What I Use
In this Inaugural Post I’ll take briefly about what I use on a daily basis.
Gadgets
Mid 2012 13 Inch MacBook Pro (Non Retina)
This is my true workhorse and everything I do ends up on this at some point.
Before I bought it I was torn between this model and the 13 Inch Macbook Air and
while I am sure I would say the exact opposite if I had gone with the Air I feel
like I made the right decision. I think it represents a nice compromise between portability, computing power,
and price. I carry it around every day and I have no complaints about it’s weight. Albeit from a few scuffs and a little dirt it has held up well to pretty rough daily treatment. If only chargers faired as well.
I do miss having a 24 inch screen but less than I thought I would due to a makeshift solution (more on that in a moment).
IPhone 3GS
Since I got this in 2009 I’ve slowly watched it go from top of the line to barely supported
while giving me no problems all the while. My apps still run and my music still plays so I have still have
not seen any compelling reason to upgrade. I’m still running 5.0.1 as my 3GS doesn’t get many of the new features of 6.0 and Siri.
I think I would have upgraded already if not for wonderful jailbreak apps like SBSettings that I don’t feel like going through the process of reinstalling again.
Early 2009 24 Inch iMac
My main computer for 3 years, it now sits on my desk serving niche purposes. It’s main use now is as a hacked together second monitor for my MBP. I have yet to find a working, practical
solution to use it as a true second monitor so I’ve just been using teleport(like synergy) and
Soundflow to almost make it one. I normally use it to show Movies, Chat, or pdfs, documents and
websites that I need to constantly reference. Since its on 10.6 it’s used for any Powerpc
app or non-updated intel app. I also use it to run .bat files. For these things it works pretty well.
iPad 2 3G
I bought this in 2011 to use as my portable community and it served its job ok before being replaced by my MBP.
For anything non-intensive like web-browsing, email, reddit, or reading, the iPad performs beautifully.
The cracks begin to show when you try to do anything more.
Even with a bluetooth keyboard, writing anything longer than an email is slow and unfun.
It gets even worse when I try to do actual work on it. Despite trying almost every native solution
(I never tried ssh) the iPad never came close to being as good as a real computer for coding, image editing,
or anything else. If I can’t install ruby or git on a computer then I can’t use it as real computer.
The iPad is currently being used as a dedicated ebook reader and other light browsing and for this it performs admirably.
Software
BBEdit
One of the oldest text editors for mac, I haven’t been using this for that long. I switched to this from TextMate a few years ago because of it’s overflowing features.
For something that was supposed to be barebones it really has everything. The two main reasons I switched I because I liked the layout and it’s ftp support more than TextMate.
I’ve recently been thinking about trying out Sublime Text 2 but I don’t feel like leaving this old friend.
Terminal
Not much to say here, just the vanilla Mac OSX Terminal.No complaints, always works as expected.
Google Chrome
Once again pretty standard stuff. I’ve found this to be (at least for me) the fastest full-featured browser.
I’ve found the sync feature to be invaluable along with plugins like Adblock and LastPass.
Sparrow
Although it’s been bought by google and discontinued I still use this as my desktop email client.
It does everything I could ask for and it does it well. If I had to choose one feature it would be its top-notch
multi-email account integration.
Dropbox
While this is another standard, I can’t even count the number of times it’s backups have saved me from forgetting
to print or transfer something. It also makes a wonderful way to share files.
My only modification is that I’ve set up symlinks to allow me to back up other directories not in the dropbox folder.
Google Docs
I have the entire Microsoft Office Suite on my computer but I find myself almost never using it due to this
wonderful Office replacement. It fulfills all my needs while doing it in its own lightweight, cloud backuped way.
Discussion, links, and tweets
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