Colleen WainwrightInterview
Writer, speaker, consultant
Adapted from Colleen Wainwright's interview on Uses This, published 18 October 2012. 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
My main rig is a 15" 2.8 GHz, matte-screen MacBook Pro from late 2009 maxed out with a 500GB hard drive and 8GB of RAM.
So I panicked and bought a 13" 1.8 GHz MacBook Air (4GB of RAM, 300MB drive).
I don't really need two laptops, but is way easier to leave the MBP hooked up to the Cinema Display, and as a tiny person, it's way easier to tote the Air.
I also caved and bought the iPad 3 with (unactivated) Verizon 4G.
I vastly prefer reading dead-tree books where I can, and where I can't, on my Kindle 3G (books are heavy!), but the possibilities for digital publishing on the platform were too tantalizing to forgo any longer.
I take photos for presentations and the blog with a Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ4; it's outfitted with a 4GB Eye-Fi card and more than any other gadget I own, every time I use it, I feel like I'm living in the future.
You will pry my Logitech presentation remote from my cold, dead hands.
For drawing and notetaking, I favor PITT Artist Pens and a whatever's-on-sale 6x9" spiral-bound sketchbook.
I also make a half-gallon of outstanding full-fat yogurt (SCD-legal!) every week in a Yogourmet yogurt maker.
Communication
Productivity
And I am as good at adding things to OmniFocus as I am bad at following through on them.
Browser
(Oddly, I rarely use Safari; I've thought about moving it deeper into the phone, but it feels like sacrilege.)
Notes
Coding & Development
Design
The MBP is still on Snow Leopard because it was hard enough getting the HP to print on that, and because I steadfastly refuse to upgrade from Adobe CS3.
(I mostly only use it for Photoshop these days, but I like having the other apps JUST IN CASE.
Media
Plus, hey, streaming Netflix in bed!
Storage
Other
I'm running Lion on the Air, because I'm lazy.
I use VueScan for scanning, without which I would have hurled something through a wall long ago.
Still, I reserve my deepest, fondest, sexytimes Software Luv for TextExpander.
Rounding out the desktop experience, I use QuickBooks for invoicing and because it makes my bookkeeper happy and hoo BOY, do I want to keep her happy.