What’s In Your Dock?

Noel Rappin, Wednesday, August 6, 2008 @ 11:17 pm

One of the things I like most about pair programming, or going to conferences, or sneaking a glance over somebody's shoulder at their screen is getting a chance to see the applications and tools that other people use to make it through the day. I often find myself walking past somebody and wanting to stop and ask them exactly what that interesting looking icon is for.

With that in mind, here are six things that you'd find on my dock, menubar, or command line history that help me get through the day. (I consider Quicksilver and TextMate to be in the Hall of Fame, and beyond this list.)

Autotest: Part of the excellent, if underdocumented ZenTest gem, autotest runs all your unit tests, then sits and reruns the appropriate tests when you save a file in your project. It also tries to run failed tests until they pass, which is very helpful if you have only one or two failing tests and you want to put some debug print statements in the code. Generally, if I'm coding in Rails, autotest is running.

Caffiene. Super-simple little utility that sits in the menu bar. When you click it, your Mac won't go to sleep. You can even set it to revert back to normal after a set time interval. This is always turned on whenever I give a presentation or client demo -- I always hate if my computer decides to sleep in the middle of my droning on...

Evernote. Note taking application. Boring, right? Not exactly. It syncs with a web account and also with an iPhone app. I've taken to putting clippings from Rails blogs there, to prevent the "I know I saw that somewhere" syndrome. Notes can also include pictures, and the web service attempts to do character recognition and allow you to search on, say, the notes you wrote on the whiteboard during that meeting.

TextExpander. Text macro utility, which comes with a set of HTML snippets that I prefer to the TextMate ones. I also define my command line aliases here because I hate messing around in Unix config files.

Twitteriffic. Okay, it's not exactly a productivity tool as such. But it's an extremely well designed piece of software. And with all the Mac and Rails developers I follow, it's nice to get a sense of what's going on. And, well, there are a lot of funny people who hang out there.

VoodooPad. Essentially, this is a personal desktop wiki, but rather than being an ugly web app, it's a pretty nice looking Mac app. I confess that I admire VoodooPad more than I use it, but I've recently started to put project-specific data there that is either too sensitive or too pointless to expose on our public wiki.

Hope this helps. What's in your dock?

agile ajax

Comments: 1 so far

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1. 

   Being a Unix guy myself (Linux / Ubuntu), I’m stuck with Windows XP on my work laptop, which is where I do most of my development. I use Gizmo Central, a little free (as in beer) application that lets me hotkey different docks around my desktop, so I believe I’m eligible for the “whats in your dock” comment, so here’s the key ones. http://i38.tinypic.com/14e3n81.png

   The “Work” icon on the left is a little Gizmo script that loads up most of my applications I use at work (PhpEd, Firefox, Thunderbird, Outlook :sigh:, and also starts my X server). That way I can come into work, boot up, click the Work icon, go get a cup of coffee, and when I get back everything is ready to go.

   Snippely. A great little AIR app that lets you store code snippets in any language quickly and easily. It prevents digging through old folders, trying to find a file you wrote last year, just because you can’t remember how you did something.

   Xterm (CygWin). A must for me (and any Unix guy) stuck on Windows. It gives you a full Unix shell you can use in windows, making it great for batch file operations or things that just take too long in a GUI environment.

   PuTTY. I have 5-10 servers I need to access via SSH, each one having different credentials/keys and SSH ports, so keeping everything in PuTTY saves alot of time. Plus its got alot of other unique features that would make it a good client on any system.

   So if anyone reading is stuck in Windows, maybe this list will help.

   Comment by T.J., Thursday, August 7, 2008 @ 11:13 am

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