Ben HammersleyInterview
Editor (Wired UK), war correspondent
Adapted from Ben Hammersley's interview on Uses This, published 23 June 2010. The kit is drawn from their answers and each reason is an excerpt, lightly edited. Shared under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read the full interview ↗
Is this you? Claim this kit →Hardware
Now I've been working with an iPad for a few weeks, I have to say my MacBook Air is getting very little use - it's more of a very expensive docking station than anything.
I had an epiphany about 8 years ago, when my home office went from having 4 big tower PCs in various states of repair and OS, along with my own servers and NAS and lots of cable runs and so on, to a single iBook running off Wifi.
Communication
All my email, whether it's personal, from SIX Creative, from WIRED UK, from my well.com account or whatever, is consolidated into Gmail (either through the Pop3 import, or with a Forwarding rule on the original server).
I stay out of Mail.app on the macs, but not the iPhoneOS mail.
Productivity
Browser
(I double up because XMarks also syncs to Safari, which makes it sync to my iPhone as well), and for backup assurance purposes.
Coding & Development
Media
If someone made a thing that took an iTunes library index file and made Spotify playlists from it, I'd make the transition entirely: I adore being able to spend five minutes with a new machine and then be entirely in my preferred environment.
Storage
Other
I don't have a working TV at home, instead using an old iMac with Boxee installed: the iPhone app acts as the remote control.