Who are you, and what do you do?

I’m a programmer at heart, but I spend a lot of time taking photos, teaching, thinking about user experience and making music with my brutal techno punk band. I’ve been doing Rails and iPhone for a while lately and to be frank it’s the best hard thinking I’ve done.

What hardware are you using?

My main workhorse is a Macbook Pro 15", I don’t know what the processor is, it’s fast enough. I run off a ridiculously fast SSD which I replaced my DVD drive with. I’m usually hooked up to a 2nd display running as high a resolution as possible. I tend to dual boot with the most recent two OSes from Apple on this laptop. I’ve also got a Mac Pro that isn’t used as much as it should be back at my house, one of my housemate uses my old ~2007ish MacBook

I do my iPhone stuff in the simulator, or on an iPad 2.

With Photography I moved to 3/4 lens based cameras after I went up Everest, and didn’t really get results I was happy with. I bought the Panasonic GF1, which conveniently broke at the same time as the GF2 came out. To be frank though, I preferred the first. Low light photos always seemed to come out better. Also, the GF3 came out. Maybe at some point I’ll get to try that but I’m really not in a rush to do so. I like how it deals with outside photos. I occasionally do wedding photography, but it’s under duress. I used to have a flickr account I cared about, but then delicious got shut down, so I started but haven’t finished my own photo site.

In the band I play Keytar, or any other random instrument that comes near to hand. I mostly do the singing.

What software are you using?

Let’s get this straight upfront, I love Text Editors. I feel really cramped when I have to crush myself into an IDE where I share my code interface space with a bunch of toolbars or sidebars. So my workhorse is the never updated TextMate – TextMate was the first text editor I really sat down and learned to a very very deep level, and so far I’ve not quite got anywhere close with any other editor yet. It’s always there if I need to get something done.

Sublime Text 2, is a my current favourite other text editor it’s more stable than Chocolat, and it’s cross platform which is always a boon when working on linux boxen. Sublime Edit has lots of features I’d like to see in Textmate like split views, and a support for Lion stuff.

I like to tinker with Macvim with the Janus plugin set to make it feel slightly TextMateish, I like it, but I keep poring time into Macvim and I never really feel like I’m getting anywhere and after a week or two I jump back to a non-modal editor.

Espresso gets a shout out here also for being great for quick CSS edits when Webkit’s amazing developer tools aren’t em. But it’s not my kinda thing, too close to being an IDE (same with Coda.) In iPhone dev I use XCode a lot, I’ve tweaked a lot of the default keybindings and I generally feel pretty nippy with moving text around in everyday life.

I use Safari as my default browser, but that’ll probably end up changing to Chrome again. When using Web Browsers I always have LiveReload, YoutubeWide, Facebook Photozoom and some kinda of support to work with instapaper.

Two essential tools for everyday Web Browsing for me are Vimari / Vimium which give an amazing experience when dealing with website from your keyboard. Vimium is defintely better, but I’m really glad Vimari exists. The other tool is Gleebox, which allows me to do Quicksilver-esk commands from inside my webbrowser.

For things that aren’t text editors or web browsers. I use Totalfinder to give me tabs in finder, and to add cut & paste. I use these often. I do all my talking in Adium, and I have a useful script to let me see who I talk to most, and a custom chat theme that can inline translate text for me between languages. I’ve used Mailplane since it’s beta days, still not planning on moving to any other mail client. I edit my images in Pixelmator.

For collaborating with people I use Dropbox (doesn’t everyone? ), Skype for video chat, CloudApp for instantly uploading anything I take a screenshot of, can’t recommend this app enough. I tweet either using the terminal or via the Mac Twitter client, I’m @orta

For dealing with my operating system, I like to use Albert to open applications and to provide global hotkeys to Applescripts I write. It’s now got an API, that’s pretty exciting to me. I use Daisy Disk to find large files to delete, The Unarchiver to open files, this is surprisingly important as it has some useful settings like Open Folder after Unarchiving. I avoid using the mouse at all, so by default I have the mouse icon absurdly big. It turns out that in Lion I can double the size again. It’s about an inch big. No joke. I use Moom to move windows around using the keyboard.

I love Fresh, it’s an app that shows you the most recently edited files instantly, so you can either copy and paste, or drag out. It’s been essential in testing, and I really miss it on other people’s computers. Another biggie for me is iTerm 2, I followed the fork’s development for a while now and the author’s really done some amazing work in making a terminal client that really shines. Linux users get jealous of my terminal. That’s quite an achievement.

In the terminal, I use brew as a package manager. Oh-my-zsh as an extension of zsh instead of bash. I love the spell checking, the application tab completion, inline git messages, syntax highlighting and not having to bother typing cd to change directory. I miss those when I don’t have them. I keep my dotfiles in a github repo.

When working with Ruby I use rvm to manage multiple rubies, gemsets to ensure that my ruby gems are separate and bundler to ensure I have my dependancies right. I like testing with shoulda. I use Base for dealing with SQLite databases and Sequel Pro for MYSQL databases.

If I were setting up a new mac for ruby, I’d follow this.

I rarely game, but when I do it’s on steam, I’m ortatherox. Supposedly I’ve bought ~$1200 worth of games.

I write all my code on github and I release it all under a Creative Commons license.

What would be your dream setup?

It’d be nice to not have to repurchase applications that move to the Mac App store. It’d be nice to have a MacBook Air. It’s not essential, I’m really happy with the state of computing for nerds. I’m more interested in working towards the dream setup for people who aren’t totally computer literate.