My Mac Monday (MMM3) : Tim Dalton

June 7, 2010 in Favourite Apps by David John

I’m an ICT consultant working in education, and have been a Mac user for nearly 10 years now. My main home machine is currently an iMac, carrying the Macbook around day to day.

When I’m working from home the Griffin stand keeps the laptop at eye level, and I use the open source Synergy to share keyboard and mouse between the two. This is a fantastic little app- move your mouse off the screen on one machine and it appears on the next, whether Mac, Windows or Linux.

My role involves a huge amount of variation in the tools I use. After a fairly major migration earlier in the year day to day running of the organisation is dealt with using a combination of Google Apps and a VPN connection.

Tweetdeck is my current preferred Twitter client on the desktop, and I’m using the official Twitter app on the iPhone. I’m also a big fan of Adium for instant messaging, happily connecting me up to all my various accounts in one place.

Google Reader has also become absolutely central to my setup, every morning starts with a scan through the feeds there.

Within the classroom we use the Adobe suite for web development work; students are now looking at building their own mobile apps using the features in CS5, and we are big fans of the iLife apps for all kinds of projects.

The easy entry level stops learning the tools being the focus of the lesson and really encourages creativity.

Away from work I’m just starting to get into Aperture for managing and editing my photos. Have always used Photoshop previously, but after seeing some of the demos it is something I would like to try.

I’m also very interested in tracking of fitness activities, playing around with both Roadbud on iPhone and a Garmin Edge GPS unit combined with the Garmin Connect website.

The next stage for us is looking at portable devices. Groups of staff and students are currently trialling iPod Touch/Nintendo DS to see if they have a measured impact on their learning, and we are in the process of setting up a similar test for the iPad.

Blog is at tdalton.co.uk and on Twitter at @timdalton, always happy to receive comments/questions on our work.