Scott McNulty is a senior contributor to MacUser, a frequent Macworld contributor, and co-host of Fork You. He is also the author of ‘Building a WordPress Blog People Want to Read,’ which is best enjoyed when bought in multiples.

Scott’s Setup:

1. What does your setup look like?

2. What is your current Mac setup?

I have a dual 3.2 GHz Quad-Care Intel Xeon Mac Pro with 16 gigs of RAM, 3 internal hard drives (the stock 500 gig HD, and 2 1 TB Western Digital HDs that I added later), and the ATI Radeon HD 4870 Graphics card. Oh, and the Mac Pro has two SuperDrives for some reason (I bought it at an Apple Retail Store, and they only stock the low end Mac Pro or the high end Mac Pro… guess which one I bought).

Attached to the Mac Pro I have:

• 24 inch Apple LED Cinema Display
• 24 inch Dell UltraSharp 2407 WFP
• Apple wired aluminum keyboard (which I love)
• Logitech MX Revolution (with a Mighty Mouse as backup)
• JBL Creature II speakers
• Griffin SimpliFi

One of these cameras is usually attached to the Mac Pro as well:

• Canon G10
• Canon Rebel XTi
• Canon HV20
• Canon HF10
• Canon HF200
• Kodak Zi6
• Flip Mino HD

I might have a technology problem.

3. Why are you using this setup?

Generally I’m using my Mac to do one of three things: read, write, or edit video (see? There’s a reason I have this ridiculous computer… so I can buy more cameras!). Clearly, video editing on this machine is a pleasure: lots of RAM and two monitors really make a difference (my previous machine was a MacBook Pro, which was great but the Mac Pro is sooo much faster at encoding video it isn’t even funny).

I would recommend that if you can afford to get yourself two monitors you should do it. I know some people think that it is overkill, but trust me once you use a dual monitor setup (whether it is using an external monitor with a laptop, or using two monitors in general) you’ll never want to go back. I couldn’t use my LED Cinema Display with the Mac Pro for a few months because it didn’t have a Mini DisplayPort and I really missed that extra real estate for writing or watching video (luckily Apple came out with the ATI Radeon HD 4870 Graphics card upgrade which sports a DVI connector and a Mini DisplayPort, exactly what I needed).

There are some who say, “Scott, do you REALLY need this much computer just to blog?” To those people I say, “Mind your own darn business! And how did you get into my apartment?” Clearly I have no need for this much Mac, but when it was time for me to get a new Mac I realized that I had never owned a Mac Pro. I felt it was my duty as a highly respected Mac pundit to experience the Mac Pro for myself.

4. What software do you use on a daily basis, and for what do you use it?

Here are all the apps I use on a regular basis:

• Butler: Without this app I wouldn’t even know how to use my Mac. Once it became clear that QuickSilver development was slowing down I went on the look out for a replacement app launcher/Swiss Army Knife of Awesome for my Mac. I tried a bunch of the apps out there and fell in love with Butler (how can you not want to have a little icon wearing a bowler hat in your Menu Bar? I mean really.).
• Camino: Safari is great and all, but Camino is my true browser love. I don’t use any FireFox extensions so Camino offers me the one thing I want from FireFox: the rendering engine. I must admit that Safari 4, top tabs and all, is slowly wooing me from Camino.
• TextMate: I’m typing up this very document with TextMate. I write a lot, and most of that writing is done in TextMate (usually using MarkDown).
• Scrivener: As of late people have started asking me to write books (I’m as shocked as you are) and Scrivener is my go to text application for large writing projects. It is an outliner, a word processor, and a note keeping application all rolled into one great package. I can’t imagine writing a book without it.
• MarsEdit: I use this for all my personal blogging. I’ve been using it forever.
• NetNewsWire: Speaking of apps I’ve been using forever, I’ve been a happy NNW user for a long, long time. At the moment I have a little over 600 feeds in it, and it never bats an eyelash.
• Final Cut Pro: I have a silly little video podcast that I co-host and edit. All the editing happens in Final Cut Pro (though I could probably use the latest version of Final Cut Express for what I’m doing).
• iTunes: This one must be on everyone’s list.
• Skitch: I take a lot of screenshots of various things and I haven’t found an app that make it easier than Skitch.
• Acorn: I do lots of small edits in Skitch, but when I need to do something major I launch Acorn. It is perfect for what I need, and so much easier to use than Photoshop for a graphic design novice, like myself.
• iPhoto with FlickrExport: I’m not a very good photographer, but I do enjoy taking pictures. iPhoto organizes them, and the great plugin FlickrExport makes it super easy to upload all my crappy pictures to Flickr.
• ClipStart: ClipStart is a young application, but it is to video what iPhoto is to pictures. Since I have all those video cameras I have lots of random video clips cluttering up my Mac. ClipStart gives me an organized view into that video chaos and an easy way to upload random videos to Flickr from time to time.
• Tweetie: I think it is the law that Mac geeks must use the Twitter, and if you’re going to use a desktop app for Twitter than Tweetie is the best at the moment.
• 1Password + Dropbox: For a long time everyone raved about 1Password, and I just didn’t get it. Then I found out about its keyboard shortcuts and paired it with Dropbox (so all the logins for all the Web sites I use are available on any Mac I have) and I was in love. 1Password as truly improved my computing experience, and it is rare that you come across an app that you can say that about.

