XenForo community

Happy to oblige.

To be honest, having been a macOS user since 2008, my selection of apps isn't particularly unusual or unique - I've been through all kinds of solutions and come out with more or less the industry standard tool for each task, but I'll go through them anyway.

Starting from the basics, I use Safari as my everyday browser. It's really efficient on macOS and does everything I need it to. While I'm working on development though, I use Chrome, mostly because the developer tools / inspector are phenomenal.

On the communication front, for email handling, I use Spark. Tools like shared email drafts, push notifications for every account including Google-based offerings and smart classification of emails along with tight integration with iOS apps make it indispensable.

Everyone at XenForo talks to each other using Slack, and we have connections to a handful of other organisations' Slack workspaces that allow us to keep our communication in one place. While it's not an app per-se, we use ClickUp for project and task management and planning because it interfaces with virtually everything else we use.

My development suite of tools consists of PhpStorm for editing text and managing version control with GitHub, in conjunction with TablePlus and Sequel Ace for interfacing with databases.

I have VMware Fusion available to spin up virtual machines running other operating systems for testing or demonstration purposes, as in my development setup videos.

My personal development server lives on my laptop rather than my desktop so I can pick it up and walk off with it at short notice, and it runs a suite of services through Homebrew including nginx, PHP 8.0, 7.4 and 5.6 all with Xdebug, MariaDB, Mailhog, mkdocs and the Closure Compiler.

For video production and editing, I use Final Cut Pro X together with Compressor to manage footage captured primarily with the built-in macOS screen capture tool. Audio duties are handled by the Audiofuse Control Center for audio monitoring and control, in conjunction with Loopback for routing sources and Audio Hijack for advanced audio recording facilities.

When I work with graphics, my tools of choice are Photoshop, of course, together with Affinity Designer for vector work, alongside ImageAlpha for optimising PNGs for the web.

While I'm in music production mode, I run Logic Pro X with Native Instruments Komplete, the Arturia V Collection and Equator 2 from Roli.

When I'm doing the XF Insights webinars, the high-quality camera I'm using is actually my iPhone, acting as a webcam via Camo Studio.

I think that's basically it - nothing particularly surprising but all together they make for a very capable workstation.

Thank you so much for getting back to me, I really appreciate the breakdown. I currently use a Macbook Pro for work (Final Cut Pro X/Logic Pro X) and it has essentially taken over the rest of my workflow as well.

Safari is great and the only reason why I don't use it more often is that I still like some cross syncing with Windows, for this, I use Brave, which the inspector is like Chrome's, so it feels great and I agree with you in that department.

Due to being at home more often because of Covid, I found myself desiring the ability to use my Windows tower alongside my MPB without hanging to change any audio devices between them, so I recently set up a stereo line mixer solution this month.