![]() The design is gorgeous, but more than that the GTD system is still as steady and trustworthy as it was when I first started following its tenants years ago. After a year-long stint with Todoist, I’ve settled on Things 3. With its markdown support but also rich text abilities, lovely design, solid iCloud syncing - and, of course, a whimsical Bear - it quickly became my default app for taking notes, keeping references, storing links, or planning projects. And while this setup has served me well all this time, I’ve recently begun migrating much of that to Bear. ![]() I have nearly ten years worth of markdown files sitting in a notes directory in Dropbox that I keep synced with nvALT. Plus, Google is doing things hostile to a free and open web – so, I feel good throwing my support behind Mozilla and their mission to protect Internet health. It’s fast, privacy-conscious, and well-designed. But with the launch of the new Firefox Quantum at the end of 2017, I’m back. I was a Chrome user for years, and waffled between Chrome and Safari for a long time (especially as the iPad become a go-to computer for working and Safari became rock-solid – but more on that in a future post). Not only is it a must for development, but it makes for a great teaching environment as well. And no R environment is complete without RStudio. When I’m not doing Javascript and web development, I’m writing in R. Although I do most of my development work in vim and a terminal, the environment of Visual Code is terrific. I’ve abandoned Sublime Text and Atom for Microsoft’s Visual Code Studio when I’m doing Javascript and web development. Homebrew is how I install almost any software on my Mac that isn’t available in the App Store or on npm. The killer feature is a much stronger plugin architecture. iTerm 2Ī great replacement for the default Terminal app. Their apps are fantastic and they have great customer support. You should be using a password manager, and you should be using this one. ![]() Spotlight is good, and getting better, but for speed it can’t hold a candle to Alfred. The natural language processing is too good to pass up, so triggering the app with a global shortcut lets me easily type “Call Paul on Monday at 3pm to discuss the podcast” all without the jumble of mouseclicks it would take to do that on any other calendar. While Apple’s default calendar app is pretty good, the ease of adding events to Fantastical can’t be beat. It’s a small thing, but it works well for my brain. If I need to focus on a task, I’ll tell the timer to remind me in 45 minutes to take a walk. While Pomorodo has never seemed to click with me, Gestimer serves as a good stand-in for that approach. Gestimer helps remind me to take a break. The other problem: if I get focused on something, I’ll lose track of time. When things get especially busy, I need a way to carve my day into blocks of time. So, as things stand in 2018, here is what I install on any new machine I work with. But I think I’m justified to be so: these are things that I use every day, and should help me get the work done I’m trying to do.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |