laptop

šŸ’» New Mac, new setup (June 2025)

I’ve recently moved into an office in the garden – a fancy shed, in other words. Doing so exposed a weakness in my tech setup, based as it was on a Mac Mini. When I returned to the house, I couldn’t access my computer!

Now, wellness gurus would probably be yelling “GOOD!” at me at this stage, but, y’know, sometimes I don’t want to have to go outside to do some work, and I fancy doing my email over a lazy breakfast, or I just want to check something in the evening. It was really annoying not being able to. So, I switched the Mini for a new Macbook Air.

I went for the 15″ one, as I don’t travel much these days, and the extra screen real estate is good for my eyes. I also maxed out the specs, so got the new M4 model with the 512GB SSD and 32GB RAM in the Midnight colour (a sort of light black, if that makes any sense at all). I don’t want to be having to replace this thing any time soon.

In terms of hardware to make it work in the office/shed, I went for:

  • Logitech MX Master 35 mouse – this mouse isĀ brilliant. I find the Apple Magic Mouse cumbersome and heavy, the lack of buttons annoying, and the ability to use it as a trackpad replacement useless. This mouse is regularly recommended on various trustworthy websites, and I have to say I love it. It’s pretty light for a wireless mouse, very ergonomic, and has loads of programmable buttons which both don’t get in the wayĀ and are really useful.
  • Spigen Urban Fit Laptop Case – fairly standard hard case to protect the outside of the laptop. Has a pleasing texture, but isn’t sticker friendly, I don’t think. It has however proved to be very adhesive when it comes to animal hair.
  • Rain Design mTower Vertical Laptop Stand – went for a vertical stand, because I’m happy to keep the laptop shut when I am at my desk and plugged into the monitor. Fits the laptop nicely.
  • WAVLINK Thunderbolt 4 Docking Station – this was the thing I probably did the most research and agonising over. Some of these things are ridiculously expensive, but at the same time i didn’t want to go too cheap, and find myself overloading the thing. This has worked with no problems since I got it.
  • Apple Magic Keyboard with Touch ID and Numeric Keypad – i umm’d and ahh’d over the keyboard – was very tempted to go for something mechanical, but in the end stuck with the official Apple one, but went for the bigger size.

This is in addition to the Dell 27″ monitor and Logitech webcam I already owned. Some of this may seem a little pricey (although by no means the most expensive kit out there) but I have to say, using higher quality gear genuinely makes a difference to my productivity (honest).

Software wise, I’ll break this down into categories to make life easier! There’s aĀ lot and quite of a few of these are utilities that start up on login – hence why I maxed out the RAM, I guess.

Setapp

Setapp is a neat subscription that gives you access to a mighty range of Mac apps for a single monthly price. You do have to make it work for you, but luckily some of these apps are properly best in class, and the others are good enough to replace first choices which otherwise would cost extra dosh.

