Justin FrankelInterview
Software developer (Winamp, REAPER)
Adapted from Justin Frankel's interview on Uses This, published 2 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
At the office I have a 24" iMac, with a 2.93GHz C2D and 4GB RAM.
I prefer to type on the original (circa 1998) PS2 Microsoft Natural Keyboard (not the Elite!
Honestly though, my wife's C2D MacBook Air really wins overall -- it feels more solid and the battery life is substantially better.
In addition to those machines, I also have an iMac G5 for PPC testing, and an older C2D ThinkPad X60 which has a bunch of OSes installed.
We use a couple of i7 Mac Minis for build servers -- they are plenty fast for building on both Windows and OS X, but use around 7 watts each when idle.
I have two ReadyNAS Pro, each with around 4TB of storage, in two different places (home + office).
Finally, I end up doing a good deal of busy work on my iPhone 4S -- using the mail client to move messages between IMAP accounts is pretty effective for delegating work.
Communication
Productivity
For Windows development, a completely awesome tool is ClipX, which is a free clipboard manager written by my friend Francis Gastellu, however he still has not fixed the Windows User Object leak that occurs when you open the paste menu (\cough\ Francis ahem \cough\).
Coding & Development
On OS X I tend to use Terminal.app for as much as possible, and run native applications via Spotlight (Cmd+Space).
Git is completely awesome and at this point I'd be lost without it.
MSysGit on Windows is also quite nice in that it comes with a ton of standard gnu tools which are nice to have.
I usually use the Visual C++ 6 IDE (circa 1998), which is not perfect but also only occasionally gets in my way.
Sometimes when I find myself missing a particular feature in the editor, I'll open the file in vim.
On OS X I'll do most of my editing in vim, but use XCode 3 for compiling and editing projects.
Design
I prefer Photoshop but find it to be ridiculously overpriced, and I am terrible with either of them anyway and will let the professionals make things.
Media
I'll use GIMP for many image editing tasks (for me, this usually is just making test images for themes, or making small tweaks to existing images).
Other
I also use Start+R, then type "cmd" to launch a command prompt, "ssh \<host\>" to run PuTTY (which I have in my path named as ssh.exe, etc), or just a URL.
As much as it pains me I use QuickBooks 2007 for bookkeeping.
Steam: I don't play very many games but Steam really makes it easy to buy/install games without having to have physical discs or worry about copy protection being installed.