Meg PickardInterview
Creative geek (The Guardian)
Adapted from Meg Pickard's interview on Uses This, published 10 August 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 also have an 24" iMac, which I occasionally use to process photos, wrangle audio etc, though since being relegated to the spare room when we moved house last year, I've barely used it.
I don't use an Apple mouse, because they're lovely to look at but horrible and impractical to use, so - like just about everyone else - I use a proper multi-button mouse instead when I need to, and otherwise the trackpad (or magic trackpad) is fine.
For basic audio/video/stills recording, my iPhone 4 (and related apps) does the job.
For better quality audio, I've got a Zoom H2 recorder which isn't a thing of enormous beauty, but is ever so good at just doing what it's supposed to, plus records in surround stereo, which again can be good for capturing being somewhere.
However, the camera I use most (apart from the iPhone) is a Vivitar Ultra Wide and Slim - it's perfect for city exploration, never runs out of batteries and takes surprisingly good photos.
Work also provide me with a Blackberry 8100, which is better for writing email - watch those thumbs fly!
Communication
Productivity
I travel a lot for work, so for a long time, weight and form-factor were more important than speed or capability, but I finally snapped after struggling to present from Open Office on the netbook while visiting someone else's office.
Keynote is beautiful, but actually kind of a pain to work with if you need to do much beyond standard conference bullets/photo with caption.
So my guilty secret is that I often use Powerpoint (say what you like: it works).
Pages is good for long-form writing, which I don't do enough of, because there never seems to be time.
Browser
Security
Coding & Development
Media
Storage
Until fairly recently, I depended on a WD-Passport as my storage on the move - slimline, good capacity and nice and quick - but these days DropBox does it better and is much less faff (see below).