Thomas Mathoi’s Mac and iPhone setup
Every week we post a new interview with someone about what software they use on their Mac, iPhone, or iPad. We do these interviews because not only are they fun, but a glimpse into what tools someone uses and how they use those tools can spark our imagination and give us an idea or insight into how we can do things better.
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Who are you and what do you do?
I am Thomas Mathoi, a native Tyrolean now living in the beautiful city of Graz in Styria together with my wonderful wife, our two children, and our Labrador, Cody. My main focus at work is helping run construction projects as a freelance project manager. Four years ago I founded iPROT.info as a side-project together with four colleagues. iPROT is web-based software for easily writing and distributing meeting minutes. You can find me on Twitter and on my website.
What is your current Mac setup?
I have a late-2013 MacBook Air as my daily driver. Powered by a 1.7 GHz Intel Core i7 with 8 GB RAM and a 500 GB SSD, it performs pretty well for all of my daily business. At the office, the MacBook Air rests on a mStand from Rain Design and is usually attached to a 27” cinema display. My MacBook Air follows me (nearly) everywhere in a black ONA Brixton messenger bag. Recently, I’ve ordered a wolf grey GoRuck GR0 which should be easier to handle during rides on my Vespa.
I don’t use the dock on my Mac very often, which is why I hide it on my desktop. It lies hidden at the left edge of the screen for when I need it. Some custom shortcuts and SuperTab are helping me to start and switch between apps.
Where can we find your wallpaper?
You can find my wallpaper (which is called “Avalanche Snow Mountain“) at Papers.co. This wallpaper adorns my Mac as well as my iPhone.
What software do you use on your Mac and for what do you use it?
The heart of my productivity workflow are Evernote and Todoist connected via TaskClone. I use Evernote for notes as well as task planning and Todoist for my daily task management.
My emailing is done with Gmail. I had been using Sparrow, Mailplane, Mailbox Beta for Mac, and then Airmail. All these apps have their specific disadvantages and that’s why I always went back to Gmail supercharged with Gmelius and Gmail Notifier directly in my browser.
My appointments are made with Sunrise, which is my goto calendar app. It chimes in perfectly with Google Calendar, Evernote, Todoist and a lot of other apps, too. And, of course I love and use Dropbox a lot for all my files (most of them encrypted with Boxcryptor) and photos.
Writing for my blog is done best with Byword. NeoOffice takes care of all my spreadsheets, presentations, and text files.
The best way of seeing all the sites on the web for me is Firefox. Ocassionally I also use Safari and Google’s Chrome for testing our software iPROT.info.
Most of my music resides on Spotify. I still carry a large iTunes library on my hard drive, but it has not grown much for the past couple of years. Too sad that my favorite music player VOX does not support Spotify.
A few little helpers are well hidden in the background on my system. They are Bartender, PopClip and iStat Menus as well as Keeping you awake and TextExpander. Alfred 2 for searching and launching. Itsycal is a tiny calendar for the menu bar. My two desktop widgets are run by GeekTool and Ubersicht.
What iPhone do you have and what apps do you use on your iPhone the most?
I am using an iPhone 6 Plus in space gray since last November. It is the best smartphone I’ve ever used so far and it completely replaced my iPad within a few days.
On the road, my iPhone is well protected in a black Leather Wallet No. 75 from GarnyDesigns.
The apps I use once or twice a day (or even more often) are placed on my first home screen. All the other apps I’ve placed in folders on my second home screen. There is also a folder called unused which is placed alone on the third home screen. This one is for all the native apps from Apple that I don’t use but cannot uninstall for some reason only Apple knows.
And these are the most important apps on my first home screen:
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Productivity: Evernote and Todist are keeping me productive while I’m on the go.
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Calendar: Sunrise
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Email: Mailbox is the best email app for mobile use. It has a handsome interface and the smartest way to snooze mails.
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Podcasts: Pocket Casts plays my podcasts whenever I sit in the tramway or walk my dog.
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RSS-Feeds: Reeder
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Messaging: Threema, Messages, Facebook and Hangouts are keeping me in touch with my familiy, friends, and colleagues.
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Twitter: Tweetbot
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Music: Spotify and the brand new VOX Player for iPhone.
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Running and cycling: Strava
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My favorite games (at the moment): Alto’s Adventure and Monument Valley
How would your ideal setup look and function?
Actually, I have everything I need. But, eventually I would switch to a 13” MacBook Pro with Retina display. It has way more power than my MacBook Air, and I would like to see Mailbox as my main email client on the Mac. But the beta at the moment is still a bit too buggy and lacks the comforts of text formatting or Markdown support, ability to sync drafts directly with GMail for better cross-device-use, needs a much better configuration for aliases and offline functionality, and definitely needs Evernote integration.
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