Urban Faubion

New Computer Setup

Work recently issued me a new computer and realized I should write down the programs I use daily and the tools I use for development.

General:

  • Skype is an application for making free voice and video calls over the internet. It also lets you make group calls, instant message and for a low rate, make phone calls.
  • Dropbox is a tool for syncing files across different devices and the web.
  • Caffeine is a utility for keeping your Mac from going to sleep.
  • Growl is a notification system for OS X. It centralizes all of your notifications, has theme support and allows you control notifications on a per-application basis or all at once.
  • Google Notifier is a menu bar application that allows you to see new Gmail messages or upcoming Google Calendar events without having to open a web browser.
  • Growler for Google shows Google Notifier notifications using Growl

Design:

  • Photoshop CS5 is a digital picture and photo editing application.
  • Illustrator CS5 is a vector graphics editor.
  • InDesign CS5.5 is a layout program for posters, flyers, brochures, magazines, newspapers and books.
  • Lightroom 3 is a digital photo management and editing program.

Development:

  • TextMate is a general-purpose GUI text editor.
  • Transmit is a file transfer program for FTP and SFTP servers, Amazon S3, or WebDAV.
  • Charles is an HTTP proxy / HTTP monitor / Reverse Proxy that enables a developer to view all of the HTTP and SSL / HTTPS traffic between their machine and the Internet.
  • Processing is an open source programming language and environment.
  • Xcode is a suite of tools for developing software for Mac OS X and iOS. I use it for iOS development and some of the tools it ships with to set up my other development environments.
  • OSX GCC Installer is usefull if you don’t want to install Xcode and you just need GCC and related tools to set up a development environment.
  • Homebrew is a great package installer for UNIX tools that don’t ship with the Mac by default. I use it to install other libraries such as:
    • growlnotify - a command-line tool for posting notifications to Growl.
    • node - an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it great for real-time applications.
    • phantomjs - a headless WebKit with a JavaScript API.
  • Git is an open source, distributed version control system.
  • rbenv is a simple, unobtrusive UNIX tool for switching between multiple versions of Ruby.
  • ruby-build provides a simple way to compile and install different versions of Ruby on UNIX-like systems.
  • Pow is a zero-config Rack server for Mac OS X.
    • powder - command-line utility that makes it easier to add applications, tail your log files, and restart Pow.
  • Bundler a tool for managing Ruby application dependencies.