Apps I use during my daily workflow

I think it’s great to see what tools other people in your industry use day to day. You can learn new techniques, discover new apps, and improve your own workflow by looking. Coen Jacobs recently shared his setup, so I thought it would be good to share mine too. Even though pretty much we do the same thing, we’re both pretty different when it comes to workflow.

Hardware

My main computer is a Macbook Pro 15″ retina. I switched to mac about 6 years ago after some “issues” and haven’t looked back since. When I’m not lazy-coding on the sofa, I plug it in to a cinema display on my desk where I also have a keyboard and trackpad setup, linked via a MagicWand. Being a bit OCD I need to have a completely empty desk, so I stash all my notebooks and things inside a HiRise.

Aside from the mac I also use my iPad mini a lot for reading blogs, Netflix and blogging.

Productivity

Sitting snug in the menu bar, Fantastical lets me quickly glance at my todos, meetings and schedule. We have several shared calendars at WooThemes so its always useful to be able to see whats going on without launching iCal.

For performing common tasks quickly I use Alfred; it’s a great productivity tool which lets you quickly launch apps, websites, and run system commands and scripts.

Within Alfred, I have a few scripts important to my workflow, the main two being an “I Done This” command (for logging work to the IDoneThis service we use and Woo) and my “WooCommerce Deployment” script which I use to deploy plugin updates to SVN.

Finally, Text Expander is another massive timesaver – I use Text Expander mainly for support purposes and when replying to emails.

Communication

Working remotely, communication with other team members is important. I mainly chat with the WooCommerce team, for which we use several apps and services. Hipchat is the main service we use and is kind of like IRC, but more modern. Internally at WooThemes we use it as our main communication platform day to day and it lets me chat with support ninjas and other developers. It’s also useful for posting funny GIFs and annoying my co-workers 🙂

For now Hipchat doesn’t support VOIP so we’re forced to also run Skype for meetings.

If I need to take a quick screenshot and annotate it for someone, I use Glui since it’s lightweight and convenient.

For emails, I use Airmail. I’ve changed mail clients several times since Sparrow was abandoned, including mail.app and Postbox, but none are ‘great’. Airmail is the best I’ve found at the moment, and it is getting better with new versions.

Development

My main development tool is the awesome Sublime Text 3. Lightning fast, flexible, expandable – it really is great and I’d highly recommend it over over apps like Coda and Espresso, simply because of its speed. I have several plugins installed for code completion, FTP, and code alignment, all of which improve the speed and which I can knock out code.

For minifying JavaScript, LESS files and images, I use CodeKit. CodeKit is easy to setup and processes your files automatically on save – very handy.

For my code testing environment, I recently switched from MAMP to Vagrant. It has a steep learning curve, but so far its been worth it. I personally use Varying Vagrant Vagrants for my configuration as it comes pre-installed with several WordPress versions and is fairly simple to setup.

One thing I do do when using vagrant is setup symlinks from my development directories to my vagrant install. To do so I have to run something along the lines of:

cd Sites/_vagrant
vagrant ssh
ln -s /srv/sites/P/plugins/wp-job-manager /srv/www/wordpress-default/wp-content/plugins

For version control, when not using Terminal commands I use the official Github App. Coen ridicules me for not using terminal constantly, but I just like having that visual display of repositories, history, diffs and for me its more convenient when it comes to syncing and committing (I have a shit tonne of repositories to manage day to day).

Blogging

Last but not least, for blogging I use IA Writer.

During the #WTBFB blogging challenge I’ve been using this heavily. Distraction free, quick, iCloud support, markdown, and I can go to and from the iPad and mac versions to write stuff on the go.