Tools
I love to read about apps, tools and products other people use in their day-to-day life. Especially The Setup and Justin William’s Tools list. So why not list the hardware and apps I am using? This post will be Mac-focused. I plan to write similar posts about iOS-Apps and my iOS-Development tool chain.
Hardware
- Macbook Air 13” mid 2013: This is the only computer I’m using. It has the i7 Intel chip, 8gb ram and a 128gb SSD. The hard drive is small but it’s totally ok to have the big image and iTunes libraries on a fast external USB 3 drive. The obvious downside of this machine is the display but let me tell you this: 11 hours of battery life are amazing!
- cheap Benq 24” monitor: nothing fancy here, just a place for huge Xcode Storyboards.
- iPhone 5: It is still a perfectly fine phone but I plan to upgrade to the iPhone 6 this winter.
- iPad Mini: I have no real use case for this device. It is mostly a Youtube-Player.
Development
- Xcode: Not much to say.
- Dash: I do not know if I would enjoy using Xcode without Dash. It’s a documentation viewer, incredible fast and supports all kinds of different languages and frameworks. I use it in combination with Alfred, which I’m going to mention later.
- Chocolat: All non iOS-Code (HTML,CSS, Javascript, Ruby and one day hopefully Haskell) is written in Chocolat. It’s a modern OS X app, active in development and has all the features I need.
- Github for Mac: A simple GUI for Git. Free and not bloated with features I will never use!
- Transmit: Best OS X FTP client!
Design
- Sketch: I’m using Sketch for all my interface designs, icons etc. It’s inexpensive and easy to get started.
- Spectrum: The native color picker feels useless in comparison to this app.
- Ember: A place for all my screenshots and inspirational images.
- Xscope: Who does not need a digital ruler with some extras?
Productivity
- Airmail: Mail.app is ridiculously broken with Google Mail and feels heavy and old. Sparrow is no longer in development, so Airmail is the best alternative I could find.
- Omnifocus: I plan all my more complex projects and tasks in Omnifocus.
- Wunderlist: All simple lists go in here. Version 3 is beautiful and the sync is unbelievable fast.
- Alfred: Spotlight on steroids.
- 1Password: I hope there is not much to explain here.
- Pinboard + Spillo: I’ve used Evernote for managing all my bookmarks and interesting bits I found on the web. This became an unmanageable mess because Evernote tries to combine too many different concepts, which does not work for me. Now I’m using Pinboard in combination with the Mac client Spillo. It’s simple, focused and easy to use.