How to: Hammer out the ideal front-end development setup

Setting up Hammer for Mac, Rock Hammer, MAMP & Coda 2 using DropBox is super sweet and rock solid. The ideal front-end development setup? I think so. I may have finally found my holy grail…

I was introduced to Hammer for Mac from listening to the most excellent Unfinished Business podcast. I played around with the demo and have finally forced open my reluctant wallet and paid for the full version. Which truth be told is a steal. My wallet is still sulking though.

Super-charge your web development with Hammer
Still using PHP includes for HTML? You’re going to love Hammer.
~ hammerformac.com

After setting the exquisite Rock Hammer, Andy Clarke’s curated project library for Hammer for Mac as my default template. I prepared to do a Sass learning session on my MacBook. I put the Hammer project file on Dropbox. Then set MAMP to point to the /Build/ directory within the project. Remember, it is the build folder where you actually preview your work. So now everything is sweet like cinnamon. This really is ultra simple and a solid way of working.

Coda 2’s superb iCloud syncing feature allows me to resume working on this on my iMac too. All I had to do was select “Add Existing Project” from the file menu in Hammer (or Command O if that is too much work). Choose my project on Dropbox, et voilà! I now believe I have the ultimate front-end development environment. I couldn’t be happier. Well maybe if Hammer synced with iCloud too… but hey, I can live with this.

If you don’t have MAMP you could give Anvil for Mac a try too. I haven’t tried this though as I already have MAMP Pro. But it does look very cool.

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