5. Do you own any other Mac gear?

I have an AirPort Express somewhere in my apartment (it is so small!) and a first generation 1TB Time Capsule that both my Mac Pro and my fiance Marisa’s MacBook back up to.

There’s a 40 gig Apple TV in our living room that we use to stream music to and to watch the occasional movie trailer (when we have parties it comes in handy to have a picture slideshow and play music. That impresses people for some reason).

I, of course, have an iPhone 3G (black, 8 gigs), an 80 gig iPod, and a 16 gig iPod nano (orange because Marisa said orange best matched my personality, whatever that means). I also have a G4 Cube sitting on an end table looking cool (it still works, I just have no reason to actually run it).

6. Do you have any future upgrades planned?

I tell ya, just knowing that my Mac Pro supports 32 gigs of RAM and I only have 16 in there sometimes makes me think… but then I realize I hardly have a need for 16 so I really shouldn’t double it for no good reason (though it would be totally awesome, right?). I’m very happy with my current setup, and spent the money on my Mac Pro with the idea that it would last me a few years at the very least.

More Sweet Setups

Scott’s setup is just one in a series of Sweet Mac Setups.

Christina Warren is the assistant lead blogger for both The Unofficial Apple Weblog, and Download Squad. Though she went to film school, and is known on Twitter as @film_girl, her passion really is writing, and it shows.

Christina’s Setup:

1. What does your desk look like?

2. What is your current Mac setup?

I have a Black MacBook (August 2007, so it’s the mid-2007 revision), 2.16 Core 2 Duo, with 4 GB of RAM (only 3.3 is really usable, but whatever) and a 160 GB internal hard drive. I have that paired with a 22″ widescreen ViewSonic monitor (and incidentally, I would NOT recommend the monitor or ViewSonic, as after only six months I’m getting major backlight fluctuation and stuck pixels and will have to send it off for repair, I think I’ll replace it with an HP 22 or 23″ widescreen monitor and then use the ViewSonic as a TV).

I use an Apple Wireless keyboard (the super-hot aluminum version) and a Microsoft Bluetooth Notebook mouse when I’m connected to my desk (75% of the time) and the regular MacBook mouse/trackpad when I’m mobile.

I have a 750 GB Seagate external (USB 2.0) drive connected when I’m at my desk, and probably close to a terabyte in other FireWire and USB 2.0 drives that I have laying around my insanely messy office.

When recording Podcasts (like TUAW’s Talkcast or The Flickcast), I use a USB Logitech AK5370, which is cheap, but effective. I had a 4 speaker creative surround sound setup, but in my new office, they don’t quite work so I’m looking at some attractive replacements.

I have a Wacom Bamboo Fun (the medium size) for Photoshop and Illustrator work, and I love it. I also have a 32 GB iPod touch 2G and a 60 GB black iPod 5G. My fiance recently replaced the battery in my old-school 40 GB iPod 3G, so that’s around somewhere too.

I display my MacBook on the Logitech Alto Express laptop stand. For anyone who is looking for an inexpensive laptop stand (you won’t get the wired ports or add-ons like with the Alto Connect), look at the getting the Alto Express. I got mine for like $12 shipped from Amazon.com (and this was NEW) and it has been fantastic. In fact, my fiance bought three more so that he could have one at work and two in his office at home.

Oh, and I have a BlackBerry Curve. But I hate it it (used to love it), so let’s not talk about it.

3. Why are you using this setup?

The MacBook has been a great primary computer, handling everything I’ve thrown at it and then some. Sure, doing high-end Motion work is out, but that’s not what I do. Having the second monitor has really opened up how I’m able to interact and work with my applications. I almost always have my e-mail (Apple Mail) open on the MacBook and then I do my work on the secondary monitor.

The MacBook keyboard is the best laptop keyboard I’ve ever used, so the Apple Wireless keyboard is a great way to bring that experience without having to be confined to the MacBook itself. Plus, since I’m using a Logitech Alto Express stand to display my MacBook at an angle, the keyboard is really a necessity.

