Over at TUAW, I listed Coda as one of my favorite applications, and indeed, it is a central part of my web development toolbox. When it comes to straight CSS editing, however, my favorite app is CSSEdit. CSSEdit by MacRabbit is the best CSS editor I have ever used. In fact, before CSSEdit, I was against the entire idea of a CSS editor -- isn't Notepad or TextEdit enough? Sure, but I like to save time and do things as quickly as possible, and this is where CSSEdit comes in.

My favorite feature of CSSEdit is the Live Preview and X-Ray inspector. Similar to Firebug (but with a much better interface that is less cluttered and much more accessible), CSSEdit shows changes you make to a stylesheet in real-time. There are also bookmarklets available for your browser that will open and edit the CSS stylesheet in CSSEdit with one-click. You can alternatively just load up a site and extract all stylesheets that the site uses and then manipulate them to your liking. It is a very handy way of seeing how certain stuff is done or isolating a problematic element.

For the user who is new to CSS, CSSEdit is nice because its dual visual/source code interface makes it easy to change elements of a stylesheet, like color or border type without having to know exactly what you are doing. For those of us that like to hand code everything, the automatic suggestions (based on what you frequently use) and the auto-insertion of brackets and appropriate spacing is a huge time saver.

To top it all off, CSSEdit has W3C Validation built-in. There are tons of great web development tools for the Mac, but when it comes to working with CSS, CSSEdit is my favorite, hands down!

I've blogged about it before, and I'll blog about it again.

Back when I was just a wee lad of the Internet, I found a most wonderful concept: instant messaging! At the time, I thought MSN Messenger was the coolest thing since the automatic bread slicer. Of course, my best friend preferred Yahoo! Messenger, and the majority of everyone else I knew would use nothing but AOL Instant Messenger. So, I had two choices: have three relatively bloated instant messaging running simultaneously on my computer, or lose electronic touch with the rest of the world. That is, until I found Trillian.

Trillian, like Digsby or Adium, aggregates multiple different instant messaging services into one relatively light-weight application. The Basic (free) version supports AIM, ICQ, Windows Live, and Yahoo! service as well as IRC chat. The Pro version throws in support for Jabber (Google Talk and soon Facebook), Novell GroupWise, and Bonjour (formerly Rendezvous). Also, if you shell out the $25 for the Pro version, you'll get video chat support for the networks that support it.

I don't know how I ever lived without Shush. It's an algorithmic white noise generator you can keep in your pocket, and it shows how versatile the iPhone is. I first gave it a shot because it was written by one of my favorite developers, Daniel Jalkut of Red Sweater Software, but I quickly found I needed white noise everywhere.

My neighbors were throwing a noisy party that kept me awake. I hit "start shushing," adjusted the volume slider, and drifted off. On an airplane, a baby started crying loudly. I hit "start shushing" and made him disappear. Not only is this useful, it gives you a satisfying sense of control over your own life.

With one button, you can sleep better and make all kinds of annoyances vanish, and nobody ever has to know your secret. As an added bonus, this is the smallest -- in terms of disk space -- white noise app out there. Because it uses an algorithm instead of a recording, it weighs in at around 100kb. That's worth way more than this app's 99 cent pricetag, and that's why Shush is one of my favorite iPhone apps.

Now that torrent technology has become one of the most popular ways to distribute large files, it's important to find the right Bittorrent client. If you're on a Mac, that's Transmission. I used to be a fan of Azureus (now called Vuze), but I switched to Transmission because it's less cluttered and takes up a lot less screen real-estate.

Transmission's not bare-bones in terms of features -- you can fine-tune your upload and download speeds, change ports, and check your ratio -- but its design is minimal and not too distracting. I don't want a busy-looking torrent app, I want one that I can set up quickly and leave alone until my downloads finish. Transmission provides that, while still letting advanced users get under the hood where they need to. It's also free and open source! That's why it's one of my favorite Mac apps.

So far I've told you about two applications that were so awesome that I had no problem sending some cash to the developers to pay for continued use of the products. But both BeyondTV and Pocket Informant only require one time payments. Sure, you might want to pay for the major upgrades that are released every few years (smaller updates are usually free), but you don't need to keep paying to keep using the software. But now I want to tell you about a utility I'm gladly paying $50 a year to use: Carbonite, an online backup solution.

Recently someone I know, (I'm not going to name names, but his is an anagram for Brand Idler), may have accidentally wiped his wife's hard drive while trying to reinstall Windows XP. Sure, he backed everything up to a USB hard drive first so he could restore all of her important documents, media, and other files. But the hard drive was faulty and an awful lot of important data was unrecoverable.

This problem could have been easily avoided if Mr. Idler and his wife had spent a few bucks on Carbonite before the accident instead of signing up shortly after. Once installed on your computer, Carbonite will go to work backing up everything in your documents folders and any other oflder you specify. Items that are backed up will have a little green dot next to them, while items that are not yet backed up have a yellow dot. It can take a few days to perform your initial backup, but once that's completed subsequent backups go very quickly. And everything happens in the background so you can use your computer normally while backups are in process.

