What’s In Your Bag? : Nick Barron

In this first of a new series of posts we take a peak inside the bag of Nick Barron, UX Director here at The Pixel Parlour.

Nick takes the lead on most web development projects, playing a roll that’s a mixture of PM and UX designer. He’ll often be found not in our Greenwich studio at all but out pitching for new work or on-site with existing clients running workshops or contributing to strategy meetings. He’s our very own digital nomad, with his office over his shoulder and here’s what he hits the road with day-to-day.

MacBook Air

“For me the Air is the perfect balance of performance and portability. All-day battery life means that I don’t need to carry an AC adapter around and the SSD plus 8GB RAM offers a machine with plenty of raw speed when docked to a Cinema Display in the office.”

“Aside from the usual Mail and Safari my most-used Mac apps are probably OmniGraffle (for wireframes & sitemaps), Pixelmator (for quick pixel pushing or opening/editing Photoshop docs from the rest of the team), Coda (for making our real developers nervous) and Evernote (a digital backup for my brain).”

iPhone 4S

“No surprises here, it’s an iPhone. Apart from pretty-much living in Reminders, the other apps I dive into every day are MailChimp, Analytics Tiles and Carrot. Oh and the imaginatively named UK Train Times for live rail info.”

iPad

“Having tried most of the other options on the market the full-size iPad is still my tablet of choice. It’s the perfect device for sharing designs or making notes in meetings or sitting on the sofa to write a blog post. And with Evernote and Dropbox onboard it’s my portable portal to key resources back at Pixel Parlour HQ.”

Rework : Change the Way You Work Forever

“I decided to pick up this book from the guys at 37signals in the original dead-tree format. It’s packed full of loads of interesting ideas (many of which run against the commonly held wisdom) to keep the old business brain ticking.”

USB Batteries

“The Apple wireless mouse eats batteries for breakfast so knowing that I can quickly charge a pair of AAs anywhere I can grab a spare USB port is pretty handy.”