I’m always interested in what setups other people use, so I thought I’d give you guys a peek at how I work…

MacBook Air

As a developer, I’m pretty demanding when it comes to my computers.  I type hard and fast, I run a ton of programs simultaneously, and I work from just about everywhere.  Not just my desk or my couch or my bed, but from coffee shops, airports, the library, with clients, in cars, on trains…

For the last three years I’ve worked on a trusty 15″ MacBook Pro which had been a great machine, although with its quirks.  It made a number of trips to the repair shop, but never left me in a pinch.  Finally, this winder, I decided it was time to upgrade, and picked up a MacBook Air, with which I have been nothing but impressed.  I opted for the solid state drive, so there is no spinning drive, and this machine is sweet.  Fast, tiny, and light.  And I haven’t missed having an internal CD/DVD drive for a second!  The backlit keyboard is a major improvement over the MacBook Pro, and it’s great to type on, too.

The MacBook Air gets an A+ from me!

Peek

I’ve been a long-time Blackberry user/addict, but when the Peek came out I decided to take a look.  The peek does email and email only in a device smaller than any other smartphone at a very attractive price– just $20 a month.  At first, I wasn’t too impressed– the lag was huge (often times 30 minutes+), which is too long to wait to learn that a server is down or a client needs a change made immediately.   Frustrating!  But I’m now beta testing the new Peek software, Peek Pronto (due out in a couple weeks), and you can color me impressed.  Email now regularly shows up on my Peek BEFORE it shows up on my computer.  That’s good speed!  And it’s nice to be able to move around town without a cell phone, yet still be connected.

I look forward to seeing how the Peek continues to evolve over the coming months– it’s a young product with a very active and responsive team.

Software

Next comes software.  After a long struggle to figure out what my ideal setup was, I finally realized that the ultimate coding environment just doesn’t exist within a single App.  I use Coda, from Panic Software (a top-notch Mac development house), to do all of my project management.  Coda is awesome at letting me get at my files quickly, keeping track of which files need to be uploaded, handling those uploads, playing with CSS, and the built in SSH client is really handy.  The downside of Coda is the text editor, which, while good enough for quick edits, just doesn’t have the same polish of TextMate.

TextMate is an app I’d heard about for a long time, and just finally began to use, and my only regret is that I waited so long.  The code completion works perfectly, it’s quick, it’s beautiful, it’s… well, it’s just great.  I am a happier coder with TextMate, and that’s a beautiful thing.

My primary web browser is Firefox 3, because I love the plugins!  My favorite plugins are FoxMarks, Web Developer, and ColorZilla.  For testing, I also use Safari on the Mac and IE, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome in Windows XP Pro (through VMWare Fusion).

And while all of these things are great, my absolute favorite new app/service of the past year (and maybe ever), is Dropbox.  Dropbox is pretty much magic.  I keep all of my working files in my Dropbox, and it automagically sends them to a secure server off in the cloud, keeping them backed up and accessible from anywhere.  But that’s just the beginning.

Dropbox logs every revision of a file you save, so when I realize I screwed something up, I can go back to my 10-minutes-ago copy of a file in seconds, and, through Dropbox’s file sharing features, it’s easy for Becky and me to keep our current files accessible to both of us, and sharing files with clients is a snap.

So that’s my setup!  Of course, I also have MS Office, Adobe CS3, etc, etc, but those, to me, are secondary apps.  These are the programs that I spend 90% of my computing life in.

What software do you use?  Is there something you think I should try?  Let me know!  And stay tuned for an upcoming post where I let you know how we saved $50 a month on our cable bill!

Tags: coda, computer, dropbox, macbook, peek, software, textmate, work