  • Canary Mail – I have an email address that runs on Fastmail rather than Gmail, and I like to have a desktop client for it (I use Apple Mail for my iCloud account. I have too many email addresses!). Canary was available in Setapp, so I use it. It’s fine.
  • Ulysses – one of the better writing apps for longer documents out there. I tried using it for an ‘everything bucket’ for a while but that didn’t work out.
  • Commander One – a Finder replacement, with a lot more options but most importantly a twin pane display, which makes organising stuff much easier. I could live without it, but it’s included, so what the hell?
  • Bartender – when you run as many apps as I do, the menu bar at the top of the Mac desktop gets very cluttered. Bartender helps me keep it neat and tidy.
  • Rocket Typist – this allows me to create various little abbreviations that automatically expand into words or phrases. For example, I can type my telephone number with just 2 characters – and I don’t have to remember what it is! Text Expander is probably the number 1 app in this space, but Rocket Typist works fine for me.
  • Dato – the Mac shows the date in the menu bar, but it doesn’t do anything. Dato makes it clickable, so it shows what meetings I have coming up. Inessential but neat.
  • Paste – a clipboard manager. It remembers everything cut, copy, and paste, so I can go back and use them again. This is one of those tools that once you’ve used it, you wonder how you ever managed before.
  • Yoink – rarely used but helpful when needed. When dragging and dropping stuff (files, folders, text, photos etc) around the screen, Yoink lets you temporarily leave it in a dropzone on the desktop, then come back for it later
  • CleanShot X – makes taking screenshots a breeze, a significant improvement on the built in Mac method
  • Soulver – I used this purely as a sort of conversational calculator. I’m not great with figures, and so I can type calculations in words to get the response I am after – usually working out percentages!
  • Nitro PDF Pro – a PDF editing tool that saves me having to shell out for Acrobat Pro. It’s fine.
  • CleanMyMac – a handy set of tools to keep the Mac working as it should
  • Coherence X – can turn websites into desktop apps. I don’t use it much, other than for Google Tasks, which I use to log daily to dos, and having it lingering in a browser tab is not something I enjoy (this is very niche, I get it)
  • Mindnode Classic – a really easy to use mind mapping tool. Been using this for planning and organising thoughts for years
  • MarsEdit – my desktop blog editor of choice. Venerable but brilliant. I don’t use it quite as often as I used to, because of the micropost system now in place on this blog, but I still prefer using MarsEdit to blog when I can.
  • Gemini – not something I use all that often, but Gemini hunts out duplicate copies of files, and lets me tidy them up.
  • Permute – really good little app for converting all sorts of media files to different formats. Not a problem many people have, but when you do, it can be really annoying.
  • Sip – a really simple tool for picking colours from anywhere on the screen
  • TextSniper – pulls text out of images
  • Diagrams – makes a certain type of diagram very prettily. Doesn’t work for everything though.

Fair to say I get my money’s worth from Setapp.

Free as in speech and/or beer

There’s a bunch of things I use that don’t cost money – not all of them proper open source though.

  • NewNewsWire – an old school feed reader for people like me who need such things. It’s free and open source, and brilliant.
  • AltTab – I find the Mac version of the Alt-Tab shortcut annoying – it scrolls through open applications, not windows. This fixes that – and does a load of other stuff I haven’t really looked into.
  • Rectangle – makes resizing windows, tiling them just how you want them etc easy peasey.
  • iTerm – a general improvement on the basic Terminal app. To be honest, I install this out of habit more than anything. Likewise the first thing I do with it is install Homebrew – also for no good reason.
  • Alfred – again, an improvement on the built in Spotlight tool. Means I can do more from the keyboard.
  • BBEdit – when I need to edit some bog basic text, BBEdit is my go to, especially as it now had a free version.
  • Google Drive – Localise runs on Google WorkSpace, and I usually happily use the browser. Sometimes though moving files around on the desktop is easier.

Stuff I have bought

I do shell out for individual bits of software occasionally, although it is relatively rare. One of the things I love about the Mac though is the time and care taken by those developing apps for it – and that makes spending the money a little bit less painful than it would be otherwise.

  • Mimestream – I like having email in a native app rather than a browser tab, and Mimestream – despite the terrible name – seems to be the best at working with Google accounts.
  • DEVONthink 3 – my new everything bucket, and it’s working great for me. Having tried loads, I just decided to splash the cash and buy the behemoth. I use about 2.5% of its features, admittedly, but I like them. Main uses are storing PDFs and archives of webpages in a library, keeping notes from all my meetings in one place, and maintaining a work journal of what I am doing and who I am talking to.
  • Transmit – bit of an indulgence, but I find every other FTP client annoying, so am happy to shell out for Transmit’s ease of use.
  • Sketch – a recent addition. I had been using Figma’s free version on the web for my very basic needs, but was reaching the point where I would have to start paying, and so I went for the native desktop option instead. It feels solid, although as with much of the software I use, I barely scratch the surface of its capabilities.
  • Screen Studio – a new one for me, but this seems to be the top choice for screen recording – something I intend to do a lot more of in the near future.
  • OmniOutliner – I bought this on the App Store years ago, and so always download it, although it rarely gets used these days, unless I am really struggling to get my thoughts in order about something
  • Pixelmator Pro – been using this, and the non-pro version before it, for years. My image editing needs are very basic and Pixelmator just works
  • BetterMouse – way better than the standard Logitech software for customising my mouse. Well worth the Ā£7 or however much it was!
  • Microsoft Office – grumble, grumble. A necessary evil.

