Priorities

It’s no secret that I FINALLY got a new MacBook Pro. The old one was 5 years old and had been showing it’s age for some time now. It nearly collapsed and died at WordCamp Chicago in June, but I managed to get a few more months out of it. So I swallowed my principles and found a way to get a new one.

This will be my third Mac laptop?in a row and I just didn’t want to migrate everything over verbatim. A lot of cruft had built up over the years and I wanted to leave some of that behind. I thought it would be interesting to keep track of which apps or settings I chose to install and in which?order. It’s been nearly a month now and I’m up to 43 steps?with perhaps the end in sight. For now.

So just for the record, and for curiosity’s sake, those 43 are, in order:

  1. Time Machine
  2. Chrome
  3. Dropbox
  4. 1Password
  5. App Store (download/install all apps, like Pages, Numbers, Keynote)
  6. Tweetbot
  7. Dock preferences
  8. Skype
  9. Desktop Server
  10. Chrome extensions
  11. Xmarks
  12. System preferences for Spaces, Hot Corners
  13. Wallpapers
  14. ChronoMate
  15. Cloudup
  16. Transporter
  17. Alfred
  18. Sublime Text
  19. Phpstorm
  20. Call Recorder
  21. Levelator
  22. Things
  23. iBank
  24. Moved My Documents
  25. Set up email
  26. Pictures
  27. Printer
  28. Colloquy
  29. Adobe
  30. Pages (old version)
  31. Fonts
  32. Crash Plan
  33. iTunes library
  34. Git
  35. Text Expander
  36. WebEx
  37. Send Later
  38. Mouse
  39. Keyboard
  40. Rescue Time
  41. Bartender
  42. Cloak
  43. Carbon Copy Cloner

The only one that I feel might be missing from this list is iStat Menus. I haven’t made up my mind whether or not I’ll install it yet, but I sure do miss it at times.

This is just a bit of personal trivia that may be of use to no one, including myself. But I did find it interesting to see which apps or settings I couldn’t live without and how quickly I got them installed. YMMV.

2 Replies to “Priorities”

  1. Always interesting to see other people handle events like this. Over the years, through necessity, I’ve learnt to make this process as streamlined as possible.

    I mainly use cloud based services for data storage and purchase all applications where possible via the App Store, making sure to hide the ones I no longer use.

    Last time around I managed to go from new machine to fully up and running in under four hours. Ideally I would like to get this down to two!

    1. I don’t do it often enough to put much energy into streamlining it. But I do wish I had kept a timestamp for each. Probably a good third were done on day one, many by cloud. And the rest have taken longer simply because I had no immediate need of them. Since I only wanted to install what I was using, this seemed a good approach.

      I must say I was pleased with how quickly the machine became usable. I remember when getting a new computer meant days of downtime. It was a far less stressful and energy-consuming event this time around. Puts the excitement back into getting new kit!

      One of these days I should take a look to see what I’ve left behind.

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