In the early 2000’s I had an unhealthy fascination with looking at other people’s computer setups. I would scour Google and Flickr for hours looking at how people set up their work environments. I also went through a phase where I was obsessed with analyzing what was in people’s Docks in hopes of discovering a new app I may not have heard of.1
Once I graduated college and started Second Gear the obsession mostly subsided due to me having more important things to do than browse all day. That doesn’t mean it isn’t still fascinating to me. With that in mind, I am hoping to start highlighting the workspaces of some developers I know.
This is not an exercise in minimalism or showing how clean you can make your desktop. I cannot stand that stuff. What I want to see is how someone’s Mac desktop looks when you are in the thick of development: windows everywhere, sample files thrown around, Photoshop crash logs. I will be contacting a variety of developers, designers and other creative types to see if they are interested in participating.
To start, I’ll highlight my desktop as of this morning when I decided to start doing this.
Xcode 4 has cleaned up a lot of the clutter I used to have when writing code. I am a fan of the single window interface. With Xcode 3 I’d have at least two code windows, a project organizer, debugger and Interface Builder all open at once. Now I can consolidate all of that into a single application. Even better is that it let me shrink decrement the number of icons in my Dock by one.
In general I don’t keep anything my most used applications in the Dock and rely on Launchbar for app launching and clipboard history. It’s quicker for me to type Command-Space, “Acorn”, Return than to hunt through 30 icons on my Dock to find the brown nut.
In general I have never been a messy person with my computer desktop or my house. As obsessively as I dust my office, I also meticulously prune things off my desktop and into folders where they belong. The only thing that consistently stays on the desktop is a symbolic link to my Elements folder so I can easily drag Markdown files into it so they sync to my iPad. I also presently have an Elements 2 folder nearby which contains all the UI, icons and design documents for the project. Once I ship2, that will be archived away and I’ll replace it with a folder for my next project.