Native apps for web services

Most of these are just Electron or similar wrappers around websites, that give an ersatz sense of the solidity one gets from a proper native app. Still, at least they don’t take up valuable tab space.

  • Trello – still one of the best ways to throw together a collaborative to do list / lightweight project plan
  • Slack – a customer uses it heavily, and i am a member of a couple of community focused groups
  • Miro – no idea whether Miro is the best app for the online workshopping thing, but it continues to serve my needs just fine
  • Whatsapp – seems to be the default comms method for an awful lot of people these days. Being able to type on a full size keyboard speeds things up, even if it doesn’t reduce the typos!
  • Zoom – still my preferred way of doing online meetings. Google Meet is quick and easy, but feels flakey still. Teams is a royal pain in the backside, although sadly it seems to now be the default for most of the people I talk to regularly.

So, quite a lot of stuff. It’s taken me an age to put this together, so hopefully there’s something useful in there for everyone. My question: have I missed anything?!

New Chromebooks – worth the bother?

Google have announced a new model of their Chromebook – the web only laptop that runs their Chrome operating system, which essentially consists of a browser and not much else.

As well as the laptop, there’s now a desktop machine too – which is rather reminiscent of the Mac Mini.

Both look like nice bits of hardware – but just how useful is a computer that only runs web based apps? ReadWriteWeb featured two contrasting views recently – one for, one against.

I’ve never actually seen a Chromebook, and am pretty sure I don’t know anybody that owns one (this in itself is probably telling). I do however have a bit of experience with something similar.

A while ago I blogged about my investment in a Lenovo S205 netbook. After a little while I got bored with it, and decided to replace Windows 7 with Ubuntu as the machine’s operating system. I probably should have been mowing the lawn or something at the time.

Anyway, as part of setting up the machine, I made it boot up Chromium (the open source cousin of Chrome that ships on Linux based systems) automatically, and so I pretty much just use the machine within the web – I don’t run any native programs at all.

The truth is, it’s pretty handy and I reckon I can get 80% of my work done on there. Thanks to Gmail, Google Docs, Evernote, Xero, Basecamp, Google Reader, Tweetdeck, WordPress and so on, I can get an awful lot done within the browser.

The downside comes when I need to do something with an actual file – such as using FTP to get a file online, or formatting a document in Word (Google Docs is fine for bashing in text and sharing notes, but not so good for well presented documents, I find). Editing images is another example of a common activity that right now isn’t fun to do within the browser.

(The other downside of using the Lenovo as a Chromebook-like device is the slow boot time – unlike the official ones, it doesn’t feature a solid state drive, which enables the Chromebook’s to boot in less than 10 seconds. I have, however, ordered an SSD for the S205, so we’ll see if it makes a difference!)

However, when I think about it, there could well be a role for Chromebook style devices, not necessarily for person use, but maybe within an organisational context. I could imagine a company’s sales team, or a group of field workers, having access to all the apps they need through a browser: email, docs, CRM etc, without any of the clutter of a traditional machine that in their roles they just wouldn’t need.

I’d probably prefer to have an iPad though. What do you think?