4. What software do you use on a daily basis, and for what do you use it?

Web browsers go without saying, but I generally use Safari 4 Beta when I can. There are often situations where I have to use Firefox 3.10 (I was using FF 3.5 beta but it was still too incompatible with some of the plugins I explicitly use Firefox FOR, so that was scrapped), but I still prefer Safari.

NetNewsWire is my hands-down, favorite RSS reader. I prefer Newsgator to Google Reader and use Newsgator Mobile on my BlackBerry (the one good app on the thing), so NetNewsWire is the perfect facilitator of all my feed reading needs. I write about fashion, web technologies, film and everything Apple, so my newsreader is my productivity savior and also my productivity killer.

Since I primarily work as a freelance writer, Mail.app, Word and TextMate are some of my most heavily used applications. Some of my freelance work requires that I send articles via *.doc, and Word 2008 is the best way to do that. I have and love Pages ’09, but when it comes down to it, Word is often the easiest to use, especially when commenting and editing files. I use Google Apps to run the mail servers for my domains but use Mail.app as my mail application because I just don’t like to use a web-based client if I can help it.

Since a lot of the writing I do is online, I can technically do most of my posting via a CMS, but I’m REALLY not a fan of web-based editing systems. They are clunky, prone to bugs, and oftentimes the TinyMCE or fsckeditor implementations don’t work well with Mac browsers. For my personal blog, I use MarsEdit, which is just a fantastic tool. For my work with TUAW and DownloadSquad, I use TextMate. What makes TextMate special is its extensibility, especially when it comes to bundles. My fellow TUAW Blogger, Brett Terpstra, is a super-genius (seriously) and he created a Bundle package for TextMate that allows us to craft posts in amazing ways. It supports Multi-Markdown, in-line tagging based on TUAW’s tags, etc. And the best part is, he created a script that will auto-fill the web-based text window with the properly formatted HTML from TextMate. It’s a brilliant workaround to a system with very limited XML-RPC support.

I use Real Mac Software’s LittleSnapper for most of my screenshot needs — although sometimes that’s supplemented by Snapz Pro X or Skitch. I love LittleSnapper because it makes it easy to make edits, organize screenshots for galleries (something that I do a lot of) and most importantly, grabbing full-page webpage snaps.

When I’m not writing, I like to play around with web design and development. For that, I use Panic’s Coda and Macrabbit’s CSSEdit. For non-development based file transfer or for interacting with Amazon S3, I use Panic’s Transmit.

For design work, I use Adobe Photoshop CS4 and Illustrator CS4. I wasn’t exactly thrilled with CS3 (especially after having to buy it TWICE in four months — long story), but I think CS4 has made lots of improvements, and I actually like the one-window workflow option.

For photo editing, I switch off between Apple’s Aperture and Adobe’s Lightroom. While trying to make some corrections to the photos I took of my office, I was reminded why Aperture still doesn’t do it for me and why Lightroom is almost the tool I want to use. I still find nuances between the two, which means maintaining two separate identical libraries and using them for different things. That’s a pain. Fortunately I don’t deal with RAW images very often and mostly just color-correct snapshots I take with my Nikon S51 pocket digital.

When I’m reviewing Windows or Linux stuff for DownloadSquad, I use VMWare’s Fusion 2.0. I also have, and enjoy, Parallels for Mac 4.0, but Fusion is my go-to choice. I did have a problem a few months back with getting Fusion to recognize a Windows 7 disk image to install locally while I was at a training seminar held by Microsoft, and Parallels recognized it (the same image worked fine on an external drive), so I keep both around.

5. Do you own any other Mac gear?

My fiance has a White MacBook (almost the same specs as mine, except his is late-2007, so he has a slightly faster processor, the better integrated Intel graphics and the ability to actually use 4 GB of RAM). He also has a white 40 GB iPod 5G.

An Airport Extreme router (model before the new dual-channel). We have it paired with an old-ass D-Link 802.11g router, thus achieving dual-channel goodness.

We have an Apple TV (which we modded with boxee, of course), that we LOVE. I recently got the new in-ear Apple earphones with microphone, and have enjoyed them. I just hope they don’t break down like the lesser-quality first version of the in-ear headphones did.

Over the years I’ve had truckload of iPods (10 GB 2G, 30 GB 3G, 40 GB 3G, 2 20 GB 4Gs, the black 60 GB 5G, a blue Nano 2G that was stolen when Grant got his car repaired, and now the iPod touch 2G).

6. Do you have any future upgrades planned?

Right now I’m really debating about getting a new Mac Mini to replace the Apple TV in the living room (it would go in the bedroom) to act as a full home-media center PC. We have FreeNAS running on an old box in Grant’s office and because it is BSD based, it interacts great with the Mac. We have Boxee and XBMC connected to serve content off of it, but I’d like to have the ability to play back higher-bitrate MKV files too.

