Thanks to Dan Oliver and guys at .net magazine for giving me the privilege of being a judge at this year’s iteration of their annual .net Awards. It’s really kind of you.

What are these awards about? Here’s a bit from their press pack:

.net, the world’s best-selling magazine for web builders, has opened voting for its annual .net Awards – a celebration of the very best in web design and development – as organisers hope to beat the 60,000 votes cast last year.

The .net Awards website (www.thenetawards.com) – in association with Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 – is open now for votes in sixteen categories; Awards include ‘web personality of the year’ and ‘innovation of the year’, which sees the controversial Wikileaks (www.wikileaks.com) competing against nominees including Google’s Android 2.2 OS and Adobe’s Flash Player for Mobile.

Held annually since 1998, the long-running .net Awards mix public opinion with those of a leading panel of 100 industry experts, including the likes of Jeffrey Zeldman, Paul Boag and Molly Holzschlag, who deliberate on the final shortlist.

Winners of the prestigious .net Awards 2010 are announced on Thursday, 18^th November at a special event in London.

.net Awards 2010

• Design agency of the year
• Interactive site of the year
• Blog of the year
• Mobile site of the year
• Mobile app of the year
• Innovation of the year
• Web personality of the year
• Redesign of the year
• Podcast of the year
• Video podcast of the year
• Web app of the year
• Open source app of the year
• Standards champion
• Best API use
• Community site of the year
• Viral campaign of the year

Go vote now!

When I switched to the Mac platform (quite recently) I simply took all the web development software I used over to the Mac OS X. Most of it was cross-platform and I was familiar with it so it made perfect sense. To some degree.

As an ex-Windows user I didn’t realise that the UI on the Mac is quite different from the Windows one, both visually and usability-wise. This makes user interfaces of software originally written for Windows really awkward to use. I decided to look for more native and free alternatives to my PHP development apps.

Having tried several packages in each category, here is what I found to be the best.

Best PHP IDE for Mac OS X

I have been a long-standing fan of Eclipse PDT. I always liked how complete the feature set of it was. However, Eclipse really feels sluggish and ugly on a Mac. That’s why I tried Netbeans, which looks native (althouth also Java-based) and is soo much faster than Eclipse. It also has as a more back-to-basics approach to the UI while maintaining quite a rich feature set at the same time.

Best MySQL management tool for Mac OS X

Although I use PHPMyAdmin daily I realised that a good desktop application for managing MySQL is still a better tool for the job. Having tested a few of them I decided to go with Sequel Pro, whose interface is simple and powerful at the same time allowing for inline data editing and simple column creation. It also allows you to connect through an SSH tunnel, which is particularly handy for remote databases.

Best LAMP stack for Mac OS X

MAMP is the king of local LAMP stacks on MacOS, hands down. Although quite a simple app it gives you everything you need to run you local server set up. It’s a bit of a shame that the option to create virtual hosts costs money.

One of the drawbacks of MAMP is that if you want to run Apache on port 80 it will ask you for you password every time you run it (annoying). Fortunately you can avoid that by running this app I wrote, which stores MAMPs password in your Keychain.

These are my favourite applications. What are yours?