Cruft free

When I’ve upgraded to Mac OS X Lion, I’ve done the decent thing and started with a fresh install. My system was not as old as as Marco’s or Garrett Murray’s but still I accumulated some cruft. The mess comes mainly from the changes in my workflow in the past years. Upgrading to a new OS is always a good time to audit your tools, so I did just that.

I hope these decisions will be an inspirations to others so I am documenting them here.

Text

While I used the Mac Office Suite in the past years to handle my rich text documents needs — you know University projects and all — I switched back to Apple’s iWork for this type of documents henceforth. They are cleaner and they support the new Lion features. I don’t forsee much use for them in the near future but it’s always good to have something in this software class type.

I was also an avid user of the Simplenote + nvAlt combination for most of my text related needs. I’ve kept there everything from blog posts to passwords and to-do lists and even more sensitive information like bank accounts. This is the area where a lot of change needed to happen. I embraced Evernote as my go to application for storing miscellaneous information. It’s major advantages included great apps both on the Mac, on the iPhone and the web interface so I can access from everywhere plus a wide range of note types I can store there.

While now I use it as a replacement for Simplenote, I am looking to implement its power in more workflows. I can do this because I also started to use 1Password for sensitive information. If I have to write more than a paragraph I’ll use iA Writer for the wonderful Markdown support.

Code

My work consists mostly of front-end development, but I still code a lot of Ruby. My solution to handle these tasks is Espresso. While I am not happy with any of the applications currently on the market, Espresso gives me the most hope for a move in the right direction. I am also keeping an eye on Chocolat and LiveReload.

I must plug the wonderful Github for Mac app. This is a new adition to my set of apps, replacing GitX/Terminal. It’s silly how well this works.

Design

I am still looking for a good Photoshop replacement. Unfortunatelly, neither Acorn nor Pixelmator are in the same ball park with Photoshop . Adobe’s product is on one side powerful, complete and with a killer workflow on the other side buggy and a memory hog.

Management

I’m fully immersed in the iLife-style management of my media. iTunes and iPhoto are always trusty friends. I keep my screenshots in LittleSnapper; a different library and functions but sharing a common workflow with the rest of the Apple’s apps.

For the app launcher/productivity application my choice is a Powerpacked Alfred. My obsessive mind also made me try to automatize as much as possible with Hazel and Dropbox.

Email is handled with Sparrow. The new Apple Mail has both advantages and disadvantages compared to my choice, but the rapid release cycle of Sparrow gives me a lot of hope that it will overpass Mail in all aspects.

To do management

I’ve tried them all: Omnifocus, Wunderlist, Simplenote and Things. Except for Things none of those came close to how I work. It was a constant battle with that app: I had to decide if I should make a Project or an Area, tags didn’t make sense to me at all, the lack of subtasks was more than anoying. But the true show stopper was syncing.

The saviour is The Hit List. Smart, powerful, quick, beautiful: perfect.

Entertainment

Reeder is my RSS tool of choice since the first beta. For movies I still use Quicktime plus Perian with MPlayerX as fallback; VLC is dead to me.

Too small to fit in a particular workflow

Seamless to transfer the currently playing song from my Mac to iPhone and back. Smaller to compress my css and js. Unwind — a pomodoro style timer — for when I feel procrastinating.

I am happy for now with my setup. Because I am always tinkering with my software and workflow, I will post updates if something changes. I hope many more people will make public their workflows.

The insulated relationship between our machines and its user prevents learning new tricks from each other. I will do my part to prevent this isolation and to help other in their software decisions by posting more often these geeky articles.