John PavlusInterview
Writer, film maker (Small Mammal)
Adapted from John Pavlus's interview on Uses This, published 2 April 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 15-inch MacBook Pro is from 2007 (so old I won't bother outlining the specs), but it still has enough kick in it to handle my filmmaking jobs without too much profanity from me.
My phone is a Droid Incredible, which is a fine workhorse.
Communication
I have a Logitech mic headset for Skyping (I tried Bluetooth headsets but the sound quality was never good enough).
Productivity
Like Divvy, a utility for resizing windows and snapping them to a grid system onscreen.
And Soulver is a completely brilliant replacement for the Mac calculator: it's a non-skeuomorphic all-purpose arithmetic-doer, sort of an ultra-lightweight combination of TextEdit and Excel.
Finally, I rely on an extremely well-designed webapp called Harvest for my freelance backoffice tasks like time-tracking and invoicing.
Browser
Notes
Coding & Development
Design
Media
I use Skype for all of my business phone calls whenever I'm in the office, with an plugin called Call Recorder installed so I can easily record interviews.
Storage
Other
I'm not in any hurry to install OS X Lion on my aging machine, so I'm still running Snow Leopard and I can't discern any penalty for it yet.
I also use the iOS SDK because of its handy iPad/iPhone simulator, which (when paired with SimFinger) is great for "shooting" apps, and is the only part of that package I know how to use.
I also love FuzzyClock, which replaces the system clock with a natural-language estimate (instead of "11:43," it will read "quarter to noon").