Productivity Tools on Mac OS X

These are some notes from a brownbag session I ran on Wednesday April 13th at our office. The purpose of it was to share with the rest of the team, the tools that I use on a daily basis on my laptop (MacBook Pro) and that I find useful and have made more productive.

Just to give some context on why I find certain tools more useful than others, I use the command line a lot (and thus I use a keyboard over a mouse). When I am coding, I work on the terminal or a text editor and then I switch to see the results. I don’t need to have multiple screens (like chat + browser + email) simultaneously. A good read on this type of “schedule” is this essay by Paul Graham (of Y-combinator fame): Maker’s schedule, Manager’s schedule.

So here are the applications I use daily:

Here are the applications I use daily:

• Productivity & Focus
  1. AlfredApp as a replacement for Spotlight. It’s super fast and very very configurable. I use it all the time to launch applications without taking my hands from the keyboard.
  2. Dock. I keep my dock to a minimum set of applications that I start with the mouse, i.e. when I am not coding. Namely the browsers, my IM clients and itunes.
  3. Caffeine. A very small application that prevents your mac from going into sleep mode. Very useful when doing presentations so that your screen doesn’t go dark.
  4. Divvy for window management. It allows me to position windows on my screens with just a simple key combination. I can align windows when I connect my 24″ screen easily, center them, etc.
  5. Spirited Away hides applications that are not in focus automatically after a configurable timeout. Very useful when you have two monitors and need to focus on one. It keeps all your screen uncluttered and allows focus on the task at hand.
  6. Pomodoro is an application that helps you when using the Pomodoro Technique for time management.
  7. Wooboard is a fun way for team members to acknowledge their productivity and to give each other visible recognition for the great work they’re doing.

• Using different browsers for different things
  1. Chrome: I use this browser as my main browser (for Jira, Confluence, email, etc)
  2. Firefox: I use Firefox mostly as a complement to Chrome.
  3. Safari: can clean and start fresh, flash sites, … can be reseted easily as nothing I use it with is stored in its local settings.

Why? I use different browsers for different tasks. It’s very good when testing things as well, to have a browser that you can reset to its factory settings (delete all cookies, all saved passwords, all history, etc) so that you can be sure that nothing is being cached or is working in a certain way because of previous actions you did.

• Browser related tools
  1. Choosy because I use so many browsers, occasionally I want to open a link with a different browser than the default one. Choosy is a default browser that allows you to select with which browser you want to open a link when you click on it.
  2. Bookmarks. I have bookmark groups for the tools I use most of the time, just a right click and open all is what I do every morning (opens Gmail, Gcal, Jira, Confluence, Harvest, Yammer, etc) so I have all of them opened without having to remember to go to Harvest, etc.

• Keeping the tools clean
  1. CleanMyMac, keeps my mac clean and remove junk files and folders from the system.
  2. iDefrag. You know when you have been using your Mac for a while and after a few months it starts to get slower and slower and slower? Many times that’s due to the way the filesystem stores the bytes on the physical layout of the drive, which fragments files overtime, etc … iDefrag is a pretty heavy duty tool that re-organises the layout of files in your drive and makes the whole system faster by optimising the storage within the HDD.

• Security
  1. 1password absolutely essential tool to securely create random, complex passwords and store them. You can store your 1password keychain file (the database it uses to store its data) on DropBox to have it sync between your Mac, your iPhone, your iPad and other devices you might have. Make sure your 1password passphrase is complex and not easily guessed.
  2. The Firewall settings should be enabled and you should only allow certain apps to access your network.
  3. System Preferences to disable automatic login as the bare minimum, and have a secure password.
  4. Little Snitch in addition to the built-in firewall, I use this program to inform me which programs are trying to make which network connection and limiting access to certain ports and services, especially useful for preventing bad behaviour of applications sending data without your explicit consent.

• Using files and folders:
  1. TotalFinder brings tabs to the native finder, allows a whole host of other features. It makes the finder usable (otherwise it’s not a very usable tool)
  2. DropBox to keep my files sync’ed between multiple machines and devices and as a very crude form of backup.
  3. Transmit the BEST FTP/SFTP and S3 file transfer application out there.

• development tools:
  1. Homebrew the best package manager for Mac OS X, allows me to install Unix software and other things (MongoDB, GPG, etc).
  2. rvm Ruby Version Manager. Need I say more?
  3. Tower an amazing git client for Mac OS X
  4. Kaleidoscope a diff tool for Mac OS X, for file comparisons (beautifully crafted)
  5. pow.cx recently started using it to run my local Ruby apps.

• Editors and colour schemes
  1. Textmate a neat text editor for Mac OS X, has plenty of macros and bundles that make coding simpler
  2. vim the grand-daddy of text editors, is on almost all unix machines.
  3. Solarized is a beautiful colour scheme for terminal and gui applications. I use it on vim and textmate both.

• Miscellaneous
  1. instapaper to save links to read later and archive interesting pages.
  2. RescueTime for tracking what apps I use for how long. It then gives me stats on how much time I’ve spent on Skype, on my text editor, on Gmail, etc
  3. iShowU HD for screencasts.
  4. Skitch for screencapture and annotations.
  5. Fonts: my favorite monospace is inconsolata for terminal
  6. Adobe CS5 Premium subscription for Photoshop, etc
  7. Omnigraffle Professional for drawings, wireframes, etc

• Backups
  1. Automated
     1. time machine, which is the built-in mechanism using a removable drive that I have here at the office. It makes an automated backup every hour. I use a 1TB HDD.
     2. arq for online encrypted backups to S3
  2. Manual
     1. SuperDuper! to make a bootable clone of my main HDD and some external HDD. I use this once a fortnight to make full backups that I can use to recover a failing drive or if my machine would just stop working, I can boot of a super duper copy and keep on working until I have time to send the machine for repairs.

Again, I find these tools very useful in my day to day work and some of them have really changed the way I work, however YMMV. I hope that you find this useful.