How do you use your Mac at work?

I use an M2 Macbook Pro Max with 32gb. I am a coder so my main installed tools are PyCharm, Terminal and BB Edit for coding.

I also use the installed Outlook which works up to a point as long as I don't want to use the calendar or actually write emails it is fine. But the email composer won't let me use cursor keys to navigate around what I write and honestly button button button in the Calendar when I have an appointment is pretty poor.

I also use a few web tools.

Microsoft Teams is a horrible chore to use but it just about works.

I use Amazon Web Services and on the whole the web interface isn't bad. There are a couple of niggles so it's not perfect but I can do most of what I need.

I use Jira for organising tickets and so on. I don't do any project management so my needs are quite simple and it is accessible enough.

I use Bitbucket for source control. Until a few months ago I would have said the web interface was very good. It has the most accessible diff viewer I know of. But sadly they broke that function on the Mac a few months ago and don't seem to have done much about it. It works on Windows but not as well as it used to on Mac. You can use VS Code to do this but it is a bit of a nightmare on the Mac, at least for this. It will randomly stop all speech working on my Mac for many minutes on end without warning. Restarting VoiceOver doesn't fix it. I just have a broken Mac until it decides to come back. It's pretty terrible.

I sometimes have to use Confluence for documents. Honestly I hate it with VoiceOver. It just seems really erratic. I suspect this is more the Mac's inability to have a decent web browser but I try to avoid it wherever I can which is fortunately most of the time.

I use a mix of Safari and Chrome for most web stuff. For Teams I just have Edge which I dedicate to that task.

Forgot about the 2nd half of your question. I actually don't use Windows spots or anything like that. I make heavy use of VO+F to find things, which I guess is the lazy man's way of doing it.

My main interface is the numpad. So I can do most things on the Mac one-handed with that. Moving the VO cursor around, jumping to headings, tables, buttons, edit fields, copying the last spoken phrase which I use all the time, item chooser, VO find and so on. It is without a doubt my favourite thing about VoiceOver.

But second to that is probably the feature formerly known as keyboard Commander for shortcuts. So right option then S for Safari, E for BB Edit, Shift+E for Text Mate, G for Chrome, Shift+G for Edge and so on. I also have a few shortcuts for toggling numpad in case I want to use it for actual numbers, or screen curtain in case I need to screen share.

Oh yes I also use ChatGpt which I have as a Safari web app.

Activities are pretty helpful. So by default I don't hear punctuation, spaces and whatnot. But when I switch to PyCharm or BB Edit I get indentation beeps, almost all punctuation etc. I also have one that's the same but changes indentation to words, and one for slowing the speech down and changing it to Siri for when I need to concentrate on something that is being read out. I have one which I call hardcore but it's really just Eloquence. I don't like it but sometimes it's good to have a droney voice that is easier to ignore when logs are rattling away. And sometimes it can work when myt normal voice can't.

I usually have ignore groups set, but for many 1st party Apple apps I auto switch to one that turns them back on so that I have at least some kind of chance of finding anything in them. But fortunately I can ignore them for work mostly.

Probably not a very interesting answer if you were hoping for more power user stuff, but maybe someone else can oblige.

There's a whole blog post on using Google Docs. It looks pretty helpful. It was a mess to use on Windows when I tried it and it doesn't look much better, or honestly much different, on Mac. But I admit, I didn't try very hard on Windows, because see the aforementioned mess.

https://www.applevis.com/blog/taming-beast-google-docs-macos

Where I work we all have Google accounts but only really use Mail, Calendar, and Meet, GitHub for code collaboration, Linear for project Management, Notion for documentation, Loom for bug reporting, and Slack for communication. Xcode works just fine from an accessibility perspective, for GitHub I just use bare git as well as their command-line client, the Mail and Calendar apps built into macOS to access their respective Google services, Meet over the web on my Mac or Google's official iPhone or iPad apps, UTM to reverse engineer stuff in a controlled environment, and obviously macOS since that's also the platform that we're targeting right now. The computer that I use for development is my own high-end M4 Max Mac Studio, and while the company is currently in the process of ordering work Macs for everyone for security reasons, I have opted out explicitly since I really want to leave an start my own business very soon.

I think that I'm the external member of the whole engineering team that's been around longest at this point, which is about 40 people last time I counted, and because I'm totally blind, because I produced the code that proved the viability of the project and still acts as its foundation until now, and because I'm still useful to review, debug, and reverse-engineer things that other developers find way too complex to tackle especially when it comes to concurrent execution, I am exceptionally allowed to not care about inaccessible services such as Linear, Notion, and Loom. This is, however, the result of a lost battle over accessibility in documentation and project management that I fought shortly after joining the company, where the needs of the designers who could not get alone with the GitHub interface won out over mine, so I've been in mercenary mode all along, professional but without wearing the T-shirt.

For my own company I intend to develop a suite of macOS, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, and maybe even tvOS applications and services that I will also commercialize, and will definitely announce here and on many other relevant spaces once they become ready for testing. I will also be separating my work and personal macOS installations for security reasons, develop networking equipment based on Raspberry Pi microcontrollers and single-board computers, and one day maybe even venture into hardware development if I ever grow enough muscle for that. I also had the opportunity to experiment with a graphics embosser earlier today that I have ordered so that I can work with math function graphs as well as develop my own aural and visual perceptive and regenerative AI technology.

Everyone on my team uses Macs, and I was provided one when I started. I was also provided a Windows machine with the understanding that I could use Windows if I wanted, but I was on my own, and I would be expected to use the Mac if I ran into blockers. I primarily do Devops work with Terraform and back-end Java programming. A combination of WSL, Nix, and Home Manager has allowed me to do everything in Windows, and the Mac has stayed in the drawer for over a year. I could probably use a Mac if I had to, but my lack of comfort with OSX means I would have a steep learning curve and a massive hit to productivity. I do own a Mac Mini and have used it a bit, but I find my self using my Windows laptop more because it's a laptop and I can take it with me where ever I am in the house. I think the only way I can truly determine how usable a Mac would be for me is to buy a cheep Macbook Air, and pack the Windows laptop away so I don't have any choice but to give the Mac a fair shot.