Recently I’ve been reading up on a Series called the setup where a bunch of really interesting people describe how and especially what they use for their computing needs. I got a whole bunch of new and useful tools out of it and also got in a habit to really think about what I’m using, why, and how. Since I can’t keep this all in my head I decided to make al little series out of it, and to start with I’m going to write about all the tools I use daily on and with the Web.
Thinking about it got me to the realization that I don’t need a mail client anymore, but using GMail on the web works even better with my workflow, especially due to the great search features, since I’m not a big fan of folders. Combine this with a notifier to keep track of new emails as they come in and it will stack up to pretty much any Desktop Mail client, especially after enabling shortcuts, so that archiving email is just a ‘e’ away.
With the use of webmail comes the need for a fast and stable browser, since Firefox is becoming more and more the opposite of fast and stable lately I switched to Chrome. Of course since I’m on a Mac Safari would have been the obvious choice, but Safari is just way to slow when handling multiple tabs, which especially if you are using a bunch on online tools are essential. Chrome now really is the basis of all my web use, and since the extensions are there it replaces more and more of my daily desktop tools with online equivalents, like Chromed Bird for Twitter. Even though I tried to replace NetNewsWire as well with Google Reader, to me Reader is just not there especially when using a lot of feeds because of missing options like Snippets, Open in Background, Open in new Browser Window, even though all this is possible it’s really rough around the edges.
So to me EMail an Browsing is my basic web use, there are a lot of tools I use on the web, and with the web especially when it comes to sync, and I will write about those in a later post. Also to come is the probably biggest part of my daily computer usage which is Terminal, MacVim, and IRB to which I posted the configs to Bitbucket, but will also describe how to make everything work together to beat every IDE and make Eclipse hide weeping in the corner.
Code from the sideline 