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MATT: So what OS do you use?
ADDY: The default one.
MATT: So what if you buy a computer without an OS?
That's it?
Just default?
ADDY: It's just default.
MATT: You don't care?
You just stare at a blank screen.
ADDY: Do not care.
No, I love using Macs.
I love using OS X.
MATT: OK.
So that's what you're using at home as well?
ADDY: Yeah.
It's what I'm using at home.
If I'm testing, I'll probably use Windows 10 or Linux
in an NVM.
MATT: OK.
So I use OS X at work, largely because if I ever
go somewhere to a conference and just
plug it into a projector, that's normally the point
that Linux would decide, heh, heh, lull, fail.
But at home, I use Linux, and I love it.
And the thing that I've realized is
that each OS that I play with tends
to have nice features that the other one doesn't, and I'm
sort of like polyfilling features with just apps.
In your bag of tricks, what are your main tools that you use?
ADDY: I rely pretty heavily on a tool called
Browsersync at the moment.
MATT: Oh, OK.
ADDY: So doing a lot of cross-device development,
trying to build web apps that work really
well on mobile and tablet on a desktop.
And something that's useful in my flow
is like whenever I make an edit to my app or my site,
just having it live reload across all
the different devices.
MATT: Yep.
ADDY: So Browsersync let's you do that.
Now, in their latest version, they've
actually added an entire UI on top of that feature, which
is kind of neat.
MATT: Nice.
ADDY: So you can, in addition to-- so Browsersync's
always let you do interaction sync, which
means that you can synchronize clicks,
scrolls, filling in forms.
MATT: Yeah, just anything you do on one
gets replicated across the whole board.
ADDY: Exactly.
But with their UI, you can now get granular control
over each of those.
So you can say, well, I just want to synchronize clicks,
or I just want to synchronize scroll.
MATT: Yeah.
You can switch everything else off.
ADDY: Yeah.
MATT: Nice.
ADDY: And another new thing they've
added-- so you've used network throttling in dev tools, right?
MATT: Yeah.
ADDY: So Browsersync also supports network throttling.
Lots of presets included, very useful for just
seeing how your sites perform on a slightly slower connection.
MATT: Nice.
So basically, where in dev tools you just
have a whole-- like you'd have to do it
for each individual device, this one's
just your just like blanket this is the speed.
ADDY: Exactly, exactly.
Useful for seeing what it's like to try out a site on a train
where the connection's super slow.
MATT: It doesn't support offline, though, does it?
ADDY: That sounds like a feature request
you should be putting in.
MATT: There's no underground simulation
to prove that Service Worker works.
So think about that.
ADDY: Be the feature request you want to see in the world, Matt.
MATT: You know I hate that saying.
So one of the other tools that I've actually-- I
can't live without any more is a Chrome extension
called WhatFont.
And literally all it does is you click it,
it goes into this weird mode where the mouse ends up
with a little field which is just
the current font that's being used to render a piece of text.
And I probably only use this at the start of a project
where I'm selecting a font, and I just
need to make sure that the URL is actually the right one.
Because normally I'll put in a stupid typo,
and then it resets itself, and I can't actually
tell what the current font is on the page.
This one does that.
Long font family, and if it's like the middle one,
it would just go, this is the one
that's currently being used.
ADDY: Do you use anything on top of Spotlight?
MATT: No.
ADDY: For finding things?
MATT: Like I find Spotlight is good enough
for me for everything I need to do, because normally
I just open up an app and I'm done.
ADDY: There is so much more to that.
So a tool that's a little bit like Viagra for Spotlight
is Alfred.
MATT: That makes no sense, but continue.
ADDY: Alfred, right?
So you should be using Alfred.
Alfred is really cool because it gives you support
for not just finding folders and stuff,
but it also gives you support for hot keys and plug-ins.
Now, the plug-in side gets really interesting.
So Zeno Rocha put together this really cool repo
called Alfred Workflows, which includes
a bunch of the really, really useful plug-ins
in that ecosystem.
So, for example, you can add support
for searching NPM directly to Alfred.
So you can easily find packages without even
having to leave that window.
MATT: Nice.
ADDY: You can search for Grunt plugins, Gulp plugins,
add support for DASH so you can look
at documentation while you're working on your app.
MATT: Nice.
ADDY: You can look for Sublime plugins, all sorts of stuff.
It's got a lot of stuff supported.
MATT: I used to have something similar to that
for Linux called GNOME Do.
And it was literally like a hot key, kind of like Spotlight.
It just pops up.
You can start typing things in.
But then it supported plugins and all the rest of it.
And it was really handy, but I just didn't use it enough.
So I didn't really need to.
ADDY: That's cool.
I mean, there's a ton of other tools
that I use in my day-to-day workflow.
I've tried to document some of that stuff in some slide decks.
MATT: Coming to another slide deck near you soon, I'm sure.
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