Colin GourlayInterview
Interactive story developer (ABC News, Australia)
Adapted from Colin Gourlay's interview on Uses This, published 3 February 2015. 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
At work, I use a 15" Retina MacBook Pro.
Thunderbolt Display+ 37 others
The MacBook is paired with a 27" Thunderbolt Display, which encourages me to constantly check out my work on low & high DPI screens.
My personal phone is an LG Nexus 5.
Most of the innovation happening in the phone space now is in software so I haven't felt the need to upgrade to the Nexus 6.
The music I create is mostly sample-based and is quite loop-heavy, so to allow me to experiment faster, I use a Novation Launchpad.
Communication
Productivity
Alfred - a great launcher, though Spotlight is getting better.
In the storytelling team, we also use Trello in a variety of ways, from idea generation, to tracking upcoming news events, to simple to-do lists that help us get interactives polished and out the door.
Browser
My development browser has been Chrome for a few years now.
I also take advantage of the remote debugging tools built into Chrome and Safari to debug web content running live on Android and iOS, respectively.
Security
One of the best decisions I made this year was to do a stocktake of all the accounts I have on the websites and services I use, reset all of my passwords and throw them into LastPass.
Coding & Development
I also (occasionally) do a bit of speaking about data visualisation and JavaScript.
iTerm2 - a far superior terminal.
I write all of my code in Sublime Text 3, with a few extensions for highlighting code and catching syntax errors.
At the ABC, we collaborate using a suite of Atlassian software, and manage our code in Stash.
Design
I usually design in the browser, but when I'm collaborating with designers or creating icons/logos, my go-to tool is Sketch.
Media
For music production, I use Ableton Live, which has a live performance mode that I can control with my Launchpad.
I also dabble with Propellerhead Reason, but it's quite overwhelming and I plan to get more acquainted with it in 2015.
For listening, I really like Rdio, but in Australia there are a ridiculous number of albums unavailable, for no good reason.
Storage
Other
Caffeine - stops my MacBook from dimming/locking itself.
Ensuring my interactive content works in recent versions of Internet Explorer has become much easier with the VMs that Microsoft provide at modern.IE.