Cobalt Edge

I too read Al3x's interview the other day, and like John Nunemaker, figured I'd share my setup, as I enjoy reading what others use and often can pick up a few interesting tools or tidbits.

Unlike Mr. Nunemaker, my desk is too messy, IMHO, to photograph right now :) However, many similarities aside from that. On with it...

I use a 17" MacBook Pro with 4GB RAM as my only machine these days. Like Alex and John, I really like having just a single machine, and I no longer work for a corporation where I'd worry about that. DealBase is cool and wouldn't try to make some wacko claim to some work not relevant (and we've explicitly discussed my use of a single machine, etc.). I have my MBP open on a laptop arm from Ergotron, and then my primary monitor is a 30" Dell. Really love the big monitor. I do my main work o the 30", and then the laptop screen has TweetDeck, iChat, Things, some Fluid apps, and other things that I tend to more glance at, and aren't primary work items.

Further, I use a wireless Apple keyboard, and like John, I just love this thing. I can't tell you how long I'd been looking for a keyboard that was just a keyboard (but with arrow keys). I hate normal keyboards that take up so much extra space on the right side (my mouse side) with stuff I rarely use - which only exacerbates problems with having my arm/elbow canitlevered further out to use the mouse, sometimes causing arm strain after long days of coding. I use Logitech MX Revolution cordless mouse, which I like quite a lot.

Transitioning to music... I use JBL Creature speakers, and listen to a variety of things, or nothing. Pandora, via a Fluid app, iTunes (my own playlists, or various Ambient "radio" stations), etc. Either that, or we have a whole-house NuVo Concerto audio system, so sometimes I have that on either with XM satellite radio, or to a playlist from the iPod we have hooked into it. The NuVo setup is nice because it fills my office with sound a bit better (via in-ceiling speakers), but I have more variety via the computer.

As with Alex and John, I am absolutely in love with my iPhone 3G. It is even better than expected. It has essentially replaced my 80GB iPod in the car, typically because it's more up to date, and I like it's UI better; I can remotely work on servers if I have to via iSSH, play games if I'm bored, use InstaPaper to read things I've set for reading later, sync with Address Book and iCal, and of course Twitter, via Tweetie. So, yes, I use Apple's Address Book and iCal, for great sync, simplicity, etc.

Ok, onto dev stuff. My primary work is on Rails-based web-apps, although I dabble with other things as well. DealBase is my day job, and I'm also involved with Bring Light.

Yet again, like Alex and John, I spend the bulk of my time in TextMate, iTerm (a better Terminal, IMHO), and Safari. And actually, I do my development testing in nightly builds of WebKit/Safari, and all my other browsing in standard Safari. I do pull up Firefox for testing, and to use YSlow and sometimes Firebug (although I've been finding the dev tools in WebKit nightlies work well). I've used Emacs - did so for about a year when working with Linux as my desktop. I ditched it back then in favor of Visual SlickEdit, but these days TextMate just rules. I don't get the Emacs passion - why do you want to press two keys for everything, especially the most common things? Yes, I know, you can setup different bindings, etc., but come on the most basic things like saving, opening, copy, paste, etc. should be "single" key (and by single I mean some meta+key) strokes by default. I do fire up vi all the time at the command line on remote servers, and even occasionally on my MBP for some real quick edit. Also, I spend the bulk of my day in my text editor, so yes, appearance matters, and TextMate kills others. I've also used a lot of IDE's in the past, from IDEA, to Eclipse, to Visual Studio. Visual Studio is actually quite good if you have to suffer in that world, but I find Eclipse just plain crappy. IDEA was great for Java, and their Ruby setup will be something to keep an eye on, but generally, the setup I have now works well.

I have all my code for nearly everything I do (e.g. both private and open source/public) on GitHub, and truly love it. Git has been a huge win, and gives me the best of, as well as improving SVN and Perforce. I'm using GitX for most of my commits and history browsing these days.

