Here is a quick breakdown of the apps that we cant do without here at Joomlabamboo. They are all mac based so apologies to pc users out there. We use a combination of the following tools to work locally and live

CSS Edit - We use this for all of our css editing. Such a simple and beautiful interface. The ability to group styles into folders and search through the file for style types as well as through the actual css source to pull out search terms - fragments of rules, words etc.

The live Web preview is invaluable. It took a little while to get the hand of using this feature but it saves an incredible amount of time by being able to build a site watching the effect that each keystroke has on the page - no more refreshing to see changes.

The milestone feature is also a classic feature and a great way to set starting points for different projects.

X-Ray is similar to the web developer toolbar outline css option in firefox. Its very useful for getting the specifics of html markup and figuring out which css rule is controlling the output. This is especially handy for Joomla as you get to see what mark up the core code is outputting.

Smultron - There are quite a few different text editors on the market but Smultron really hits the spot for us. Im sure some of the other editors are better appointed but I really just like the feel of Smultron. The ability to do live searches, search through a selection of files and make changes through a group of files is really handy.

Fireworks - This one probably doesnt need much explaining and we use this over photoshop probably more just out of habit. Its very easy to create web mockups and some quick image effects. I find the interface more intuitive than photoshop, but thats probably just personal preference.

Mamp - Where would you be without a local server on your machine. When we were pc based we used JSAS but Mamp is certainly a reliable option for setting up a local server environment not only for joomla but any type of dynamic php/mysql site.

Coda - Its billed as a one window app for all types of web development but we tend to use its as an ftp client mainly. There are times when its easier to open files on a live server through coda but we have a tendency to only do this when we want to make quick edits to a page. Its very handy to preview images from the web server using coda rather than opening the image in a fireworks for instance, but we tend to prefer the streamlined interfaces of cssedit and smultron when doing the heavy coding.

We could probably get away with using cyberduck, filezilla or submit but the one thing coda has got going for it is there is no delay when adding existing files to a directory - its a small thing but on other ftp clients we have tested there has been a microsecond delay when the clients floats the overwrite prompt box - that can get a little annoying after a while.