Show Me Your Dock Series! Part 21

Dave Ellis

Dave Ellis is a blogger and talented, award winning freelance designer based in Leeds, UK. Dave has worked with some of the worlds biggest brands such as; BBC, Disney, Guinness, Nickelodeon, Nintendo, Orange, Universal Music and Vodafone.

He’s been working as a freelance web designer since 2005 and is now a regular at many design agencies across Leeds and often works remotely with various design and agencies in London.

I asked Dave if he would give us the lowdown on the applications he relies upon as a designer and blogger on a daily basis.

The Intro…

As a freelancer I move around a lot and I’m a bit of an app junkie too – my machine of choice is a 17″ Macbook Pro on a 1920 x 1250 resolution (so I can fit more on it). I’ve been using macs for around 12 years, the truth is I can barely even find my way around a PC. I can find my way to firefox and explorer which is usually about all I use them for.

The Dock…

Dave Ellis Mac Dock

  • Dashboard – I seem to only ever use this for the calculator!
  • Safari – I love Safari, its so quick and sleek, but it just doesn’t have the tools that firefox has, so it’s the secondary browser for me.
  • Firefox – It’s hard to remember the days before firefox now, I depend on the add-ons, especially Aardvark, Firebug and Web Developer which make my job so much easier.
  • Mail – Mail and Gmail, it’s pretty much the perfect combination. I have 4 different business accounts so it’s nice to be able to access them all at the same time.
  • Photoshop – This is my main weapon and has been for 10 years now, almost everything I design is in Photoshop.
  • Illustrator – I love an excuse to power up Illustrator, if anything requires any vector work thats where I’ll be. I only wish I got to use it a bit more.
  • Flash – I have to admit I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with Flash. I love what it can do but I hate the process – I prefer to design than code and I always seem to be sat looking at hundreds of lines of code when I use Flash.
  • Dreamweaver – Dreamweaver is a bulky app and it always has been, it’s a little sluggish and I’ve tried to drop it from my app list for a long time now but I always seem to come back. I primarily use it for coding up html emails these days.
  • Espresso – Brilliant and lightweight code editor, fantastic for coding at speed. This came as part of the MacHeist software bundle and if I’m honest, it’s why I bought the bundle.
  • TextEdit – I tend to use TextEdit as an extension to a lot of other apps, I’ll use it as a temporary place to store information – emails, lines of code, phone numbers etc.
  • Cheetah3D – Not many of you out there will have heard of this one. Cheetah3D is a mac only 3d app and it’s great for when you want to add a little bit of depth to your designs
  • Adium – Having friends and colleagues using MSN, ichat, AOL I need something that rolls all those account into one.
  • Tweetie – I’ve tried most of the Twitter apps out there and I have to say Tweetie is the easily the best, a very slick interface and importantly it doesn’t eat into your screen space like some other apps out there!
  • MAMP – Let’s me view the sites I’m working on locally. Handy!
  • iTunes – I’m a sucker for listening to a good podcast while I’m working and that’s about all I use itunes for these days.
  • Spotify – What else is there to say about Spotify? Instantly accessible music and free! No complaints here.
  • Transmit – Quite simply the best FTP software around.
  • DropJPG – So simple, yet so brilliant. Drag a file onto DropJPG and it creates a jpg, incredibly hand when you’ve just finished amends to some visuals. If I were going to recommend one app to you, this would be it.
  • LittleSnapper – Another app that came as part of the MacHeist bundle and I really want to use this to keep a log of all the brilliant things I see. Unfortunately so far I’ve not made the best use of it.
  • iPhoto – QThe interface on iphoto is brilliant yet I rarely use it. My photos really need sorting out
  • Preview – I guess the biggest compliment I can give preview is that it really annoys me when I open a pdf and it doesn’t open in preview.
  • Billable – As a freelancer that puts a lot of hours in it’s important to track that time and make sure I invoice my clients the right amount. There are a lot of options out there for keeping track of your accounts, most of the alternatives I’ve seen are bloated. I love billable for it’s simplicity, it does everything I need it to and nothing more.
  • Fontbook – I really don’t know why anyone uses any other font management software. Fontbook is flawless. Great interface, quick to use and simple to manage.
  • VLC – Without any setting up, VLC plays anything that I throw at it. I wish I could say the same about Quicktime.
  • Trash – My poor old trash, I’m forever taking snapshots, downloading little bits of code, and generally making a mess of my desktop – it’s a good thing the trash is always available!

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A huge thanks to Dave for taking time out to take part in the Dock Series.

As usual if you would like to share your dock, just leave a comment with a brief description of your dock apps and a link to a screenshot of it. Or take to your blog and write up a description of your dock as several others have done.

Other Creatives in the Series:

With more amazing creatives lined up, make sure to check back every Tuesday for the latest Dock Series installment. If you would like to be featured please leave a comment below.

Related posts:

  1. Show Me Your Dock Series! Part 9
  2. Show Me Your Dock Series! Part 10
  3. Show Me Your Dock Series! Part 20

is owner of the small but perfectly formed web design studio Postscript5, in Northern Ireland. To keep up to date with the latest designalicious content, then please consider subscribing.