Reposted from PixelBit Lab

Over the last few months i’ve been looking into various web apps to use over at PixelBit. After looking over many, testing a few and reading reviews i’ve formulated a small list of the top tools. We use others as well but these are the ones that shine.

Basecamp
Project and client management. The Suite is a good deal.

Sortfolio
Good advertising opportunity for little cost.

Quickbooks Online
Perfect tools for managing the business, paying employees and contractors. Also integrates with our accountants systems.

Beanstalk
Hosted SVN for secure, offsite backups. While we don’t use this for all code (contract restrictions) it works quite well for our small team.

TestFlight
iOS Developers “new best thing”. It makes testing a breeze and makes it possible to push builds in minutes with a clear communication with our testing pools.

Dribbble
While not really a web tool it really is nice to get feedback in realtime as a project is being developed.

MediaTemple
I have a love/hate for this host, but so far they’ve allowed PixelBit to scale (internally) and provide solutions for our clients.

MailChimp
Excellent newsletter and one-off mailing. Clean, Fast and Intuitive. Plus it has chimps, whats not to love?

There you have it, a little list of the tools we use. I will post some more “company information” in the future as we continue to grow. For now we are focused on our brands and clients, so much that we haven’t even finished our own website. Its the “cobblers children” effect for sure.

What tools and services do you use?

Note: NONE of these recommendations were paid or compensated to be added.

After a long day of compiling PHP, Apache, Imap, Mailman… and the list goes on I have the Zend Framework all setup. Haven’t ran any stress tests or long term analysis on the framework, but so far I am happy.

One super simple example is this Flickr Compositor which takes your search and creates a pretty neat composite image. There is also a bunch of other demos so in a matter of minutes you can really get an idea how powerful the Zend Framework is.

At the moment I have this system pretty feature packed, with apps such as:

• Zend Framework
• Zend Core
• Zend Debugger
• Zend Guard
• Zend Optimizer
• Zend Engine

When I get some more time I am going to be adding the Zend Framework to my development toolkit. I also plan to test out CakePHP and come up with a “best of” kit. The question is what do you prefer to use in your development?

After trying some command line and GUI based SVN applications I think I finally found one that works well. It looks great, but even more importantly it works great. The tool would be svnX, currently available only on the Mac.

Two of my favorite features would have to be the Repository Inspector and the Working Copy Inspector both of which offer greater control over your files.

If you are looking for a powerful Subversion tool then I highly recommend svnX