If you’ve been a webmaster for a while, you have probably grown tired of having to sit in front of your desktop or laptop in order to work on your sites, especially when you have powerful and ultraportable devices in the form of the iPad and/or iPhone that should be able to do pretty much everything you need in your line of work. Well, you’re in luck – they can do it! There are already dozens of apps for web developers and designers on the iTunes App Store, and below I’ve listed just some of the most popular ones:
Ego. Ego makes it very easy to check the stats on your sites and feeds – something that most webmasters simply love doing often. It’s nice to see the numbers on your stats counter go up, and now you don’t have to be in front of your computer and open a dozen tabs in your browser to do it – Ego aggregates it all in one place.
Source Viewer. Source Viewer is an app that lets you view the source code of any Web page – simple, to the point and pretty useful for any web developer, designer or webmaster. The app’s interface is simple, but you really don’t need many features in such an app, anyway, and the most important thing, code highlighting, is present, of course.
Textastic. Textastic is the best code editor for the iPad and iPhone, giving you the ability to quickly edit any code, with support for highlighting, auto-correction and other useful features. Both the iPad and iPhone versions are great for work, and if you constantly find yourself needing to edit the files of your CMS installation, this is a must have app. If you’re just building a website, however, and want to do it fast, an online Free Website Builder could be an alternative choice.
FTP on the Go. Obviously, you’ll need to be able to work with the files on your hosting account, and last time I checked, FTP was still the most popular method of transfer. FTP on the Go, in turn, is the most popular FTP client for iOS – it supports all of the major protocols and has enough features to satisfy most people – you certainly won’t be missing anything from a desktop computer.
Color Expert. Color Expert is a perfect companion app for any web designer – it’s actually better on the iPhone and iPad thanks to their IPS displays, which show colors more accurately than your usual TFT-LCD on laptops (including the MacBook and desktop Macs). The app has the full Pantone libraries, and it’s also able to create palettes from existing photos or images.
SketchBook Pro. Also for web designers, SketchBook Pro is a perfect app to do any kind of design or sketching in. You can easily create mockups of websites and apps and show them to anyone (including over HDMI, which is pretty nice). If you’re an artist-slash-webmaster, you could easily create a full blown sketch of how the end site would look, or create a diagram of the work that needs to be done – the possibilities are really far reaching.
With all of the above apps installed on your iPad or iPhone (preferably the former, though, because of the bigger display), you can easily connect to your hosting account and do pretty much any modifications you want to your site or Web app, no matter where you are. Be sure to give it a go – I’m sure you’ll love the experience!
