Installing

I was issued a new MacBook Pro at work. As I copied my data to it and set up the applications I use, I decided to keep track of the apps I put onto it (as an iOS developer).

• 1Password. A good password manager is absolutely a necessity. 1Password has gotten some complaints for moving to a subscription model, but I have a non-subscription license for it.
• Atom. An all-around great text editor, available for Mac/Windows/Linux. I like that it can be easily customized and that there are so many add-ons for it.
• Chrome. My third browser of choice, after Safari (which I use for just about everything) and Firefox (from which I regularly wipe cookies/history and use whenever I need a “clean” browser for testing). I don’t trust Adobe Flash so I uninstall it from my system, so when I need Flash, I use Chrome which has it built-in.
• Cookie. An app which lets me specify my “favorite” cookies (web sites which I really do want to keep cookies for), then easily delete the rest. Also can remove Flash and Silverlight cookies and web databases. Great for security.
• Charles Proxy. A proxy server that shows me exactly what outgoing HTTP and HTTPS requests are being made, and lets me modify the requests and responses on-the-fly. Crucial for mobile and web development.
• Firefox. My second browser of choice. I’d also say “Firebug” here, but I think Firebug is now part of Firefox by default?
• Postman. A good REST client. In other words, it lets me put together my own HTTP/HTTPS requests to web services and see what I get back. Essential for working with online services.
• Slack. Our team chat of choice (previously we used IRC and Skype). I love that Slack was created by the people who made the game Glitch, and Slack has the same whimsical humor and some of the same artwork hidden in it.
• SourceTree. An Atlassian front-end to Git, which makes Git a whole lot easier to use because Git is not known for being user-friendly. (And the official Git gui applications aren’t too friendly either.)
• VirtualBox. Lets me run a copy of Windows inside the Mac. Useful for the few web sites I need to use that are still Internet Explorer-only.
• Xcode. The most important one – this lets me code and build iOS applications.

And then I installed Homebrew so that I can install some more open-source tools, such as:

• emacs. Religious wars aside, I’ve been using this text editor since 1987.
• dos2unix. For when I need to strip carriage returns from a file.
• git. The current standard in revision control, and having Homebrew manage it means I get the latest security fixes quickly.
• jsonlint. Takes JSON data and formats it nicely, with indentation. A handy shell command on a Mac: pbpaste | jsonlint | pbcopy formats whatever JSON is in the system clipboard.
• nethack. The most complex computer game ever. Period.