Damian Nicholson

In light of the Alex Payne’s and John Nunemaker’s recent posts on their setups, I thought I’d share my own. Mainly because I find them interesting reads, and I’m generally able to try out a new app or two that I was previously unaware of.

Hardware

I use a 15″ Macbook Pro that I purchased from ebay early last year for a steal. It has a 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo and 2GB of DDR2 RAM, with another 2GB on its way. I hook this upto my 24″ Samsung SyncMaster 245B which is a pretty swish monitor if I do say so myself. This is my only machine, and it’s been able to handle everything I’ve thrown at it so far.

I have Apples Wireless Mighty Mouse and Wireless Keyboard but I seldom use them – I find I’m just as fast using the keyboard and trackpad. Besides the Mouse requires cleaning all the time which grates on me something rotten, and they eat the batteries.

You might wonder what I use to backup all my shiz, the simple answer is that I don’t! I purchased Time Capsule a little while ago and it was DOA. I’m currently in the process of getting a refund. I think I’m going to get a ReadyNAS Duo instead.

The other item on my wishlist at the moment is some Bose QuietComforts though I don’t see myself purchasing these anytime soon. I get by using my Senheiser HD415’s which are very comfortable, but leak badly.

Software

Like a lot of other people using a mac, I use Textmate and Terminal(through Visor) a hell of a lot. But unlike the other setups I still use Firefox. We were having a discussion about this the other day in the lab and we shared the opinion that it’s the extensions we’re all in love with…that’s right Firebug I’m talking about you. Ubiquity and Foxmarks are awesome too! Otherwise we’d have jumped ship long ago as Safari does everything else just as good, but at lightening speed. Yeah we’re all still waiting on Chrome to be released as well.

Quicksilver puts my productivity through the roof – thanks Rey!

Like I mentioned earlier I try to do without the mouse, thats why I use Window Wrangler, which resizes and moves my windows using the keyboard. It doesn’t work with Spaces too well though.

I twitters, flickrs, and facebooks using EventBox which is my favourite new app. I love the growl notifications and there’s lots of exciting new features due in upcoming releases. It beats the crap out of any twitter client, and I’ve tried most of them – the only thing which it doesn’t support yet is multiple accounts…give it time!

I also use Adium for chat, DropBox to share stuff and Caffeine to keep my laptop alive during presentations and whilst watching movies.

For email I use Thunderbird which I’m not overly stellar about, so if anyone else has some suggestions, feel free to add them in the comments

For music I use iTunes which scrobbles to my last.fm, otherwise it’s Spotify all the way. I have some invites left if anyone wants me to send one their way, direct message me on twitter.

I’ve been giving WriteRoom and Things a try lately, and I think they’re here to stay aswell.

Being a Java shop we use IntelliJ to develop fixx (a great bug tracker if I do say so!) and I still have Eclipse kicking around from when University days. Speaking of Uni, last year when I was working on my dissertation I used Freedom quite a bit, which essentially cuts off all your network connections for a specified period of time. You know those distractions like emails, tweets, feeds etc that always seem to appear just as you get in the zone. The good thing about it is that you cannot disable it once its set, unless you do a full restart – nifty eh!

I use Cyberduck to FTP, Toast to burn though I don’t think mac has as many good ripping and burning utilities as Windows. I also download torrents using Transmission.

When I do get a chance to catch up on my feeds, I transition between GReader and NetNewsWire. I follow a few interesting peeps on twitter, and just about everything I read now gets to me through there.

I also muck about in Photoshop CS2 every now and again.

Anyways I think that wraps just about everything up, feel free to add your setups in the comments below!