My laptop will be two years old in August, and while I don’t “NEED” a new machine, I’m thinking about getting either a 24″ iMac to become my main machine in my office (still connected to a second monitor) or getting a Unibody MacBook Pro. I’d be just as happy with the Unibody MacBook, but I need FireWire for my occasional DV and HDV editing.

Additionally, despite my longstanding hatred of AT&T, I’ve pretty much realized I’ll be going to an iPhone when the new models are released.

More Sweet Setups

Christina’s setup is just one in a series of Sweet Mac Setups.

Kicking off the Sweet Mac Setup series is Mark Jardine. Mark is the painfully talented designer for the indie iPhone software company, Tapbots.

This post marks the first in what will soon become a long and glorious tradition of posts, geeking out over how other people set up their workspace and what software and hardware they use.

Mark’s Setup:

1. What does your desk look like?

2. What is your current Mac setup?

• 15″ 2.8ghz Unibody Macbook Pro (with a 500gb 7200rpm HD)
• 24″ Apple LED Cinema Display
• Apple Aluminum Bluetooth Keyboard
• Logitech MX 1000 Mouse (I love the mighty mouse, but after going through 4 of them with broken scroll balls, it’s just time to move on)

Related Gear:

• Wacom Cintiq 12wx (really only use it for drawing)
• FW800 Drobo (for archiving older data)
• 1TB Dualband Time Capsule (daily backups of all the macs in the house)
• Logitech Z-2300 THX 2.1 Speakers
• Canon Pixma Pro 9000 Printer (for printing some of my photos)
• Colorvision Spyder 2 Pro (monitor calibration tool)

3. Why are you using this setup?

Laptop: For the longest time, I’ve had a desktop computer as my workhorse and a laptop for portability. Keeping data in sync was always the biggest problem. Where do you keep your iTunes and iPhoto Library? .Mac Sync and Drop Box helped, but it was still a pain. With the specs on my current laptop, I don’t really need a desktop anymore. There’s plenty of power and space to do whatever needs to be done. There are rare occasions when more ram or an 8-core processor system would be nice, but having a second computer isn’t quite worth the headache or money to me. Nothing beats being able to just unplug my laptop from my desk, throw it in my bag, and continue working at a coffee shop.

LED Display: The main reason I moved to this display is because of it’s integration with the unibody macbooks. The built-in display port and mag-safe adapters are extremely convenient for me. I used to hate glossy displays and they can be annoying when there’s a bright light source behind you, but I’ve learned to love the new LED cinema displays.

4. What software do you use on a daily basis, and for what do you use it?

I use Safari, Mail, iChat, iTunes and iCal daily, but I’m sure most people do as well so I won’t say more than that. Here are some other apps I have running almost everyday:

• NetNewsWire: I rely heavily on RSS for news and reading blogs. I’ve bought 4-5 RSS readers, but always come back to NNW. Sync and the built-in Webkit are probably why.
• The Hit List: I manage my life and projects with this app. Omnifocus was too much, Things was not enough. The Hit List is the perfect balance of power, simplicity, and beauty. It doesn’t have an iPhone companion yet, but it’s so good I don’t mind waiting for it.
• Tweetie: This is my twitter desktop client of choice. I have a few issues with Tweetie on the mac, but it’s still the best (IMO) so I’ll stick with it until something better comes along.
• LittleSnapper: I’ve been collecting screen captures of anything inspiring, memorable, or noteworthy for months in LittleSnapper. It’s effortless and one of these days I will thank myself for doing it.
• Photoshop: Ah, the work horse. There’s so much I hate about photoshop, yet it’s probably the most important application I own. I use it for 90% of my design and illustrative work.
• Textmate: I own almost every major plain text editor on the mac including BBEdit, Coda, SubEthaEdit, and Espresso, but I always return to Textmate. I use it to code websites, edit plain text docs, and many times just to write.
• Dropbox: Dropbox was a lifesaver when I used multiple macs. It kept all my important files in sync between my desktop and laptop. Even though I only use one computer, I keep it around as a 2nd (remote) backup for all of my work files.

5. Do you own any other Mac gear?

• iPhone 3G (my daily device)
• iPod Touch (for testing apps on future OS builds)
• 120gb iPod Classic (for the car)
• Apple TV

6. Do you have any future upgrades planned?

I usually replace my computer every 1-2 years depending on how significant the update is. However laptops these days are pretty powerful for 95% of the work I need to do. I’ve been really happy with mine, especially after upgrading to the 500gb hard drive. More ram (4gb is not enough for all the apps I like to run concurrently) and a beefier GPU (better performance in Aperture) would be nice, but I’m not complaining. So my answer is no, I don’t have any plans to upgrade at the moment.

More Sweet Setups

Mark’s setup is just one in a series of Sweet Mac Setups.