Tom ArmitageInterview
Game designer, technologist (Hide and Seek)
Adapted from Tom Armitage's interview on Uses This, published 5 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
2\.4ghz 13" MacBook Pro, one of the last Core 2 Duos, 4gb ram, 500gb hard disk.
At work and home I use the same monitor - a Benq E2220HD.
I use a cabled Apple keyboard at work and home, because I really like the feel of the low-profile keyboards, but also because I use the numeric pad a lot.
For pointing, a Logitech VX Nano travels back and forth with me.
I'm annoyed I had to upgrade my iPhone 3G which was effectively end-of-lifed in the last iOS update (and both very slow and afflicted with some nasty bugs - which won't ever be fixed now).
Things that are not quite so computer-related: a Nikon D90 and a bag of interesting (and less interesting) lenses.
Communication
That's my backup policy: a bootable mirror, and enough other stuff in the cloud (via Gmail, version control, Dropbox and similar).
MarsEdit makes posting to blogs easy.
Productivity
I use Launchbar as a launcher.
I was a Quicksilver diehard for years, but really, the stability (or lack of it) got to me.
Fantastical tells me the date, and shows me calendars in a nice manner.
I use Things across both Mac and iPhone for task management, which I'm not very good at.
Coding & Development
For longer writing - articles, big blog posts, fiction (whisper it quietly) - I adore Scrivener.
Media
Photoshop Lightroom+ 86 others
I've got a 1 Terabyte external FireWire 800 drive for storing the remainder of my Lightroom library, big media, that sort of thing.
Skitch is very handy for quickly flinging images up to the web, with minor edits - useful for previewing photos, or discussing screengrabs.
Storage
I've tried juggling multiple computers before, and it just drove me mad, and still would even with tools like Dropbox.
Backup is handled by cloning my drive with Superduper.
Other
You know all the stuff people who make stuff on the web use on OSX?
I like Mailplane for mail, because it handles multiple accounts well and has lovely keyboard shortcuts.
I'm currently moving to MacVim for writing code, and after an initial learning curve, I'm really liking it.