I spend most of my work day in front of a computer. Thus, having a reasonable setup is very important. I use a fairly clean mac, with a few add-ons. I tend to work a lot with standard mac software (meaning that came with the macbook pro). Thus, I use Safari for browsing, Mail for email, iCal for appointments, Address Book for contacts, iTunes for music and iPhoto for pictures. One of my favourite things is the high level of integration between the standard software. At work the IT department installed Entourage, Firefox and Thunderbird just in case I wanted to use it but:
- I had a short lived love affair with Firefox, but it still did not feel quite right as a mac program.
- I could not stand the ugliness of Entourage, although I understand that some people like to have everything in one program.
- Thunderbird felt quite responsive compared to Mail (whose IMAP support is not great), but it did not use the standard Address Book, and I dislike entering information more than once.
Of course this software setup does not cover everything that I need to do, so I use a few other programs too:
- Keynote feels much better for presentations than Powerpoint. It is more elegant and the themes look much better that anything PowerPoint brings by default. Keynote is one half of `iWork and I have to say that I do not like Pages (the other half), which is slow as hell.
- Yep to classify my PDF files. It is by far the simplest and most efficient solution. Through work I have access to Endnote, which is clunky and far less visually appealing. I am not sure what the pricing will be in the future (at the moment is free) but I think it will be worth the money.
- I work in a fairly visual way: if I can draw things I can understand them a lot better. Curio is great at allowing me to organise my meeting notes, sketches, I even do some mind mapping with it some times. I can organise text in it too; certainly not as efficiently as in other applications, but it does the job. I use the professional edition.
- Did I mention that I am an old fart (forty and counting)? I grew up with keyboard shortcuts, and I rather do that instead of mousing my way around. No sense of superiority here, it is just easier to me. Quicksilver really shines if you like working with the keyboard. If you like playing with the mouse it will not be your cup of tree.
- Office. My excuses are that I have to exchange documents with colleagues, and Word and Excel are de facto standards. Overkill, with lots of features that I do not use and appalling graphics. However, I do like tables and comments in Word (it would nice if it included better versioning) and pivot tables in Excel.
I have also tried a few things that did not work very well for me including: Devonthink (I did not get it; I may not be smart enough to do something useful with it), Mori (I do not to like much to use a folder structure for my thoughts: things always fit in to more than one class) and WriteRoom (I use version 1 sporadically, which in my opinion was better than the second version. A clear case of when less is more).
At work I also use a PC, which has Office, Firefox and a bunch of scientific software which is of no relevance to this post. Enough to say that I spend 80% or more of my time working in the mac, which feels so much more welcoming than my PC. Sure, it is not perfect and there are a few things that annoy me — like the lack of control over compression rate in iPhoto when exporting and not being able to sync my phone with the macbook — but they are minor compared to my PC experience.
I switched from PCs only two years ago, but now I feel mostly at home. I do not like mac zealotry and mythology (which confuses consistency with intuitive), but I have been happier with my macs than with any PC in the past. Well, except for the first computer I owned, a brand-less 286 running DOS. But how do you compete with the first time of anything?