Ideapad S205

For the last couple of months I’ve been playing around with a Lenovo Ideapad S205. It’s a slightly bigger than a netbook machine that runs Windows 7.

s205

I’ve been a pretty dedicated Mac user for the last five years or so, but have been tempted to switch back to Windows for a couple of reasons. One is I’m increasingly uncomfortable with the way Apple is starting to make decisions for me in terms of how I use my computer, and what services and software I should be using. I’m quite happy with this sort of control on my phone or tablet, but it feels wrong on a more traditional computing device – I don’t want an iOS type experience on my laptop.

Secondly, all my customers are in the public sector, and they all use Windows. Even though I can use Microsoft Office on my Mac, there are still loads of problems in opening and editing documents with clients, and it’s a real pain. As well as that, I kind of feel a duty to share the same platform as my customer base.

But, I didn’t want to spend a load of money on a new laptop that I hated, so I decided to get something cheaper that would nonetheless help me make a decision as to whether I would want to return to using a PC rather than a Mac. The machine I went for was the Ideapad S205.

Firstly, it’s cheap – less than Ā£300 from PC WorldĀ the last time I checked. It has a screen that’s 11″ – so slightly bigger than your average netbook. This extra space also means a larger keyboard than you often get on these small machines, and it’s a lovely thing to type on. Not only that but the screen has a decent resolution on it, so it isn’t filled up with enormous icons that makes it impossible to use.

The other winning thing about the S205 is that it has a pretty grunty 4gb of memory. Often these smaller machines have only around 1gb and that makes running big applications, or several at once, pretty slow going.

There are a couple of downsides to the S205 though and these make it unlikely to become my everyday computer. Firstly, the 320gb hard drive is spacious (not that I really need that for a work laptop) but it’s an old school drive with actual moving bits. Once you have had a machine that just runs off a solid state drive, as I have with the MacBook Air recently, you don’t want to go back to the old, slow way of doing things.

The second issue is one of processing power, and while the memory on the S205 is good, the processor is not exactly rocket-powered. Fine for word processing and browsing and so on, but video calls on Skype slowed things down to a crawl and it really struggled.

A couple of things I noticed about the difference between the Windows and Mac platforms. One is the sheer amount of crud that comes pre-installed on a Windows machine – it took me over an hour to delete all the demos and trials of software I didn’t want from the machine, and removing all theĀ unnecessaryĀ icons from the desktop. A real pain!

Secondly, software on Windows just isn’t as easy to use as that on a Mac. I’m still to find, for example, an FTP client on Windows that doesn’t have 3,000 icons on the screen. My Mac equivalent, Transmit, has a beautifully clean interface, which gets out of the way and lets you get with with what you want to do. This is true of lots of apps, and even the Windows interface itself – which to be fair in version 7 is much improved on Vista, etc.

So overall, for most folk who want a cheap but good performing laptop, the S205 is an excellent choice. It’s no replacement for my Mac, but then at less than a quarter of the price, you wouldn’t expect it to be.Ā It also hasn’t quite persuaded me to switch platforms either, just yet.

Using a PC

Iā€™ve had a pretty settled tech line-up for a while, which works really well for me. Essentially ā€“ 24ā€ iMac on the desktop, MacBook Air for the portable and an iPhone for the really portable.

The iMac is fine for the grunt work, sitting at the desk ploughing through pretty much anything ā€“ with 4gb RAM and a 3.06ghz Core 2 Duo crunching through video doesnā€™t present too many problems (though I am at times tempted to up the RAM to the full 8gb).

The Air is not a performance machine, but it handles the web ok as well as basic stuff like Word, and is light enough to lug about and use on trains etc without too much bother. The battery life on it is disappointing, I only get between 2.5 and 3 hours out of a full charge. Itā€™s limited to 2gb RAM, which isnā€™t that much these days, and things can slow down when you have a lot going on ā€“ Flash content can be a problem.

Some stuff you need Windows for, so on the iMac I have a virtual Windows XP machine, which I tend to use for testing stuff in Internet Explorer 6 and the odd bit of Office work which, for whatever reason, Office on the Mac canā€™t handle (sometimes it does very odd things with formatting).

