Leah Culver
Developer (Convore, Pownce)
Who are you, and what do you do?
I’m Leah Culver and I’m a developer and entrepreneur. I live in San Francisco and make websites and iPhone apps.
I’m currently a co-founder of Convore, a web-based group chat app. I also co-founded Pownce which no longer exists. Somewhere along the way I co-authored OAuth and OEmbed and have written a bit of open source code.
What hardware are you using?
My laptop is a 13-inch MacBook Air. I also love my iPhone 4. I’m still on AT&T but might switch to Verizon at some point.
I don’t use an external monitor, keyboard, or mouse. During the two years I developed Pownce I didn’t have an office (or even a home office) so I completely lost the ability to use a mouse. It’s pretty funny to see me try to use one now.
And what software?
I use Chrome for casual web browsing and Sparrow for email, mostly because I have multiple GMail accounts and Sparrow manages them nicely. I’d be lost without my Google apps: GMail, Docs, Maps, and Calendar.
For development I use Coda or XCode for editing, GitX for diff-ing, and Terminal for a variety of things. I use Firefox to preview and edit designs because I think Firebug is still the best at viewing and editing CSS.
My blog is on TypePad and I occasionally tweet.
For chat, I use a mix of Adium and Colloquy which has probably inspired the design of Convore quite a bit.
I recently started to give up physical items in favor of cloud-based services (hence the lack of hardware). My code is all on GitHub and my files are stored on Dropbox. I use Rdio for listening to music and 1Password for managing my various passwords.
There are so many iPhone apps that I love: Foursquare, Yelp, Taxi Magic, Uber, Reeder, Instagram, Path, Echofon, Kindle, and of course the apps I’ve worked on: Plancast and Convore.
What would be your dream setup?
An internet connection directly to my brain so I could quickly look things up on Wikipedia and always be right.
In the more near future, I’d like to be able to develop iPhone apps directly on my iPhone. Why does this not exist yet??