While you may still want to backup your files locally in case you need to restore them quickly or on short notice, knowing that all of your files are safely stored online and accessible from anywhere in the world provides quite a bit of piece of mind. Carbonite provides you with unlimited online storage space for $50 a year. You can get a discount if you sign up for two or three years in advance.

Carbonite is availble for Windows. There's also a beta version available for Mac users.

Yes, your PDA, cellphone, BlackBerry, or whatever it is you carry around in your pocket probably came with a calendar and contact manager. And they probably suck. Pocket Informant doesn't.

This personal information management suite was originally designed as a complete replacement for the PIM applications that come with Windows Mobile. It's now available for iPhone and BlackBerry devices as well.

The Pocket Informant calendar is nothing short of awesome. It offers agenda, day, week, and month views that are quite frankly more useful than anything you'll find in Outlook or Google Calendar. And they just happen to fit beautifully on a small screen. You can easily see at a glance how much free and busy time you have in a day. And you can link appointments to contacts, set reminders, and show tasks from your To Do list in your calendar.

Pocket Informant's search utility also puts the built in Windows Mobile search function to shame. Results appear almost instantly, and you can find top level information like a contact's name or phone number, or results that are buried down a bit deeper like a name mentioned in a note attached to a calendar item from a year ago.

Pocket Informant for Windows Mobile costs $29.95. The BlackBerry and iPhone/iPod touch versions are each $20.

Over the past week we've been bringing you some of our favorite applications of all time. And most of them have been free. I love freeware and open source software. In fact, almost every application I run on my Windows, Windows Mobile, and Linux devices didn't cost me a penny. But I decided to do something a bit different for my favorite apps posts. I want to highlight some of the applications that are so good or so useful that I decided to pull out my wallet and pay for them. Some of these apps I can't imagine living without, while others are just extraordinarily useful.

First up: BeyondTV, from Snapstream Media. You can think of BeyondTV as TiVo for your PC. But it's a lot more. It's a personal video recorder that's extraordinarily easy to use, but also quite powerful. It offers a ton of features you won't find in the Windows Media Center software that comes with Windows Vista Home Premium and Windows Vista Ultimate.

Here's how it works. You throw a TV tuner in your computer and install BeyondTV. You can then search for programs by title, keyword, or category or browse a program guide. You can schedule one time recordings, or record every episode or every new episode of a show. BeyondTV will do the rest, including sorting your shows by series.

There are a few things that set BeyondTV apart from similar PC-based PVR software like SageTV and MythTV. For example it has a built-in "showsqueeze" feature that lets you automatically re-encode recordings using DiVX or Windows Media video codecs. You can certainly do this with other applications, but it typically requires a plugin. But probably the main reason I prefer BeyondTV to the alternatives is that it has an intuitive feeling user interface but allows you to dig around in advanced menus if you want to tweak things.

I do a lot of troubleshooting on various operating systems for customers, and I've got to provide a lot of phone support. Without VirtualBox, I'd need a whole lot more hardware than I care to cram into my workspace.

On a single XP Pro desktop, I've got Windows 98, 2000, Vista, Server 2003, and Ubuntu virtual machines at the ready. Giant hard drives are cheap, ram is cheap, and my CPU has plenty of juice to do a little virtualization.

I find VirtualBox a little less confusing and just about as powerful as VMWare. It has all the functionality I'm looking for anyways, and it's totally free. It would be nice if the SATA controller and RDP support were included in the Open Source edition, but that's not problematic since I'm not using VirtualBox for enterprise-grade situations.

Because VirtualBox operating system installs are damn near as responsive as your real OS, it's an awesome way to fix one giant issue with some new laptops. Several companies don't bother with XP drivers on some of their laptop models which can make downgrading a royal pain in the ass. Leave Vista in place, decrapify it, and then do your XP install in a virtual machine.

No driver issues to worry about, and all you've really got to teach someone is how to launch VirtualBox, start the machine, and how to use the hotkeys. It amounts to about 5 lines of instructions, and I've guided some pretty technologically challenged individuals through it without any trouble.

I also love that it's open source, modular, cross-platform, and that Sun gets a little loose on their screenshots page, declaring that "Damn Small Linux runs damn well" in VirtualBox.

For the longest time, I thought I needed to use Dreamweaver to edit my web code. That bothered me. I didn't like the way it handled saving files to my remote server, and it was just too damn bulky for my taste. And there's the price tag. I wasn't really a fan of that either.

Fortunately, I discovered Notepad++. It's totally free, extremely powerful, and does everything I need an editor to do (and a whole lot more). It's based on Scintilla, which is a fantastic foundation for source code editing.

What makes it so great? For starters, it's portable, it supports tabs, syntax highlighting,drag and drop, macro recording, regular expression search and replace, and auto-completion. That's barely the tip of the iceberg.