This setup has done me proud, and with the brilliant Dropbox providing the glue that keeps all these machines stuck together, itā€™s been easy to work on stuff whichever device Iā€™m using.

Sadly though, my Air has had to go into the Apple shop for repairs ā€“ the iSight webcam stopped working, and that means the whole screen-half of the machine needs replacing, and it will be gone for a week at least.

This left me laptopless, which given that I am out of my office a few days a week, would cause some major productivity problems. Luckily team Learning Pool came to the rescue and kitted me out with a new laptop.

It has Windows on it.

To be precise, Windows 7 running on a Dell Vostro v13. Itā€™s a lightweight portable laptop, a step above a netbook, but no workhorse machine. My model has 2gb RAM and a 1.3ghz Celeron processor ā€“ plenty for web browsing, emailing and Office stuff, but not a machine youā€™d want to do any video editing on, for example. Also, if you have too many apps open at once things do slow down quiteĀ  bit. In other words, itā€™s a bit like the Air.

Like the Air, itā€™s also a lovely looking thing, thin and light and perfect to carry around a lot. Iā€™m finding Windows 7 a real improvement on Vista, but it still takes too long to boot up, shut down and wake up after going to sleep.

The battery life on the Vostro is as awful as it is on the Air, if perhaps a little worse. 2.5 hours seems to be the best it can do. Carrying a power lead will be necessary.

Most of what this review on Engadget says is about right, I think. What I have found I miss most from the Air ā€“ apart from all my favourite apps (see below) ā€“ is the trackpad. Using multitouch has just become second nature to me, and as I tend to do a lot of scrolling ā€“ in Google Reader, for example, or on general web browsing ā€“ having to constantly switch between trackpad and cursor keys is incredibly annoying and counter-intuitive.

In terms of software, the Learning Pool guys installed Office for me, and Skype, which is handy to have. Of course, with the Windows version of Office I get Outlook and Iā€™m giving it a go (we use Google to handle our email and calendar at Learning Pool, and it seems to play pretty nicely with Outlook. On the Mac, I stick to the web interfaces). Itā€™s not as bad as I thought it would be.

Bits of software I have added include my favourite RSS aggregator, FeedDemon which is superb, especially with the Google Reader synchronisation. NetNewsWire, the Mac equivalent, has nowhere near the richness of features sported by FeedDemon.

I installed Dropbox, so all the files I have shared using my other machines are now available on this one too.

I found that Live Writer was preinstalled, which is cool as it is a neat offline blog editor (Iā€™m using it to write this post) and probably better than any of the Mac options.

I need an FTP client, and for that I downloaded FileZilla, a free open source cross-platform application that seems to work nicely enough, but doesnā€™t have the great usability of Transmit, which I use on the Mac. Any suggestions for a better app are welcome.

Iā€™m using Notepad++ at the moment as a text editor, which is useful enough but I am yet to find a genuine equivalent to the likes of TextMate or BBedit on the Mac. If anyone has a recommendation, do let me know.

For Twitter, I installed the native Windows app by Seesmic, so as to avoid having to install Adobe Air, which can be a bit resource intensive on these less well-powered machines. I didnā€™t like it though, so also installed Air and Tweetdeck. Paint.net is a good little free image editor, and I downloaded Chrome for a browser ā€“ I couldnā€™t contemplate using IE, and I find Firefox is a bit slow and bloated these days.

Windows 7 comes with something called the ā€˜Snipping Toolā€™ which may replace Skitch on the Mac ā€“ if not then there is always the likes of SnagIt. The way Windows handles archive files like .zip seems really slow, and doesnā€™t match the speed that OSX seems to handle these things. I suppose something like WinZip would solve this.

Generally I would say Windows 7 is pretty good, probably the best version Iā€™ve ever used, but it doesnā€™t come close to the ease of use of OSX. The system is often a bit sluggish to react and sometimes it isnā€™t terribly obvious to know what to do to accomplish certain tasks.