Simon CarlessInterview
Gamer (GDC, IGF, Gamasutra, GameSetWatch)
Adapted from Simon Carless's interview on Uses This, published 22 March 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
(It's kind of a cop-out overdesigned gaming PC for people who don't have the patience to build their own, which suits me fine!) With a widescreen Asus VE245TL 24-inch monitor, it keeps me multitasking fairly efficiently.
My work machine is now the ultralight Lenovo Thinkpad X201.
My work phone is a BlackBerry Torch 9800, which is ALMOST great and an improvement on previous BBs, but a bit glitchier than it should be (it recently managed to software lock-up so badly that it muted all my phonecalls - entertaining!)
Quite apart from a laundry list of old hardware (yes, I own a GP32, but no, it doesn't get much use) I also keep buying the 'new school' unofficial consoles that allow you to play oldskool cartridges.
Communication
Within that, communication is key, so my fellow Gamasutra editors and I find Campfire to be invaluable for group chat and organizing - the comprehensive searchable logs are particularly useful.
Most actual writing takes place either in a custom CMS (Gamasutra), or various versions of MovableType from 3 to 5, depending on which site it's for.
Although Wordpress is just as good, and has many more useful and diverse plugins (I use it on my personal site), I think MT has the 'used less, gets hacked less' advantage, and it's sorta a legacy thing at this point.
I also use Tweetdeck to monitor Twitter updates in a news-style scroll on my desktop.
Productivity
Other tools I do use on a regular basis might include OpenOffice, which has snuck along from 'not so bad' to 'surprisingly good' in recent years, imho.
Browser
Since most of what I do is talking to people and writing words down, Mozilla Firefox is pretty much open at all times on any computer that I'm using, PC or Mac.
Media
Although indie games, my love, aren't very hardware intensive, my main home PC is a VoodooPC HP Firebird 803.
For example, my image editing never needs to be too complex, and I move between computers a lot, so Pixlr's web-based image editing tool is great.
(I also use Irfanview for simple desk-based cropping and resizing.)
Other
Also on my main home PC running Windows Vista, I am one of a tiny minority who actually uses the Vista Sidebar for things like monitoring CPU usage, weather (the Weatherbug app!), time, and volume controls.
What I probably do most on my iPad is read Kindle books, but if you'd like some game recommendations (since games are certainly software!), I've been playing the obvious (World Of Goo, [Plants Vs.
Also, Reeder is super awesome for feed browsing - UI shells that work with existing infrastructure are totally the way to go.
In particular, Trials HD and its expansion packs are amazingly fun and addictive, with robust online highscore tables making it much more of a 'beat your friends' social experience.