I’ve been rocking a white plastic 2009 model MacBook for a few years, it was my first ever Mac but the poor thing has slowly degraded into being a useless device after upgrading to the latest OSX and has never been really great for doing graphic work on.
A couple of weeks ago I bagged a semi-new MacBook Pro which was pre-loved by my good mate Tony who did an awesome job upgrading it from it’s basic form to a beast that sports 8GB RAM and a 128GB SSD drive alongside the stock 320GB HDD (CD drive has been removed).
The upgrade has totally changed my working model. Before I used Mac for coding/dev and my workstation PC for graphic work. Now I can do everything on one portable machine leaner and faster than before.
I’ll still keep my workstation PC (a beastly Windows machine with an SSD/6GB RAM/1TB HHD) for home media storage, backups and testing but not much else. I’m sad to move away from being totally platform agnostic but as I have no desire to upgrade to Windows 8 I’d have probably ended up using my PC less and less anyway.
And now, the important part:
Essential Apps
- Path Finder – because OSX’s default Finder sucks
- Skype – obviously
- Dropbox – obviously
- SkyDrive – a new addition, I use this for design resources/assets rather than clog up my Dropbox
- CrashPlan – backs up my Mac to my PC server, this is then uploaded to the cloud
- VLC – runs any video
- CCleaner – because I still like the felling of ‘uninstalling’ apps (doesn’t actually work in OSX Mavericks yet!)
- FileZilla – because FTP still exists
- Photoshop & Illustrator – obviously
- CodeKit, PrePros, Compass.app – for LESS/Sass/Comppass-ing in the GUI
- DesktopServer – Simplest way to spin up test WordPress sites in minutes
- Sublime Text – best text editor around (I also have Coda2 floating around)
- SourceTree – for GUI Git-ing, makes complex branches a lot more easy on the eye
- Spotify – for cloud music-ing
The rest of my apps for writing/email/productivity are all in the browser (mainly Google powered). I run these in Chrome and run Firefox for general browsing. I swap between Chrome/Firefox for dev.
‘Agnostic’ – ha!
Nice one 🙂 My white 2008 MacBook is still hanging in there as my ‘leisure’ machine but each time I spend money trying to keep it in this decade I get this uncomfortable feeling I’m on borrowed time… basically it’s now a glorified music player.
_Really_ helpful list of apps too, ta.