I have bought two iMacs and an iPad from Apples refurbished store. Being able to buy the full Apple care warranty and enjoy a discount on the price of the hardware makes it a great way to shop apple. As far as I could tell those devices were as good as brand new. The 2011 model iMac is still going strong!

I use Ulysses as my library and note system. It has good organizational tools, fast sync, and treats meta-data well.

But if I need to focus on a single document, I write it in iA Writer.

I am using the Transcend 512GB Thunderbolt Solid State Drive

I made my 2011 iMac feel like new by getting an external SSD thunderbolt drive and using that as my boot disk. Running applications and the OS off of it really sped everything up, and it worked so well that now with my new iMac I am still running things off of the same external drive. Whats great, you can still access all your files on the old internal drive and if you ever need to travel you can run your "iMac" on any thunderbolt-enabled mac.

That's a great video - thanks for sharing

This is a great set of tools - many I've never heard of before! I might install Yosemite fresh to try them out...

For CSS I've found that many small, well organized files, is the key to my sanity. I switch between plain css and Sass based on the project, but I always use Make to automate the concatenation and processing of my files.

Make has been a great tool for me (though any automation / build tool can work) as it lets me mix up the tools I use without changing the general process - edit my code, run make, test, repeat. I can change from CSS to Sass, or add in autoprefixer or cleancss and its still the same steps for me (and anyone else who has the Makefile).

And I can't live without Sublime Text 3, Git, and iTerm 2 with the vital Dot Files.

I am a fan of progressive reduction as an idea, but I think there are two keys for it to actually work.

First, the linked designs are excellent in that the dominant visual element on the tabs is unchanged - each iteration has the same circular icon in roughly the same size and place. This is key as users use shapes, size, and color to find targets in the corner of their eye, and you do not want your reduction to fight that.

Second I think this is only a good idea in apps people use frequently. If a product is used many times a week or day (such as email) the icons can be learned easily. But if a user only checks in twice a month (such as an analytics dashboard) then they may never become "fluent" with a text-free button.

Pairs well with the bezier game

I don't know exactly what they are using in the video, but what you are looking for might be alcohol based markers. Coptic is the high end (and refillable), but there are other cheaper brands as well. http://www.amazon.com/Copic-Markers-12-Piece-Cool-Gray/dp/B000MRR3RE (Not a referral link)