008
3,611
75
Detroit
Just got my first mac this weekend :D

One program I used a lot on my PC was Visual Studio Express, however they don't do a mac version. Is there a similar piece of (free/cheap) software for the mac.

I mainly used it for web page coding, html, php, asp (no .net stuff)

Thanks.

Since you are doing page coding, I suggest you take a look at tacohtml edit ($24.95 shareware). It includes php, html, css and javascript syntax coloring and a live preview window. Of course, there's dreamweaver (very expensive) but check out all the freeware/shareware alternatives before resorting to dreamweaver. I have both taco html and dreamweaver on my macbook and I use taco html more often.
 

Xorro

macrumors regular
Original poster
Dec 19, 2008
129
0
UK
Many thanks. Taco looks good. Does it do syntax checking, like looking for the missing closing tag?

I'm not a fan of dreamweaver.
 

angelwatt

Moderator emeritus
Aug 16, 2005
7,852
9
USA
Take a look at NetBeans if you're wanting an IDE app. For web dev stuff I use BBEdit for pretty much everything.
 

r0k

macrumors 68040
Mar 3, 2008
3,611
75
Detroit
Many thanks. Taco looks good. Does it do syntax checking, like looking for the missing closing tag?

I'm not a fan of dreamweaver.

I think the syntax coloring would get pretty ugly if you omitted a closing tag so I would respond yes, though I'm not sitting in front of tacohtml to check it out.

As for BBedit, it does look nice but it's one of the more expensive options. You can try many of the features of BBedit in the freeware Textwrangler (which I also use).

I agree, I don't like dreamweaver much, but I collaborate with some dreamweaver users and it's handy to have access to the same tools. Dreamweaver offers some niceties like converting thousands of font tags to CSS in one fell swoop. But when I'm editing something for my own use, I sometimes use iWeb (I know, just as lame as frontpage), or I use textwrangler, tacohtml or even vi in a terminal.
 

Cromulent

macrumors 604
Oct 2, 2006
6,802
1,096
The Land of Hope and Glory
Just got my first mac this weekend :D

One program I used a lot on my PC was Visual Studio Express, however they don't do a mac version. Is there a similar piece of (free/cheap) software for the mac.

I mainly used it for web page coding, html, php, asp (no .net stuff)

Thanks.

The direct replacement for Visual Studio on the Mac is Xcode but that is for proper programming languages such as C, C++, Objective-C, Python and Ruby.

If you are looking for a decent website editor then Smultron gets my vote. Very clean, lightweight text editor.
 
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