What tools I use

Hardware

Mac Book Pro 15" as my main station. When home, paired with Apple Keyboard, Logitech bluetooth mouse and 24" HP ISP LCD panel.  It is connected via Wi-Fi or via ethernet to router and therefore to home backup server (whitebox with big drives). I have photo of my desk on deskography.

Software

Text editor, web browser and terminal application can be run on any system, on Mac it just make sense for me. (Only less known tools are linked.)

  • Snow Leopard (on notebook) or Linux/Solaris (servers)
  • Terminal (for SSH, tail -f, scrip/console and others)
  • Finder (previews of images and PDFs and drag&drops to Terminal)
  • TextMate (with great bundles for Ruby, Rails and Git)
  • GitX (mainly for viewing)
  • Spark (keyboard shortcuts for new Terminal or Finder window)
  • Safari (for dev and normal use + reading RSS feeds)
  • Chrome, Opera and Firefox for testing
  • Communication
    • Mail.app (Gmail over IMAP)
    • Adium (jabber and icq)
    • Tweetie (great Cocoa twitter app)
    • Skype (mainly voice, there is no need for video)
  • iCal.app (for local calendar and remote subscription to Backpack)
  • iTunes (music, podcasts - Ruby5, RailsEnvy, TED talks)
  • Dockdrop (drag file on dock icon and get it uploaded with URL in your clipboard ready to paste in IM or mail)
  • Pixelmator 
  • MindNote (for structural ideas)
  • VirtualBox (with Windows 7 and various Linux distributions for testing)
  • Cyberduck (for FTP needs only, because mostly I am using SCP from shell or git over SSH for file transfers)
Notable console tools
  • git from command line
  • capistrano, rake for automation (+ bash completion)
  • htop on Linux
  • imagemagick for batch image editing
  • screen
  • pbcopy and pbpaste on Mac

Web based SW

I like simplicity of 37signals products (it is inspiration for my own apps).

  • Backpack (general purpose tool to keep me organized)
  • Campfire (trying Wave from Google)
  • Fakturoid (I am user and also developer of this invoicing tool)
  • GitHub (open source project hosting with style)
  • Writeboard (for preparing blogposts) 
  • small self-hosted apps (for private use)

Ideas for improvement

Bigger screen, faster drive (or SSD), more battery life, even more memory, even more connected SW with better import/export abilities.

Filed under  //   mac   tools  

Comments (2)

Apr 03, 2010
 said...
Hey there. Deskography link is dead. Just saying.
Apr 03, 2010
Fixed :).

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