Robert Chambers

Show me your dock!

Inspired by Grace Smith’s Show me your dock! series of posts, this is what’s currently in my dock.

Finder

Firefox – I’ve tried out all the major web browsers, but I think this has the best combination of features and speed.  The Web Developer and MeasureIt add-ons are particularly useful.

Mail, Address Book, iCal – I like their simplicity and how easily they connect with each other. I think Mail is one of the nicest Imap (which I use for all my email accounts) clients out there. I wirelessly sync my contacts and calendar with my Blackberry using the built-in features (via my Gmail account).

Things – been demoing this task management software for just a week now, but I already think I’ll be buying it. The ability to tag tasks and group them by project are very useful. The user interface is a joy to use and makes me actually like getting tasks!

Evernote – my virtual notepad. It helps me organise my thoughts and, using the clipping feature, collecting inspiration from around the web.

Skype – one of my key applications. It is vital for communicating with clients and colleagues wherever I am.

NetNewsWire – my RSS feed reader. Mail’s RSS reader seemed to have a few bugs, so I moved to this. As a big fan of Instapaper, I also liked the ability to send articles to this to read later.

TwitterDeck – not used any other Twitter desktop clients, but I haven’t found a reason to change.

iPhoto – only use this for me personal photos. If the library gets too big, I find that you can get performance issues and it can crash quite a bit, so I’ve split mine by year. Nice integration with my Flickr account.

Spotify - iTunes killer (enough said).

Coda – my favourite code editor. Perfect for developing WordPress sites. It also has a built-in FTP client.

Transmit – another great Panic product. Regarded as one of the best FTP clients. I mainly use it to mount my Amazon S3 storage.

Dreamweaver - since installing Coda, I only use this to quickly update website content. It may not be in my dock for much longer.

Fireworks – another key application for me. It is my primary image editor for web work. A great wireframing tool and is much better than Photoshop at optimising images for the web.

Photoshop – mainly use this to edit my personal photos. Although, I use the great cropping tool for work too.

DigitalColor Meter - use it to quickly grab Hex values of colours and great for matching corporate branding.

Paparrazzi! – great for capturing full length screenshots of websites.  The delay feature helps if there’s animation.

1Password – web developers have so many passwords to remember and this solves it.

MAMP – enables me to have a testing server on my Mac.

System Preferences

VMware Fusion – runs Windows on my Mac without needing a reboot. I use this to test my websites in Internet Explorer and newsletters in Outlook. I have tried Parallels too, but found that this crashed less often.

Applications

Dropbox - where all my latest files are kept. Great for automatically backing up my files and being able to access them from anywhere. I recently upgraded to the 100GB premium account – worth every penny.

Downloads

Trash

I’d be interested to know what other people have in their dock, so feel free to comment below.