tools of the trade

These are the applications I use most often on my MacBook, in descending order:

1) My web browser is OmniWeb. Despite a somewhat archaic appearance — drawers in Mac apps are so 2003 — it’s the most feature-rich browser in the Mac world, and the features are well-chosen and well-designed. I’m especially attached to its workspaces and search shortcuts, and the ability to set site-specific preferences for all kinds of webpage behavior.

1a) When I’m in OmniWeb, the pages I visit most often are Gmail and Google Reader for my RSS feeds (I’m not going to bother linking to those); Remember the Milk for tasks; and Pinboard for bookmarking. I think Pinboard, despite or because of its simplicity, is a big advance over Delicious.

2) I write almost everything, from books to these blog posts, in BBEdit, which has been my text editor of choice for about a decade now. I stopped writing my books and articles in a word processor in, I think, that year I already mentioned: 2003. I do most of my text formatting via John Gruber’s Markdown, but more and more often I’m using LaTeX, which often sends me to TeXShop — an amazing free suite of writing and typesetting tools.

3) My “everything bucket” is Together. It used to be Yojimbo, but Together works slightly better for my workflow, and has a more responsive and less grumpy developer.

4) Because of my interest in the graphico-visual display of thoughts I like making certain kinds of class handouts in the remarkable OmniGraffle. To get a sense of what OmniGraffle can do, take a look at Will Benton’s comment on this post.

5) Oh yeah, iTunes.

And that’s about it. I rarely venture outside those apps.

apologies

Hey everybody, I have been away — from this blog, and from everything else — for the past few days because of the death of my father. It was not altogether a surprise (he had lung cancer) but he declined faster than anyone had expected, so I had to leave town suddenly. Posting will resume in the next couple of days.