Multiview editing lets you two documents at once - or two views of the same document. Collapse regions of your code that you don't need visible while editing. Zooming makes code easy to read even on small screens (like my MSI Wind). Bookmarking important or troublesome locations in your files makes navigating them snap.

Plugins add another dimension to N++, and I've got a few favorites. Light explorer adds a small but very useful file browser pane, FTP Synchronize automatically updates your server with changes saved to a local copy, Quick Text offers powerful snippet management, and Secure Pad adds encrypt/decrypt functions.

There are several other great add-ons, and Notepad++ has an enthusiastic, supportive community. They have also contributed tons of autocompletes, translations, themes, and language additions - everything from Smarty to UnrealScript.

Notepad++ is simply a great application.

There are a ton of remote control apps to choose from, and I've used plenty. Normally I'm all about the free alternative, but this is one case where I'm completely ok with paying for a product. For ease of setup and use out of the box, I haven't found anything as good as Teamviewer.

Yes, Teamviewer is completely free for personal use - and if you're doing the "friend that knows about computers" thing for people, you need this app. Here's why.

1) It's portable. Drop it on your flash drive, and you can fire it up and help a buddy out no matter where you are or who's computer you need to run it from.

2) It's small. The QuickSupport module is a 1.3mb download, and telling someone where and how to get it is dead simple.

3) It runs on Windows and Mac. Linux support would be nice, but it's kind of a non-issue - most of the people you offer personal support probably aren't running Linux anyway.

4) It's fast, and secure. Teamviewer runs 256-bit encryption based on RSA key exchange and AES. Their code - including your own custom designed QuickSupport modules - are signed by Verisign.

Since I often have to connect to Windows servers (or sometimes workstations) from my Mac laptop, CoRD is my RDP client of choice. CoRD is a free and open-source application for Mac that allows me to save multiple servers' connection information in the handy sidebar so that I can quickly start remote desktop connections.

CoRD lets me connect to multiple servers simultaneously while only taking up one window of screen real estate, or I can use windowed mode so that each connection has a dedicated window.

Since practically every website requires some sort of user registration, I decided to purchase 1Password to manage all of my login credentials. 1Password is a Mac-only password manager that can also store secure notes, "wallet" information, and identity data.

Rather than use a single password for all of the websites I access, or try to create a convoluted password algorithm to have a list of unique passwords, I use 1Password to generate long, nearly impossible to guess passwords that are unique to each website. In the off chance that someone figures out one of my passwords, they will only have access to that one site instead of everything.

1Password can also auto-fill my login information or my registration information (common answers like name, address, etc.) to speed up my web browsing. It can sync all of my information to my iPhone (and accompanying free iPhone application), a Palm, or the my.1password.com service so that I can maintain my password security when browsing on my phone or without my laptop.

As a blogger and IT professional I often need to make screenshots for things like showing a program window, instructing where to find an obscure setting, or making a witty LOLcat. Thankfully, Skitch is available to fill this need and make my screenshot tasks quick and painless.

I didn't know about Skitch until it was released in public beta early this year. I downloaded the Mac-only client, installed it, and got myself a skitch.com account for easy uploading of my screenshots. Within seconds I was able to capture the entire screen (or a selection) and mark it up with arrows, text, boxes, and circles.

The key feature for me though is the ease with which I'm able to upload the screenshots and share them with others. Using the Skitch web account, I'm able to store my screenshots (for free) and get links to the direct picture file, forum/embed HTML, and a dedicated page that allows commenting on the screenshot. The screenshots can also be uploaded to a WebDAV server, Flickr, or FTP.

Recently our sister publication, TUAW, did a series of posts about each blogger's favorite iPhone and iPod Touch apps. We thought here at Download Squad that we'd take that same approach and apply it to our favourite Windows applications. This first post is my first of three in this vein that will cover Evernote, FeedDemon, and MindManager.

Evernote

It seems you can't go very far online these days without someone extolling the virtues of Evernote. While this note-taking application has been around for a long time, it has recently been reborn as a cross-platform powerhouse. The original concept behind Evernote was that you had one scrolling piece of note paper that you could continue to add notes to, then easily search within them both based on content and based on a timeline of when your notes were created. While this paradigm still exists, it's no longer Evernote's claim to fame.

Evernote now has a powerful web application that serves as a central nervous system for your note taking. All of your notes that are created in the local Evernote client on your Windows (or Mac) computer are synchronized to Evernote's servers, where they can apply OCR (optical character recognition) to any images that you have included in your notes. This means that you can search for a word that is visible in a photo, and Evernote will find it.

Evernote's interface has been refined over the past few years and is very easy to navigate and use. On the Windows platform most people seem to pit Evernote against OneNote from Microsoft, and in my opinion with the advent of Evernote's server-based system and reliable synchronization, it's no contest.

A free account at Evernote is enough for most users, offering up to 40 MB of file transfer per month, but if you find you are a heavy user you may need to upgrade to a Premium account, which offers 500 MB of transfer per month, plus other features.