I use RSpactor for continuously running our RSpec suite, and we also use RSpec stories (but haven't converted to Cucumber yet). I recently added speech output to RSpactor, and that is my preferred notification instead of Growl. We use Pivotal Tracker for tasks/stories/features as well as bug tracking. We used to use Lighthouse, but having it all in one place was nicer, and Tracker wins big time in my opinion. If you want GitHub post-receive hook for Tracker, I recently whipped that up, and its been a real nice addition. We too use Hoptoad for exception notification, and really like it. Also, New Relic is in use at DealBase. I also like viewing Google Analytics with Analytics Reporting Suite, a slick AIR app.

I really like Navicat as a GUI for database stuff. It's proprietary/pay software, but honestly, it's worth it to me. I can do all this stuff command line fine, but the GUI simply makes it a heck of a lot faster to view the results, quickly re-sort on a column, mess around with queries, etc. Also, it has great SSH support, so I can tunnel into all my server's DB's with ease.

I have CruiseControl.rb setups for all my Rails apps, and make use of CCMenu for a nice little status menu item showing me what's going on with those.

I pretty much can't live without LaunchBar. Same goes for 1Password.

Skitch is quite handy for showing sharing and annotating screen shots, and we use Google Docs and Gmail. Speaking of email, I am a huge fan of Mailplane, which is a Mac app for Gmail. Integration is superb, and I can quickly switch around my 15 or so Gmail accounts with ease. I find it superior to a Fluid app for Gmail, since the integration is better and it handles multiple accounts.

I host most of my own web apps on Slicehost, and DealBase is at EngineYard.

I also use Backpack some, although not nearly as much as I used to, and access it about 99% of the time via Packrat. MarsEdit is my blog authoring tool of choice. NetNewsWire is my RSS reader.

All of my photography and photo processing, etc. are done in Adobe Lightroom. I use the Flickr plugin for it as well.

Various other bits:

• TextPander


• WeatherDock


• Pukka


• Flickr


• Del.icio.us


• xScope - a great screen ruler app


• Photoshop CS3 (look for my name in the about box too :)


• JungleDisk - I do some backups with this


• SuperDuper! Still my favorite backup, although I use TimeMachine too


• CSS Edit and XyleScope sometimes


• Last.fm - is running all the time, but I really don't actually make use of it, kinda silly.


• Acrobat Pro and Reader


• XCode (or TextMate) if I'm working on an Objective-C/Cocoa app.


• iStat menus


• YouControl Tunes




p.s. One other bit I can't live without but really isn't computing hardware/software, is my espresso setup. I use an Expobar Brewtus II machine, Macap MC4 stepless doserless grinder and a variety of cups (mostly Nuova Pointe and Illy). I use only totally fresh beans from a variety of places (favorites include Blue Bottle, Ecco Caffe, PT's, 49th Parallel (unfortunately not often, since shipping from Canada makes it a bit cost prohibitive), etc.). Coffelab tamper and Bumper stand and knock box. My espresso bar is kept clean (unlike my desk). The pictures are a bit older, so don't show bottomless portafilter in use these days.

Whew, that's more than plenty. What's your setup?




Loading mentions Retweet
Filed under  //   ContinuousIntegration   CruiseControl   DealBase   environment   Espresso   git   Gmail   iPhone   laptop   Mac   Nuvo   Office   Pivotal Tracker   Rails   RSpactor   Ruby   TextMate  

Update: the first .autotest I had in here was bogus, sorry about that. The .autotest file contents below work properly with Rspec tests at least.

I make extensive use of ZenTest's Autotest to constantly watch my test suite and ensure my app's tests are passing on my dev box/during development. Historically I've used Growl/growlnotify to get little popup notices indicating if my tests passed or failed. That's nice, and I've done the enhancements that add graphics and style it nicely, etc. But, in reality, I'm not always looking and sometimes don't see the messages. Plus, they can be somewhat distracting.

