Testing the cloud

Every time I upgrade Mac OS X, I migrate my account to the new fancy version. Because of this I now have an account that’s probably 7 years old with all preferences, hidden directories, failed installations and junk of all sorts. Since this Macbook Pro has not been my work-machine for a while, I figured why not. Let’s make a clean break, install a fresh copy of Lion and see what the cloud is worth in 2012. All I need is my personal stuff and some basics to get work done outside the office, so this should be easy.

1. Dropbox

This is a no-brainer and the absolute first thing to install when Lion is ready. I’ve got some preferences that should be synced to ~/Library, so I’ll do this for the apps I already know I’ll need (using MacDropAny).

2. Media

I’m a big fan of iTunes Match and Photostream, but because I’ve got about 18.000 songs and a quite large photo-library, I just copy this over from a fresh-made backup.

3. Address Book / iCal

Synced through iCloud, so this was already setup when I entered my credentials. Real slick!

3. Apps

Using the App Store, it became pretty easy to find applications to install. I just went to the Purchased-tab and installed the apps I know I’ll use:

4. Alfred

C’mon, I’m not going to start anything by finding its icon somewhere. Alfred needs to be there pronto.

5. Sparrow

I’ve been a Mail.app-user for years, but I recently fell in love with Sparrow. A lot cleaner and it’s more than capable enough for my email-needs. I’ve got 2 email-accounts (a GMail-account for the business and my iCloud-account) and configuring them is easy.

5. 1Password

Defiantly an essential tool, which stores all my passwords and secret stuff. All synced through Dropbox, so easy to setup.

My new favorite editor. Since its preferences are synced through Dropbox it’s not a big deal to get going.

7. MAMP Pro

Even though my databases are synced through Dropbox, I haven’t found a way yet to sync the hosts-settings. Not a huge problem, because I can just add one when I need it (which is not often).

9. Transmit

Awesome FTP-client. No sync-support (yet?), so this turned out to be a minor disappointment.

10. CodeKit

A pretty slick application to get SASS going. Since most preferences are set through a Compass-config-file, there isn’t a lot to configure and setup.

11. Billings

My accountancy-application of choice, in case I have to track time or make an invoice on the road. Syncs with Dropbox as well, awesome.

12. GIT, Rails, developer tools, etc

To get things like GIT and Rails going, I’ve installed the Xcode, homebrew and some other stuff. I always find this a tricky thing to setup, but it seems to be all working now.

13. Tower

Best GIT-GUI for the Mac I’ve seen yet. Supports Dropbox-synching, so no big deal to setup.

Furthermore, I’ve installed iWork, iPhoto, SuperDuper! and.. that’s it. The hero of the day is Dropbox (obviously) which makes the setup of a lot of my favorite applications a bliss. Most of above applications were ready to go because of this synching, so it seems a lot but it really isn’t. I guess there’s something I didn’t install yet, but in theory this should be it. Buzzword or not, the cloud is awesome.