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Mac OSX Productivity Tips for Developers

If you can get over the affected method acting and stilted banter between two people1 pretending to be completely intrigued by content they’ve obviously heard before (read: lots of softball questions and corny handoffs), then you’ll find that this is a superb video book if you use a Mac:

Mac OS X Productivity Tips for Developers by Matthew McCullough and Tim Berglund

I’ve been watching it on Safari Books Online – hey, I didn’t know they did videos either! – and so far I’ve already remapped my caps lock key and also set up quicklook to preview Markdown (although that in turn prompted some googling to find this cool set of quick look plugins from @sindresorhus).

Some of the hints are old classics, but even though I’ve been using a Mac as a daily driver for six years I still found some great nuggets in here.

The thing I’m most impressed about is that it seems to have been recorded last fall, so the tools and techniques are recent and don’t have that oh-so-2012 old-advice feel. Well worth the time and very well suited to the video book format.

  1. I’m not saying I could have done any better in front of a camera in an empty studio with a desk and two laptops, I’m just saying that sometimes the overly-serious and feigned entranced interest that Matthew and Tim show gets a little over the top. Occasionally my streaming would stutter at an inopportune moment that would make me think that one had broken character and decided to give the other one the silent treatment. But it’s still great material they’ve put together.

What a great find for Mac devs

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Dad to twin boys and twin girls; Retooling in my 40s around front-end dev and JavaScript; Oracle CX Apps Sales Consultant; all-around guy