Khoi VinhInterview
Designer director (NYTimes.com)
Adapted from Khoi Vinh's interview on Uses This, published 12 October 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
So late last year I bought this 1.86 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo MacBook Air (I custom ordered it with the faster processor that normally ships with the solid-state drive model, but I bought a normal spinning hard drive to save money); it's maxed out with 2 GB of memory.
SeeThru Hard Shell (MacBook Air)
For added safety, I somewhat dorkily keep the MacBook Air in a Speck SeeThru hard shell case, which I describe to people as the Internet-age equivalent of covering my couch in plastic.
When the MacBook is in the office it usually rests on a Rain Design mStand, which is a really beautiful piece of industrial design; it feels very substantial, and the laptop really looks great on it.
Underneath the mStand I stow the attached Apple slim extended keyboard and Apple mouse, but these are really secondary input devices.
My main workhorse computer at the office is a 24 in., 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo iMac, with 4 GB of memory.
This Dell 1905FP isn't particularly large, but I'd rather have a second monitor of modest size than only one 30-in.
I'm also completely unimpressed by Apple Cinema Displays.
Next to my main keyboard is my main mousing device: a four-button Kensington Expert Mouse.
That's a little FireWire-based dock for my aging, 40 GB iPod photo.
It only reads Compact Flash cards, which is what my Nikon D70 digital SLR camera uses, but it's fast and much more reliable than any USB-based card readers I've ever used.
Communication
Now I carry it to and from work every day, and I do all of my 'personal' business on it: email, instant messaging, blogging, Twitter, etc.
I draft all of my blog posts there, keep notes from all of my meetings, and sync everything across multiple computers through MobileMe.
Productivity
I keep in touch with the Interwebs through Google Reader, which I found to be completely bewildering in the beginning but which I've come to really be fond of.
Browser
As a Finder replacement, Path Finder is basically unnecessary and I consider it to be a geek's guilty pleasure.
However, there's one essential piece of software that I have to have available with these browsers: the excellent utility Choosy, which intercepts clicks on URLs in any program -- email, IM, word processors, etc.
Security
All of my passwords go into 1Password, one of the best pieces of software to come along in ages.
Design
Almost all of my design work starts in Adobe Photoshop, a grand behemoth of a program that I wish I could quit, but really has no peer in versatility.
Other
Most of the time, I'm using Synergy to control the MacBook from the iMac's input devices that sit next to it.
Yojimbo is my main note keeper and idea vault.