I see that you’re using Skitch and one of folks here mentioned Basecamp so I thought you’d like to check out Freshlog:

http://freshlog.com

It’s like Skitch with the ability to create Basecamp Messages and Todo list items WITH screenshots and a list of other supported issue trackers, check out the screencast:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ciw_2L6lq7s

Glad to hear someone else out there is using Fireworks. For all its faults, I find it perfect for web design!

Also, I’d love to see a copy of your pdf proposal — I’m currently trying to set up something similar, but don’t quite know where to start. Seeing an example would really help!

http://www.thuiven.com/index.php/notebook-entry/my_web_design_workflow_and_tools/

I used Dreamweaver until recently when I converted to a Mac and now I’m on Coda, mainly because there seems to be a lot of buzz around Coda, but I quite miss Dreamweaver.

Transmit, CocoaMySQL, MAMP and Parallels (for IE testing) would be a few other apps I use. And I quite like TextMate when it comes to Ruby on Rails.

http://tinyurl.com/4bzdl2

For starters, I’m not a fan of occupying my dock with all frequently used applications, so instead I resort to utilizing a fantastic application launcher called Sapiens. For development, my weapon of choice is BBedit and anything involving imagery, our trusty Photoshop.

However, if your rough price is say £2,000 – but when you look it it a bit more closely it’s more like £2,500 – how do you justify to the client that the rough price has gone up? Don’t you find clients a bit suspicious of that?

I have two design processes, one for sites and another for apps. For a site, I design it in Photoshop, get the client to sign off on it, then convert it to XHTML and CSS using Aptana. For an app, I go back to good old fashioned paperware designs. I find it’s the best way to map a process. For web apps, the client is usually more concerned with how it works then how it looks, so there’s less of an emphasis on the graphic design.

I’ve recently started to use version control on all my projects. With Aptana I can commit straight to version control from within the editor, and then using Hudson, a continuous build system which monitors the source code repository it rebuilds the test site each time there’s a new commit.

Setting it all up was a little tricky, but I’d highly recommend it. Now that it’s all up and running, it’s dead simple to revert to a previous version or undo a new set of changes because the client changed their mind (which happens a lot).

Here’s a couple of links to some useful resources for setting it up.

Aptana Studio – really great alternative to Dreamweaver (especially if you used it as a glorified text editor, like I did)
Subversion – Awesome version control software. Used best as a hosted service, so you can access it from anywhere.
Hudson – A continuous integration system that can be used to monitor your svn repositories and upload any changes to an ftp site. Very handy!

This stuff comes into it’s own when you start to work on projects with other people. You’ll never need to worry about overwriting someone else’s code again.

FYI, I’m not affiliated with any of these sites in any way.