Xcode – Not much to say here but it’s a toss up between Xcode and my apartment for where I spend the most time.
xScope – For getting the UI pixel perfect (3.0 is out and includes Mirror)
Versions – SVN client. Makes mandatory software beautiful
Coda – For anything remotely web-y (buy it. seriously. buy it.)
BBEdit – File diffs, non-Xcode related dev
HTTP Client - Like curl but for those who sit on the recognition side of the recall vs. recognition crowd (sorry command line junkies)
0xED – For when you have to pour over hex dumps (please see Hackers for reference)
Base – For when you need to visually explore a sqlite file. Fast Cocoa UI.
JSON Formatter – Safari plugin. Mandatory if you spend any time in the browser exercising web services
GitHub for Mac – a great GUI Git client
Slender – scans your Xcode projects for resources that are unused and missing / incorrect @2x sizes. Crucial for pre-flighting to the App Store
Mac App Store – I buy all my tools through the App Store. I gets me up and running on any new machine fast

An interesting observation. I’ve spent more on coffee in the first two months of 2012 than I’ve spent on all of the software tools I use to code.

One thing the browser could use is support for MacBook trackpad style navigation gestures. Specifically the three finger swipe gesture for going backwards and forwards in history . The screen is big enough that it’d be useful to not have to reach up to the top of the screen to go back a page.

Read the full details on the Fido tethering page.

iPhone OS 4.o should have support for background processes. Not support for applications that are left running like on Android (which created a market for 3rd party task switchers and killers) but background processes with no UI support. The OS should provide no ability to kill a process unless you launch the application that is responsible for it and disable whatever feature that application uses that requires said process. If we take Pandora as an example I would expect a settings item in the application to say “Enable streaming while application is not in foreground”. In addition to an in-app setting I would expect a global setting similar to Enable Push Notifications and Enable Location Services are handled, per app and global.

From a developers perspective the implementation would follow a similar model to Android where your application can spin off a Service and the a UI can hook into it for data or control when needed. The application would be responsible for killing the process.

The main concern that shaped my opinion is how Android’s implementation spills it’s guts on the user and the negative impact I feel it has on usability.  Android has this strange and hard to understand concept of task switching (long press on home button) and killing processes (deep in the settings hierarchy) which can leave the user completely unsure what’s happening with your device at any one time and why it’s sluggish and the battery isn’t performing very well.

Oh, and if they can, I’d appreciate it if Apple threw in NSAttributedString support for to the iPhone. UIWebView works but it’s not ideal in all situations.