My Setup

13 May 2011

I’ve been reading a lot of usesthis.com lately, I find it very interesting reading about the computing setup, hardware and software, used by other people. The people interviewed by this site are more or less famous people in several professions like entrepreneurs, coders, designers, photographers, etc. In the spirit of this website, I write this post about the setup I use.

Picture of my setup

I currently use a 15” Macbook Pro with a 2.2GHz quad core Intel Core i7, 8GB of ram, and a 750GB SATA hard drive, I didn’t go for an SSD right now because I need copious amounts of hard disk space.

I run OS X Snow Leopard with MacPorts, Mail.app for my personal mail, Things for my to-do list needs (although I am flirting with the idea of switching to Org Mode, iTerm 2 as a Terminal.app replacement. For communications I use Skype, Adium, and Twitter for Mac.

For programming I use GNU Emacs as text editor and IDE, I keep my customization on GitHub, I use git for source code management.

I use VMWare Fusion to run Windows 7, Visual Studio 2008 using its Emacs Keyboard Scheme, and SQL Server 2008 R2, I use this virtual machine to perform my development work for INgrooves.

I use several utilities like Alfred, I like being able to open apps quickly without using the mouse (I remove every app from the Dock), RightZoom to maximize applications to use the whole desktop, TinyGrab to take and share screenshots, Caffeine which allows me to keep my Mac awake when I leave it idle for a while, Dropbox is a must have for file sharing and syncing.

I also have an iPhone 3GS which I use a lot for email and twitter and an iPad I use for reading ebooks from Amazon, I actually wish I had chosen a Kindle.