Uses This

A little interview with me over on Uses This. I’ll skip the intro since you know who I am, but I’ll republish the rest here.

What hardware do you use?

I’m a fairly cliché Mac guy. After my first Commodore 64 (and then 128), the only computers I’ve ever had have been from Apple. I’m a longtime loyalist in that way and I don’t regret a second of it. I use the 2018 MacBook Pro tricked out as much as they would sell it to me. It’s the main tool for my job, so I’ve always made sure I had the best equipment I can. A heaping helping of luck and privilege have baked themselves into moderate success for me such that I can afford that.

At the office, I plug it into two of those LG UltraFine 4k monitors, a Microsoft Ergonomic Keyboard, and a Logitech MX Master mouse. I plug in some Audioengine A2s for speakers. Between all those extras, the desk is more cluttered in wires than I would like and I look forward to an actually wireless future.

I’m only at the office say 60% of the time and aside from that just use the MacBook Pro as it is. I’m probably a more efficient coder at the office, but my work is a lot of email and editing and social media and planning and such that is equally efficient away from the fancy office setup.

And what software?

• Notion for tons of stuff. Project planning. Meeting notes. Documentation. Public documents.
• Things for personal TODO lists.
• BusyCal for calendaring.
• 1Password for password, credit cards, and other secure documents and notes.
• Slack for team and community chat.
• WhatsApp for family chat.
• Zoom for business face-to-face chat and group podcasting.
• Audio Hijack for locally recording podcasts.
• FaceTime for family face to face chat.
• ScreenFlow for big long-form screen recordings.
• Kap for small short-form screen recordings.
• CleanMyMac for tidying up.
• Local for local WordPress development.
• VS Code for writing code.
• TablePlus for dealing with databases.
• Tower for Git.
• iTerm for command line work.
• Figma for design.
• Mailplane to have a tabbed in-dock closable Gmail app.
• Bear for notes and Markdown writing.

What would be your dream setup?

I’d happily upgrade to a tricked out 16″ MacBook Pro. If I’m just throwing money at things I’d also happily take Apple’s Pro Display XDR, but the price on those is a little frightening. I already have it pretty good, so I don’t do a ton of dreaming about what could be better.

The post Uses This appeared first on CSS-Tricks.