John GruberInterview
Writer (Daring Fireball)
Adapted from John Gruber's interview on Uses This, published 22 January 2009. 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 sole work computer is a 15-inch 2.5 GHz MacBook Pro with 4 GB of RAM and a 250 GB hard drive.
I own a 16 GB iPhone 3G that I have with me whenever I expect to remain dry.
Currently: an unlined soft cover Moleskine and a 0.38mm Uni-ball Signo RT (black).
Communication
A few years ago I created Markdown.
If Twitter counts as work-related, and I suppose it does insofar as I often find stuff to link to from it, Twitterrific.
I use MarsEdit for posting articles and links to Daring Fireball.
Server-side, Daring Fireball runs Movable Type, but, in the words of Han Solo, I've made a lot of special modifications myself.
Productivity
BusySync is a wonderful tool for sharing iCal calendars with my wife.
Numbers for spreadsheets and the occasional graph.
Keynote for the one or two speaking gigs I accept each year.
Notes
Coding & Development
I have a handful of custom system-wide Services menu items I created using ThisService, which lets you creates services from simple AppleScript and shell scripts.
Design
Media
Storage
Every night I use SuperDuper to clone my MacBook Pro's internal drive to one of the two aforementioned Lacie hard drives.
I started using Dropbox recently, but because I spend nearly all my time on a single computer, I don't seem to use it much.
Other
On my Mac, again roughly in order of affection: Yojimbo for storing and tagging notes, bookmarks, passwords, and etc.
My main web browser is the nightly build of WebKit.
TypeIt4Me for system-wide text snippet expansion.
DragThing for a system-wide drag-and-drop shelf.
Six Apart offers a very nice "iMT" plugin for Movable Type which provides an iPhone-optimized web interface.