Here is this years list of tools that help me on a day to day basis in my role as a web developer. There are other tools I use throughout the day for social networking and other things, but I've purposefully left these off the list, as I don't deem them necessary in helping me do my job.

Hardware

My hardware selection is very minimalistic, at least I think it is. I've read about various setups from other developers that include multiple machines and usually more than two monitors. I stick with the view that I need only one machine and that I need it to powerful enough to build web applications but also portable enough that I can carry it with me.

• MacBook Pro - I previously owned a black MacBook that I have used as my main development machine for over 4 years, but owing to it's lack of expandable memory and that it won't upgrade OS X to anything beyond Lion, I decided that I needed something new. At the start of the year I plumped for a new MacBook Pro and I've been amazed at the capabilities of it as my main development machine. Also the Retina display is rather purdy.
• Mighty Mouse - Still trying to get my head round the gestures for this, but needless to say, it's a very comfortable mouse to use.
• Apple Keyboard - I've had this keyboard for a number of years now but I'm starting to find it a tad small to use. It's the actual size of the keys I find too small.
• Asus Monitor - Just a 24" external monitor. Nothing fancy.
• External Hard Drive - At the moment I have a Seagate 250MB external hard drive. It's sole use is for my Time Machine backups.

Hardware nice to haves

These have been on the nice to haves list for a while but I think I'll consider at least one of these as a purchase before the end of the year.

• A NAS - To help with the day to day grind I have a massive iTunes library that I code to, however it is taking a lot of space on MacBook. I would love to have extra storage at home that I connect to easily and just pick my music and photos from it.
• A better keyboard - Not sure what I am looking for in terms of a keyboard, but one definite criteria I have is that it is slightly bigger than the standard wireless Apple keyboard.

Software

This is the software that I use every day. These are the essential applications I need to work. If I had nothing else in terms of software, then these applications would be all I would need.

• Mail - Newsflash, well at least for me it is. Mail, the default email client with OS X, is actually a great email client. I previously used the Gmail web client for email but since going Google free, I've been surprised by how much I enjoy using Mail.
• Firefox - An open source browser that is gradually making improvements in performance, but it's mostly because it's open source software that I like using Firefox.
• iTerm2 - This is my preferred terminal emulator as it provides more functionality over the terminal emulator provided with OS X. One particular nice feature is the splitting of terminal windows into panes.
• Sublime Text 3 - I've used Sublime Text 2 for a couple of years and I immediately jumped to the next release when it was available.
• Dropbox - I keep everything in Dropbox. I probably don't need to. Over the last few weeks though it's fallen into my "Do I need this service?" category of thoughts. I'll be assessing Dropbox closely over the next few weeks.
• Skype - Everyone has Skype so it makes sense to use it for calls with clients. Very handy as well for group calls.
• 1Password - Who wants to remember all their passwords or write them down or make them the same for all your logins and sites? Not me, but I still can't believe it took me to this year to start using 1Password.

While I do use the following software every day, these are more like nice to haves rather than essential. Still, they make me more productive every day, so I'm glad I have them.

• Alfred - A very nice replacement for the default Spotlight application launcher. Also I've started to see the power behind extending Alfred to do custom searches on things like my Pinboard bookmarks.
• Fantastical - A little application that sits in my menu bar and allows me to update my calendar easily. The great thing about Fantastical is that I can quickly add meetings and deadlines to my work calendar.
• RSS Notifier - I use Feedbin for following blogs, but for service updates from Amazon and Heroku, I use this application.
• Divvy - Great little application for managing your windows. I have a few shortcut keys setup to resize my windows accordingly.
• MultiMon - Divvy doesn't let me move windows from my MacBook to my external monitor which is where MultiMon comes in. Great little application.
• Broom - Diskspace is a premium at the moment, so while I am reviewing different external storage options I have Broom to let me know when folders get too big.

The Web

A web developer's playground. Just a small selection of the many services and products that I use online.

• DuckDuckGo - I'm still sticking with this as my preferred search engine. Yes it does lack the comprehensive results that Google has, but I'm finding that if I don't find anything on the first page of results with DuckDuckGo, then I do have ready to roll searches for StackOverflow.
• Github - My preferred source code management tool. Nothing to fault here. Easy to manage repositories and plenty of collaboration tools for both private and public projects.
• Heroku - I've worked with the Heroku platform for over three years now and I love its simplicity. Might be more pricier than other options but that's the trade off when you don't want the hassle of being a sys admin.
• LinkedIn - I closed my LinkedIn account a couple of years ago only to find that I actually needed it at the start of the year to get myself marketed as a freelancer. Jury is still out on it's usefulness but I am trying to make more use of it on a daily basis.
• FreeAgent (Referral link) - I've only been using FreeAgent for six months now but it's already paying for itself in terms of usefulness. Having your accounts in order as an independent contractor is a necessary evil, but the FreeAgent application does such a great of job making mananging my income simple.
• Instapaper - Reading development articles is part of development life if you want to stay up to date on the ever changing Internet.
• Pinboard - You never know when you are going to need that article on nested resources on Rails or that article on implementing 'Remember Me' functionality in Sinatra. Good job I keep a nice archive of the articles I read and find useful with Pinboard.
• Feedbin - My new RSS reader of choice. Check out a more complete review by myself here.
• Gauges - Another service that I picked in the move away from Google. Okay it doesn't have the number of different metrics that Google Analytics has, but it provides all the information I need in a simple and easy to read interface.

Backups

One backup is good, two is better. I've been lucky so far, but I think I need to beef up my backup strategy.

• Time Machine - It would be sort of crazy not to use Time Machine if you own a Mac. Background backups without the fuss. Still, it shouldn't be your only form of backup.
• Dropbox - Which brings me to Dropbox again. I keep backups of a few folders in Dropbox so that if the worse was to happen with my MacBook Pro, I could be at least up and running on another machine regardless of which operating system it is.

There was more to this list but I had to limit it to just my essential tools. If I included all the extensions, addons, plugins and other tools I used, this post would just be too long to read. I wanted to just give an overview of a typical set of tools that web developers use.