Ed FinklerInterview
Web developer (Gimme Bar, Spaz)
Adapted from Ed Finkler's interview on Uses This, published 5 October 2011. 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
I actually just bought a new 13-inch, Mid 2011 MacBook Air.
My workhorse is a Mid 2010 15" MacBook Pro:
I have a 2007 8-core Mac Pro, and it is exponentially slower on startup.
At home I have an aforementioned Mac Pro that is primarily involved in serving up video files to the HTPCs in the house, and a Mac Mini that acts as a backup server.
I do have a Lenovo Thinkpad x201 that I mess with from time to time.
My main phone is a Palm Pre 2.
Communication
Four years ago I started a successful open source microblogging project called Spaz, for desktop and mobile.
Linkinus is my preferred IRC client.
We have daily stand-up meetings on Gimme Bar, and Skype is pretty essential for this.
For email I started using Sparrow recently, because I really really love how it can take up far less space than most email apps.
I still use IM a lot, and Adium has been my mainstay client for years.
For Twitter and Identi.ca, I of course use Spaz most of the time, but I'd be remiss in not mentioning ttytter, a terminal-based client written in Perl.
Browser
Fake is a really great tool for automating browser activity -- sorta like having automator built into Safari, with a bunch of browser-specific actions.
Notes
Notational Velocity+ 23 others
I'm writing the responses for this interview in Notational Velocity, which is a really nice, simple text editor for OS X.
Coding & Development
In the past few years I've gotten heavily into desktop and mobile application with JavaScript.
In the past 6 months, Sublime Text 2 has become my primary code editor.
I do a lot of still in the CLI, and iTerm2 is a great replacement for the standard Terminal.
For both my personal projects and work, I use git for version control almost exclusively.
I try to convince you it's the best -- it's frequently a matter of finding the right incantation to do a particular thing -- but GitHub is kind of a killer app, and so many others know how to use Git that it's a defacto standard.
Media
Lately I've been messing around with Acorn to do some work, and it's a pretty solid tool.
Storage
I'm a paying Dropbox customer (50GB), and while I don't use it all, I use it enough to make it really valuable.
For backups, I use CrashPlan, both for local LAN backups and online backups.
Other
My day job is making awesome stuff at FictiveKin, primarily on Gimme Bar.
For Gimme Bar we use a VM in VirtualBox to act as our local development server.
Split windows, hotkey bring-to-front, Quake-style drop down console, and Growl support are all things I get a lot of use out of with iTerm2.
However, when I was still kidding myself, I used Adobe Fireworks for almost everything.