So, I've switched to using the handy say tool on the Mac (on Linux I think you could use "espeak", no clue on Windows, but then, uh, well, why are you doing dev work on Windows?! ;-)

The speaking is nice - I hear it, but don't get visually distracted. I use different voices for tests passed vs. failed too. This may not work great if you work in a cube farm, or even a cafe, but here at home, or in your own office, I think it's great. Here's my .autotest file as an example:

require 'autotest/redgreen'
module Autotest::Growl
  def self.growl(title, msg, img, pri=0, stick="")
    system "/usr/local/bin/growlnotify -n autotest --image #{img} -p #{pri} -m #{msg.inspect} #{title} #{stick}" 
  end
    Autotest.add_hook :ran_command do |at|
    results = at.results.last
    unless results.nil?
      output = results[/(\d+)\s+examples?,\s*(\d+)\s+failures?(,\s*(\d+)\s+pending)?/]
      if output
        failures = $~[2].to_i
        pending = $~[4].to_i
      end
      if failures > 0
        `/usr/bin/say -v Zarvox "you broke the code"`
      elsif pending > 0
        `/usr/bin/say -v Alex "Tests passed, with some pending"`
      else
        unless at.tainted
          `/usr/bin/say -v Victoria "all tests passed"`
        else
          `/usr/bin/say -v Victoria "tests passed"`
        end
      end
    end
  end
end

To see what voices your system has available, open the Speech system preference pane, pull down "System Voice" and select "Show More Voices" to see the full list.

As may be obvious to readers of this blog, I've been doing a fair bit of Facebook development work lately. As such, I need to have multiple Facebook (test) users to observe the social net aspects, etc. I thus have to have multiple browsers open so they can all be logged in at the same time. I am really hoping that a future version of Fluid will allow you to have a separate cookie store per Fluid app, so that I can just create Fluid apps for each FB user. But for now, I can't, so I have at least two, if not three, sometimes four different browsers open to do testing.

I also have been somewhat amused that my dock now consumes almost the entire width of my 24" monitor (1920x1200 resolution)!

Oddly, this isn't bothering me a bit. I make good use of LaunchBar, but I'm still a Dock fan as well. See the Skitch page for a list of what some of those dock icons are.

And a geeky tip for Screensaver developers: drop your debug and/or release versions of your saver into the documents area of the dock as an easy way to install it (that's what the two swirly white document images are at the far right of my dock).

Today I started work on my first app built using RubyCocoa, which is now a first class citizen in MacOS X 10.5/Leopard. I had read the docs and tutorial found here. I proceeded, and ran into a few bumps along the way, so here are some notes maybe someone else will find useful...

The code for the example app RSSPhotoViewer, is not quite the same as that shown in the tutorial. Specifically:

• The tutorial says you need to put "ib_action :method_name" after your methods that are Actions. The example code does not do that, and I found I didn't need to do it either.


• The example code does not require osx/cocoa or include OSX, yet I had to do this in my Ruby source code in order for it to recognize the class names properly (or at least so I didn't have to prefix them with OSX).

I couldn't get Interface Builder to recognize my Ruby window controller class - i.e. it didn't show it's outlets and actions. I tried a variety of things here, but basically I finally had to go to the command line and run "rake" and let it do a command line build. I have no idea what that did differently, as I can't see any new files it generated, etc., but that resolved it - now IB can see all my outlets and actions.

My app wouldn't run, and I got a strange error in Xcode saying "The debugger is still running" etc. It appears that if your app crashes this will be the case. And, in this case, Console is your friend. Open up Console and you should see messages that will help you assess what's gone wrong.

And now for the win... dealing with Apple Events. My app wants to receive a particular apple event from NetNewsWire. NNW documents this protocol nicely, however, when registering as a handler for the event (using NSAppleEventManager.sharedAppleEventManager.setEventHandler_andSelector_forEventClass_andEventID_), you need to pass in the class and event ID that are not standard ones (they're defined by NNW/external blog protocol). Well, in Cocoa code, these are just a four character string, but as I found, a string that an unsigned long via string packing. So, it was a question of how I get these ID's in via Ruby. Luckily this turned out to be rather simple, as you can use String#unpack. And, in this case, you pass unpack "N" as the format, which is an unsigned long packed in network byte order.

Lastly, debugging. As mentioned above, Console and such are your friend. I haven't tried any shenanigans with ruby-debug or such from the command line, so that might work. But, Xcode can't debug into the Ruby code in your project (it can into the code in main.m just fine though). So, if you have weird crashes and such, check Console. Also, use NSLog, or pop alerts or what not. If someone knows a better way please do tell.

