I am a big fan of sites like The Setup. This site allows you to look into the world of a peer and see how they tackle their everyday problems with Hardware and Software. Below is a look into my current setup, what’s yours?
Who are you, and what do you do?
I’m Matthew Strickland, a Developer, a Senior Software Engineer at Vertigo, a husband to Katie and a dad to Ella and Jad. For the past year at Vertigo, I have been working on iOS Apps like Golf Channel Academy and Sports Talk. In my free time I work on things like Gitty and BabyMe Apps as well as serve my community.
What hardware do you use?
Work:
I have a late 2011 15 inch Macbook Pro that I dev on during the day. This machine is plugged into my 27-inch Apple Cinema Display and a DAS Keyboard. I also use a Blue Microphone for audio and for listening I use a Razer Moray. For scrolling and tapping around, I use an Apple Magic Trackpad
Personal:
For my personal use, I share a 2012 13 inch Macbook Air with my wife. It is suprisingly a powerful and very efficient machine. I have done everything from building iOS Apps to playing graphic intensive games on it and it can withstand all of that and some.
And what software?
For the past year, my software has primarily revolved around Developing for iOS and the web.
For iOS:
Xcode for everything, but I have played around with Xamarin Studio and Ruby Motion.
For general development and everything else:
Sublime Text 2 and Vim for writing code and text. Mou for Markdown writing. iTerm 2 for all things console. GitHub for Mac for when I want to visualize my git flow. Mail for Exchange Email, Sparrow for Gmail. Chrome for browsing. Kindle and Pocket for reading things. TweetBot for all things Twitter. Pixelmator for my low level designs. For version control I use Git and GitHub to host my projects.
Some iOS Apps I love and use:
Gitty for keeping up to date on my projects and work. TweetBot for all of my tweets on the go. Instagram, Chrome, Rdio, Bible, Nest, Quicklytics and Timehop are other apps I use on a regular basis.
What would be your dream setup?
My dream setup is actually almost a reality. I prefer a future where no matter the device, the experience is virtually the same. My settings, preferences, the way I like to do things are all available to me and they sync accordingly. With things like iCloud, DropBox and the adoption of sync across platforms inside of programs, that day is vastly approaching.
As someone who also develops for the platforms I use, I would love to see a unified approach to building Apps for Mac OSX, iOS. This would allow for creating Apps in those platforms to be a bit easier than it is today. I am hopeful that with OSX 11.0 that we will get there with the introduction of new API’s and Frameworks.