Agile Writing & Development Tools

Writing Tools

1. Markdown Writing Tools for Mac / iPad / iPhone 

• FoldingText
  • It's Markdown with outline features, Pomodoro like support for timers and more.
  • It beats everything I've tried before especially for long articles. Worth the investment of $25.
  • Demo version on their site. It is Mac only for now.
• ByWord
  • My favorite iPad / Mac / iPhone editing tool period.
  • When you deal with short articles it shines, ByWord is what I use the most.
• iAWriter
  • If you want to write, distraction free on iPad, iPhone or Mac nothing beats the simplicity and austere UI of iAWriter. Affordable, elegant, best in class.

2. Text Merging

• KDiff3 Text Merge Tool
  • Free, it allows to merge up to 3 files, and to do it visually and for free!
  • Works for OSX, Windows, KDE Unixes and probably Linux too.

Development Tools

1. Drupal Tools

• Pantheon
  • Pantheon is arguably the best Cloud supported Drupal environment we have found as of 2012.
  • In 2013 we had some support issues with it, it does not like any custom Drupal distribution, we are currentlly looking for an alternative.
  • However we still recommend it, features here.
  • FAQ is here.
  • Pricing from $25 mo.

2. Microsoft .Net Tools

• WebMatrix 3.
  • It's their brand new tools and Cloud framework for developing using .Net, PHP or Node.JS.
  • It's free, and includes limited cloud hosting.
  • Supports GIT
  • Requires Windows

Development Frameworks - Rich Web Client Emphasis

1. Full Stack JavaScript Frameworks based on NodeJS

• Derby
  • It's objective is to create super fast full stack web apps. Founded by ex-Google fellow, and a smart team.
  • It allows for offline access to webapps, and they are obsessed about performance.
  • It's more open than Meteor, using NPM (package manager) and releasing even the components of their framework as NPM modules for others.
• Meteor
  • Meteor seems to have security issues, and it doesn't currently support offline access to a web app.
  • GPL license may be an issue with any commercial app
  • The team behind Meteor does not give us confidence

2. Promising Front-End frameworks

• Ember
  • Inspired by Cocoa, and used to develop iCloud apps from Apple
  • It has a great team of developers, it's independent and fully open source
  • Mature, stable and powerful JS framework.
  • It can work with anything on the server as long as the server delivers JSON.
  • It uses many ideas from Rails, and obviously can work well with it.
  • Reviews:
    • Why Discourse Startup chose Ember

3. Code Repositories SVN

• Github
  • The best, we recommend it, especially for the size of their network, and the quality of their team.
  • Personal plans from $7/mo 5 private repositories, unlimited people, unlimited size. But recommended repo size is 1 Gig for performance.
  • Business plans that allow to create profiles for organizations from $25.
  • Biggest community ever, and leader in the market.
  • Features are solid and include bug tracking
• BitBucket
  • Free up to 5 people!
  • Git and Mercurial support
  • Unlimited private repositories, this is their key advantage
  • Team Support even for the free plan
  • Jira Support built-in
• Beanstalk
  • $15 p/month, 3 GB, 10 repositories, 5 users
  • Supports Git, Mercurial and SVN
  • Allows to browse files on the web, and even edit there
  • Supports several environments (test, live, etc)
  • Issue tracker integration
  • It allows to deploy from their server automatically to S3
  • Philladelphia based company called Wildbit

4. Bug Tracking and QA

• Jira
  • Affordable Price $10 for 10 users
  • Our Opinion: The main issue is that Jira is a bit to powerful, it wants to become everything for your Agile team, and it's not as good in everything. If you use it for bugs, or even just feature requests is good, but keep it out of development.
• BugZilla
  • Open source, simple, gets the job done =)
• Mantis
  • Another bug focused open source tool, a bit easier to use than Bugzilla, recommended tool

5. Code Editing Tools

• KDiff3 Text Merge Tool
  • Free, it allows to merge up to 3 files, and to do it visually and for free!
  • Works for OSX, Windows, KDE Unixes and probably Linux too.
• NotePad++
  • Easy to use, and powerful.
  • Free editing tool
  • Works for Windows
• Coda
  • Mac only, and powerful
• Sublime Text 2
  • Completely free
  • Works on Linux, Windows and Mac.
• BBEdit 10
  • Mac support only
  • Very flexible and powerful