Saturday, February 3, 2007
Tools
Earlier this week Spanish Print blogger Jorge Estebaranz tagged me with the what do you use to work? meme.
My main computing is done with a Apple PowerBook G4 Ti that has been my life partner for the past 4 years. I also have an Ubuntu GNU/Linux (Edgy Eft) box underneath my desk that was until recently was setup in server-only mode. It's now running Ubuntu in all its bubbly eye candy glory. I still use it mostly as a web development server.
I guess the best way to share the software tools I use, is to take a look at my dock. Arranged in a semi-importance order with the most used apps on the left.
I use Apple's Mail to manage all my email. This application has met my needs for the last couple of years. Before switching to Mail, I used Eudora.
All my instant messaging needs are meet with Adium. It's open source, and supports multiple protocols. And it went 1.0 yesterday!
TextWrangler handles all my my general text editing. I do all my coding with this app.
El Camino, my main web browser. It uses Mozilla’s Gecko rendering engine and integrates with OS X. I have used this browser since it was first released (but not always as the default (See FireFox below)).
Safari, OS X's default browser. I usually only use this for testing or when I use OS X's Search in Google context menu item (For some reason, the system does not honor your default browser setting for this function).
Firefox. I started using this browser when it first came out and used as my main browser for a long time (It's the default browser on my Ubuntu box). I was never happy with the performance on the Mac, so I switched back to Camino. I primarily use it for testing. The development add-ons and the built in javascript debugger rocks.
NetNewsWire is my app of choice for RSS and Atom content retrieval.
I use MarsEdit for editing and submitting content to Printmode. It's nice and simple, and has HTML tag keyboard shortcuts.
SFTP and FTP tasks are handled by Transmit.
Address Book and iCal from Apple tag team to provide personal information management. I don't use iCal as much as I should.
iTunes manages my music collection. Currently in heavy rotation: Tapes 'n Tapes - The Loon, Cut Chemist - The Audience's Listening, and Africa by Toto.
Adobe Creative Suite (Acrobat, PhotoShop, Illustrator, and InDesign). I'm still using the first release of CS. I use PhotoShop the most.
I still use Microsoft Word and Excel. I have NeoOffice (Mac's OpenOffice), but old habits are hard to break. I only really use Word for is my thesis. Most of the other writing I do is done in Google Docs.
I just switched from OS X's default Terminal application and started using iTerm for all my terminal needs. It has tabs and bookmarks (which let you assign common commands to keyboard shortcuts).
I use DragThing to keep my dock and desktop clean of folders and seldom used applications. However, I find I'm using this this less and less.
Adobe Lightroom for digital photo management. Now that Adobe has announced it release and price, I might be looking for a new solution (I don't take advantage of all it's features). What I really need is a simple app that has advanced metadata support.
Flickr Uploadr to push photos to my flickr account.
I (sometimes) use svnX to interface the svn client binary. I'm still testing this out and haven't decided if it will keep its place on the dock.
Preview for PDF, JPG, TIFF, etc viewing. It's faster than all the other apps for general purpose viewing.
Yes, I keep most of the applications running at all times. Who has time to wait for things to load?
Who's Next?
Steve Duncan
Maria Falaschi
Michael Woods
Posted in: Personal Notes
