Uses This

1276 interviews since 2009

A picture of Michael Sippey

Michael Sippey

VP Corp Development (Six Apart/SAY)

in mac

Who are you, and what do you do?

I'm Michael Sippey. I'm a blogger and work for Six Apart (soon to be part of SAY Media) where I help other bloggers.

What hardware do you use?

Like most of the folks you've interviewed, it's the usual combination of Apple products. At home I use a Mac mini attached to a couple of offbrand LCD monitors, and at work I use a 13" MacBook that's usually lid down and tethered to a nice big Dell monitor. The MacBook is pretty much the best laptop I've ever owned, though lately I leave it at the office and work at home on the desktop machine. There's something very liberating about commuting on BART without a single bag; people look at you funny. Apple keyboards, Magic Mouses. Mice. Whatever.

And yeah. An iPhone 4. And an iPad 16GB Wifi version, which is mostly a family computer.

And what software?

I've moved pretty much everything I do up into the web / cloud, so I can go a good part of my day with only Google Chrome and iChat open. Mail and calendar's on Google, I keep todos in Remember the Milk, and notes, blog posts and random snippets in Simplenote. All of their web UIs are good enough (or better!) than their desktop equivalents, and #newtwitter has finally made me uninstall the six or so Twitter clients that never hooked me. Rdio and Pandora for music; iTunes for what I can't get there.

Dropbox is where the files go. When I need to, I Powerpoint, though I'm starting to really appreciate Keynote. When I really need to, Word, though I prefer Pages. Excel on the Mac is a barely passable piece of software, so I keep an install of Windows 7 and Office 2010 available through VMWare's Fusion just in case I need to do any serious work. (Numbers? Please.) I'm looking forward to the next rev of Office for the Mac, because supposedly they've fixed Excel. I'm from Missouri, though, so I'll believe it when I see it.

TextMate and vim (but mostly TextMate) for text. Acorn for any imagey things I need to do. I don't understand Photoshop, and don't want to. It frightens me.

On the iPhone are the moral equivalents -- the browser for mail and calendaring through Google. Twitter's app. Our TypePad app. Remember the Milk, Simplenote. A great quick note / idea / snippet capture app called Captio -- it's magic. And then Foursquare, Facebook, the Kindle app, Angry Birds, MLB At Bat and Nike+ round it out.

What would be your dream setup?

Since my family's commandeered my iPad for browsing the web, Angry Birds HD, solitaire, YouTube, etc., I think I'll need to get my own.

But the dream setup isn't really about hardware or software -- they're both evolving at such an insane pace that what I dream about today will end up being commonplace in a year or two. What's not keeping pace is connectivity. So the dream setup? Fast, reliable and zero configuration wireless data, everywhere.

A boy can dream, right?