My Toolbox

When I started learning my craft, tooling was a lot simpler. I built one of my first websites using Notepad on Windows98, and I persuaded my employer at the time to license a copy of Macromedia Freehand, so I could illustrate and produce technical drawings to a decent standard. We’ve come a long way since then.

Today my toolbox is more diverse but also kind of minimal. I’m making a conscious effort to drop as many big tech applications as possible. Hunting out smaller indie companies to fulfil my needs. I also tend to ditch anything that comes with new shiny AI features, AI needs to get in the bin and stay there.

I've had this post in draft for ages and finally got around to finishing it, having been inspired by some recent posts of other people doing the same. So here it is my current (as of April 2025) list of software and services I use.

Development

Nova. My daily driver. I ditched VSCode some time ago. I’ve flirted with both Sublime Text and VSCodium, but always go back to Nova. I love the interface and the company that makes it. I know it’s not open source and I have to pay for updates but that’s good with me as it gives people a living.

Tower. My git client. Not that long ago when I had a proper full-time paying job I was told to learn git via the command line and “then you can use a GUI for it”. I choose Tower once I was allowed this perk, the main reason was because a lot of the team also used it. I still use it to this day, and I still remember how to git via the command line too.

Transmit. For those times when I need to use FTP or connect to a server and do something. Another excellent application from Panic that I have owned and used for ages.

I use both Safari and Vivaldi as my browsers. I dropped FireFox a month ago. It makes me sad to see the direction Mozilla is taking with FireFox and was my favourite browser for many years. I may take a look at LibreWolf or Zen or one of the other forks sometime soon.

Design

I used to have an Adobe Creative Cloud account for everything. Earlier this year I slimmed down, so now I just have PhotoShop. I only really keep my Adobe account for Fonts, and I long for the day when Adobe offers just a Fonts subscription so I can ditch PhotoShop completely.

A lot of my initial design work is done on Rhodia Dot Grid with either a PaperMate Flair M, Staedtler Pigment Lineer 0.7mm or a Pilot G2. #stationaryporn

When I do need to design things using a computer, I reach for Affinity Designer. It’s not as feature rich as Adobe Illustrator but it good enough for most of the things I need to do. I do miss having Illustrator in my toolbox, but can’t justify the cost of a full subscription at the moment.

When working with clients it’s kinda of inevitable that I’ll use Figma too. But for me, it’s not something I use everyday.

I sometimes dive back into Balsamiq for mocking up an interface really quickly to share with the team.

A few years ago I did the excellent 3D for Designers course and still occasionally dip my toe in. I sometimes use 3D elements in illustrations and graphics and like to play around when I have time. For this I use Blender, which is a great tool for 3D design and animation. It’s got a high learning curve but there are so many video tutorials out there to help.

Communication

Slack. Do I need to explain myself here? It’s ubiquitous.

Discord. We have a small community for chatting with our users for my day job, and I occasionally drop in to other channels for work related things.

Writing

iA Writer. I’ve used this since it came out and love it. For me it’s the best writing application out there.

I write quite a lot, documentation for work, and blog posts for myself and work. I also write short stories because sometimes I want to loose myself in words and see what my mind conjures up.

Music

I have an Apple account so I use Music for streaming albums and watching TV. But most of the time I use Mixcloud or listen to Radio 3 during the day.

I also produce music or maybe I should say fumble around trying to produce music. I’m not that good at finishing songs, impostor syndrome is a thing.

I use Ableton Live Suite, with Massive from Native Instrument, the Arturia V-Collection for all the synths, and the Samples from Mars everything bundle for drums samples and other weirdness. I collect “found” sounds on my iPhone using a Shure MV88.

Others

I started to use Anybox for saving bookmarks recently. I did have a Pinboard account, but couldn’t justify keeping it since the owner of Pinboard aligned their views to something I’m not very keen on.

1password. Again I don’t need to explain myself. Password management is a must these days, and when my Mac broke badly last year I was very glad I had passwords synced across multiple devices. It’s saved my arse at least once.

I have a Fathom account for analytics on my personal sites. It's relatively unobtrusive and gives me enough data to know where people are coming from and what they're visiting.

And finally I use DuckDuckGo as my search engine of choice. I consigned Google Search to the bin a long time ago.