Regardless, I'm quite excited by RubyCocoa and have another couple apps that I may do with it. This app was a small one, and of course is not done in just a couple hours, but it's going to be a nice addition to the tool belt.

I've finally struck gold when it comes to a todo list/GTD app! I've recently switched to a new Mac app called Things, and I couldn't be happier. Finally, a system that works the way I do, is fast, looks nice, and has everything I need. Things is produced by Cultured Code, who also happen to make the excellent Xyle Scope product.

For the longest time, I used Backpack to manage my todo lists, and I've worked in a semi GTD way. I originally chose Backpack as it was relatively simple, I was using it for other things, and it provided access to my lists anywhere I had access to the 'net. When I was working at Adobe, and had many computers, plus my home machines, this was valuable. But, I disdained having to always keep a browser tab open for it, and have it mixed in with other browser use. I started working on an Apollo app to have a dedicated system for it, but that was in the early days of Apollo when the HTML view was buggy and prevented this app from working effectively. Along came Packrat and solved it, making a dedicated Backpack app, as well as providing offline storage, and much faster access. Yea! I still use this combo today, and that will be the subject of an upcoming post. But, alas, I was not happy with my todo system.

Now that I'm using essentially a single machine, and I wanted further speed for this commonly used app, as well as a better overall functionality, I started looking. This was stimulated when I saw Anxiety, which was a nice HUD implementation of a display for your iCal todos, which I'd been thinking about using to sync to my phone. I switched and tried it a while. Not bad, but definitely some issues (Anxiety was a pure viewer (you can add items) - you can't re-order, it doesn't pay attention to priority, and so on). But I'm babbling, get on with it right?

I found out about Things, I believe via Twitter I think. I watched the screencast, which starts a bit slow, but is a good display of the app. What immediately attracted me was the "Today" view, and it's separation from Next, as well as the abilities to tag, to postpone (with a timered re-add/check for re-add), and the whole Someday system.

I had been organizing my stuff more manually into a "to do today" list, and everything else. It was actually somewhat tedious to manage in Backpack, until they added dragging between lists. But still, Things just does it naturally and really well. Simple buttons to move things back and forth between Today and Next, or you can drag. Also, it pays attention to due dates on tasks, and automatically moves them into Today if they are due today.

Also, I really like the Areas of Responsibility and the Projects. I use Areas heavily, and Projects much less, but they are both useful and distinct. In general I organize all my different "work" items into areas (by client or project, or various other ways), and my personal stuff is area-less, with some exceptions. The Areas show up as distinct lists, or as separate lists in the Next and Today views. I could tell you more, but just check out the web site and/or the screencast.

So, what about web/network storage, and access from multiple machines? Nope, Things doesn't have this (yet?). Hasn't bothered me a bit though. It is an extremely rare day that I don't use Packrat to for Backpack, and with my single computer setup now, I just have much less need. Things will supposedly have some Export options later, and it's data is stored in an easily accessible and readable XML file, so I could create a simple solution for read-only data if I wanted to at least have it on the web, but I just haven't had the need or desire. The app itself works so darn well, that this aspect has barely even been on my radar.

I've looked at a variety of other apps and solutions over the last couple years, but hands down, Things is the best.

In my latest work on my Visionary Saver screen saver, I had tried switching all my preferences to use Cocoa Bindings, to make it super easy to manage the prefs. After doing this, and having it appear to work, I realized that it does not.

The problem is that screen savers are supposed to use the ScreenSaverDefaults class to manage their preferences. This is a special Defaults class that namespaces a screen savers defaults/preferences within the defaults system, given that a screen saver is a bundle, and works within System Preferences (as opposed to being its own application). The reason it doesn't work with bindings is that you can't tell the Bindings system about ScreenSaverDefaults (to my knowledge), in the same way as you can bind to the Shared Defaults Controller. ScreenSaverDefaults requires a module name, and so on. If there's a workaround, I'd love to hear it.

