Showing Off My Dock

July 28th, 2010

I’ve been a fan of Grace Smith’s blog and especially her Dock Series where by she invites a web / design professional to show off their dock, it’s a great way of finding out what other designers are using, comparing their set up to your own – as well as finding new applications. A while ago she ‘opened the floor and invited people to take part’, I only just stumbled across the post – not sure why / how I missed it first time around, but all the same I screen grabbed my dock and here is a brief explanation on each of the applications that reside on my dock.

• Finder – My OCD means everything is very neatly filed away inside here.
• Dashboard – I do actually have a couple of apps in here that I use, apart from the pre-installed Calculater and Conversion tool – I use a Loren Ipsom generator by Tobias Ahlin, which is rather nice.
• Photoshop – I’ve been using PhotoShop for over 10 years now, I do all my designing in it – when possibly Illustrator and Fireworks could sometimes be better suited – but I’m so comfortable with PS I can’t let it go.
• Dreamweaver – Using this less and less now as I’m working with WordPress more and more, I even looked into switching to Coda – but I couldn’t as there are too many DreamWeaver specific features I’d miss; especially the server behaviours which I rely on for my PHP / MySQL work.
• Adobe Illustrator – I wasn’t using Illustrator as much as I should, or at least when it was the best tool for the job – so last year I started designing T-Shirts and forced myself to do all the design work in Illustrator. It has definitely helped me learn the application, and work out how I can use it more in the future.
• CyberDuck – My FTP client of choice, I know a lot of people swear by Transmit – but this free app has never let me down; it has a great dock icon too!
• MAMP – I’ll either develop a website on the live hosting / domain, or I’ll work offline on my laptop with this Apache / MySQL and PHP setup.
• Text Editor – Editing and viewing simple documents, I also use Google Docs.
• Stickies – I used to organise all my work on these things, now I use them as a basic list of my current projects – so I can quickly see what I have going on, as well as what I have coming up the future. I also use them to make short notes while I’m on the phone.
• CurdBee – This is my invoicing app of choice, I’ve used the Fluid App to create an application from this superb web based invoicing service.
• Dictionary – My spelling can be pretty bad at times, so this gets me out of trouble on a regular basis.
• Contacts – Keeps all my addresses in order.
• iCal – I try to organise as much of my work / personal life in iCal as I can.
• Tweetie – Just switched from TweetDeck to this and I’m enjoying the cleaner interface, and the less is more approach.
• Skype – I’ve only just signed up, but I’m hoping it will become in handy with future clients who use it, especially those who are not based nearby.
• GMail – Another Fluid App, this time my Google Mail account. It even gives me an indication of how many unread emails I have in my inbox
• FireFox – My current browser of choice, and has been since my recent Mac Book Pro upgrade. FireFox struggled on my old 12″ G4 Powerbook.
• Safari – Now only used for testing.
• Opera – Surprised me how quick this browser is – but still only used for testing.
• Chrome – Another speedy alternative browser, and again only really used for testing.
• Camino – The least used of my browsers, and one for just us Mac users. I do occasionally use it when I feel the need for a stripped down, simple browser.
• Paparazzi – This takes screen grabs of individual web pages, handy for taking screen shots for portfolio pieces and uploading to CSS galleries.
• iTunes – Music all day long with this…
• LastFM – and this, I use LastFM’s radio stations based on similar artists and keywords (my username is djmartinlucas if you’d like to view my profile)…
• Spotify – … and finally this. I’ve only just started using Spotify, but I’m already building a collection of albums and playlists. And to my surprise – I don’t mind the adverts.
• Preview – I use it as my PDF reader, I find it a lot quicker to use than Adobe Acrobat.
• iPhoto Buddy – This is cool, it allows me to have 2 separate iPhoto albums (or more if you wanted), I have one for all my stock photos and a second for my personal photography.
• iPhoto – Store all my photos, both stock and personal ones. Really liking the recent upgrade with faces and better Flickr integration.
• Linotype Font Explorer – I use this to browse and organise all my fonts.
• App Cleaner – If I didn’t have this then I’d end up with a whole load of applications (and all their associated files) installed on my Mac, ones that I had tried out and then forgotten about. This makes it really easy to uninstall any unwanted application, and to make sure all the files have been removed.

I hope there’s a couple of applications in there that you might find useful. I might follow this up with a ‘Showing Off My Menu Bar’ post as there’s one or two neat little applications in there too.

Tags: adobe, apple, applications, Design, dock series, grace smith, mac, os x, software, web design