I thus had to go back to manually getting and setting the preferences for Visionary. This did simplify one thing, which is the preferences settings for an NSPopUpButton, where the content values come from an array, yet the selection and setting should go to preferences. Personally, NSPopUpButtons, for simple use, are a real pain. I'm not an Interface Builder expert, but it's odd that you can set up to 3 values into an NSPopUpButton in the UI, as generic text, but if you want more, you have to setup the whole NSArrayController and its content array, and so on, then bind that to the popup, etc, etc. It's not awful, but the documentation is pretty weak in terms of a straight forward use of something like this. I suspect many other folks don't have complicated data models behind the values for some of their popup buttons, and a cleaner way to do all this would be nice.

Anyway, it's all good now, or well, it's all fixed up, and there's a new version of Visionary Saver out.

I've been running Leopard for about two weeks or so now. It has not been the usual OS update where it has some nice eye candy improvements and some underpinning changes, but doesn't essentially affect the apps I run. Leopard has directly impacted the apps I run. There are also some that I've chosen not to switch to.

Documentation?!

But first, wow, the little printed booklet that comes with Leopard... wow, a) I actually read it, and b) the info in it was actually useful! Hath hell froze over?! Printed documentation of value?! Woah nelly! Even better, it was short, easy to read, and to the point, with almost zero fluff. Way to go Apple.

The app changes...

Not a lot, but a couple key ones. As I mentioned in a previous post, I am no longer using Path Finder, because regular Finder has some great improvements, picks up some of the key features I used Path Finder for, and it eliminates needing an additional app, that didn't integrate as seamlessly as you'd hope.

Update (12 Nov 2007): A new version of Path Finder has been released that integrates MUCH better with Leopard, including supporting Quick View, and having an "Open in Finder" replacement that works completely. I'll have to see if I go back again to using Path Finder...

Second is iChat. The jury is still out on this one to be honest, but the fact that you can now login to multiple accounts on a single network (Jabber for me), all the video and screen sharing enhancements, and again, one less app to install and keep up to date, has led me to stop using Adium for now. We'll see. I've tried before, and iChat was not up to par, but this time it's looking like a replacement.

Other bits... Stacks are pretty cool, especially when you add overlays to keep them straight. Quick View rocks. Safari is definitely better, and thankfully the one feature Safari cannot seem to implement, for who knows what reason, is still solved by Saft. This is the feature of it remembering all the tabs you had open when you close the browser, and re-opening it with that. Saft also adds a great feature, which is to allow you to edit Text Area's with your favorite editor. This is key for me (I use(d) a similar plugin with Firefox).

What hasn't changed...

Time Machine. Yep, I am not a convert. Admittedly I haven't looked at every option, etc., but I'm a Super Duper! fan. Why? First I don't really need multiple revisions of files - any files I do need that for are already in a version control system. Second, one of the key features of Super Duper (or similar) backups, is that I have a complete clone of my drive, that I can boot off of. This has saved me a few times. What happens if your hard drive goes bad or something happens to your system. Fine, you restore from backup. But, what if you are in a time bind and you really need access to your files? Well, you can just boot off your backup, work there for a short bit, and then perform your restore/redo when time permits. No biggy. Yes, you lose whatever was changed between the time you did you clone backup and the current time, but for me that is often very little (due to what really matters being in version control, or being backed up by Jungle Disk every 15 minutes).

I still don't use Apple Mail. In fact, these days I don't use a desktop mail program, or rather, one that I POP or IMAP mail with. I use Mailplane, and all my email accounts are Gmail accounts (I have a half dozen or more at this point). Works extremely well for me.

The blog post, Dock Stack Overlays on the XD blog is really cool. It shows you how to put an overlay icon on your dock stacks, so that you always know which stack is which. This is incredibly useful if you use stacks (or more than one stack anyway). Great stuff.

I've been using a few new tools lately, and also got rid of one I've used a long time. First up, now that I'm running Leopard on my Macs, I've found I just don't need or want Path Finder. Path Finder has been great, I've used it for a few years now. But, with the new features in Finder, and the niggling issues I've had with Path Finder, it was finally time to end my use. The Finder's new sidebar, stacks, quick look, and the fact that you can show the directory path at the bottom of Finder windows (this was a big-little feature in Path Finder for me), brought me back to using it.

Update (12 Nov 2007): A new version of Path Finder has been released that integrates MUCH better with Leopard, including supporting Quick View, and having an "Open in Finder" replacement that works completely. I'll have to see if I go back again to using Path Finder...

Some new tools, both web and Mac that I've been using a fair bit lately include:

Mind Meister

I haven't used mind mapping tools much in the past. I've tried various ones several times, but they either were too cumbersome, too slow, or just didn't seem useful. I found out about MindMeister from someone on Twitter, and have a couple mind maps running on it now. I'm also collaborating on one of them with others. MM is fairly preferment, quite easy to use, nice to look at, and the collaboration bit is super nice. I'd like to see them add a way to insert a URL/link, where that link could be clicked on, but that's about the only issue I have so far. Interesting to note, if you get the Premium account (a measly $4/month!), they have offline editing. They are using Google Gears for this. Another intriguing bit is that they have an API. I haven't looked into this yet, or haven't thought about how I'd use it, but I always like to see services that have this as an option.

Mars Edit 2

The 2.0 version, now produced by Red Sweater Software is quite nice. In days of old, I'd preferred ecto, but this new version is simple, effective, fast, and quite nicely, has great Flickr integration. I've been using Flickr quite a bit, especially with my other blog, and often put multiple photos in a post. Mars Edit makes this trivial.

Navicat

Navicat is a GUI database tool. I used to use CocoaMySQL, and YourSQL and such on Mac, but YourSQL doesn't seem to work these days, and CocoaMySQL seems out of date, and I think wasn't under development anymore(?). Navicat, while a commercial product, has been rock solid, and I've found to be quite useful. Admittedly, I use it a lot of simple browsing, simple queries and value changes, etc., but the dependability and quality of it have kept it in my tool chest (and got me to buy it). One other nice thing here is that while it has a real Mac UI, it is a tool also available on Linux and Windows.

Acorn

Acorn is a slick, simple new image editor by Gus Mueller of Flying Meat Software (likely better known for VoodooPad). It's extremely fast to load up, and I'm finding it's my top pick to do things like saving images in another format (if they aren't in my Lightroom library - otherwise I use Lightroom), make minor tweaks, crops, etc. The speed is one of the best things - it launches super fast, and is very fast to use, so it's an excellent tool for quick work. Interesting note: you can write plugins in Python or Objective-C.

Pack Rat

I use 37 Signals Backpack extensively. It's my GTD system, and I keep tons of notes and information I need in it. Backpack's web interface is somewhat slow, especially if you switch between various pages a lot (and don't want to keep said pages in lots of browser tabs). I have a half completed AIR app to be my Backpack client, but Pack Rat seems to be the ticket now. It has synchronization, offline editing, and so on. I am sold, and have essentially not used my browser for Backpack since.

Panic Sans font

Last, but certainly not least, is the Panic Sans font. This is a fixed width font, great for coding. I've been using the Bitstream Vera Sans Mono font for quite some time, but Duncan's recent post about this discovered a few new ones. Panic Sans is actually a font found inside the Coda app's package. It's very similar to Bitstream Vera Sans Mono, but slightly nicer. Duncan's post has good info in that particular post, but also see some of his followup posts on the subject.

What's new in your tool chest?

I'm planning to replace my dual G5 tower (personal machine) with a new MacBook Pro, 17". I need to get down to a store and see if I can look at this in person, but doing so in Eugene, may be hard. So, I'm soliciting advice on two issues:

1. Should I get matte or glossy display? The glossy sure looks cool, but how susceptible is it to glare? I don't have a lot of glare in my work environment, so maybe that's moot and the glossy is better? What do folks think? Does it make a difference in color correction? I've found that Galbraith and such have tested with the matte displays, and that I really like having my monitors color corrected.
2. Since I'm going with the 17", I'm debating whether to go with the higher resolution version. My primary work mode will be with a 24" (or larger) monitor hooked up, so I use the laptop screen either if I'm on the road, not at my regular desk, and as a secondary monitor at my desk (typically for IM windows and similar). Is the higher res a lot harder to read, or? What are the pros and cons?

In general, this will be my do-everything machine. Personal stuff, as well as development projects of my own, etc. Thus, everything from email and Quicken to heavy coding, Lightroom/photo work, etc.