MAC Apps: the best ways to make my time and my work as efficient as possible

Things ($49.95) — Cultured Code’s Things was easily the top choice on my Twitter followers’ lists of “best Mac productivity app.” Not only is the interface gorgeous (it won a 2009 Apple Design Award), the app is both simple and powerful.

Not only can you manage all your tasks on the desktop, the fantastic Things iPhone app is a great way to keep track of your tasks while on the go, as well as a fantastic portable task manager and to-do list.

The Hit List ($49.95) — After Things, The Hit List won my impromptu Twitter poll. Like things, The Hit List is elegant, but powerful. If you participated in MacHeist this year, you got a copy of The Hit List, and as a task-manager, this is one of my favorites. It syncs with iCal, makes it easy to add lists and tasks, as well as attaching and organizing notes onto certain items, and it has an interface that is uncluttered and easy to use.

The Hit List doesn’t have an iPhone app, though one is in the works.

Shawn Blanc calls these kinds of applications “anything buckets” and I have to agree. Although you can use information organizers as task managers, they really excel at collecting and collating lots of different types of information for different projects.

So, you can have a way to store all the files associated with a project, all the pictures and the contact information of your co-workers, all in a way that is taggable and searchable.

Bento ($49) — Bento is from the FileMaker, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Apple, Inc., so the interface and features of Bento naturally match and work with those of native Mac applications. Bento describes itself as a personal database program, and that’s true.

You can attach e-mail content directly to a Bento box, just by dragging and dropping, it automatically syncs and can integrate with your iCal and CalDAV calendars. You can also use it with Excel spreadsheets to view and search items and terms more easily. What’s more, there’s an excellent Bento iPhone app that works both independently and in conjunction with the original application.

BusyCal ($40) — The successor in many ways to the fantastic BusySync, BusyCal is like iCal on steroids (BusyMac calls it “iCal Pro”). BusyCal lets you share your iCal calendars across a LAN (great for business users) and also lets you sync with Google Calendar (including the ability to edit Google Calendar events), without Google/Apple’s 5 calendar limitation and with the ability to sync with more than one device. If you just use OS X and you want to sync a calendar with both your iPhone and say a BlackBerry or another phone, you can’t — BusyCal lets you do this sort of syncing.

You also get the option to add weather reports, notes, graphics and other media into your iCal view. Very, very nice.

Tweetdeck (Free) — Even if Adobe Air does have its pitfalls for Mac users (high memory usage, high crash-rate for apps), Tweetdeck is one of the most powerful Twitter apps for the power Twitter user. Granted, for some people, Twitter is actually a productivity killer, but if you rely on keeping up with social media news and trends for your job, Twitter is essential, and Tweetdeck is definitely powerful.

Twitterrific (Free, $14.95 ad-free) — One of the very first Twitter clients, Twitterrific’s icon is still often associated with Twitter itself. Twitterrific is available in a free ad-supported version or in an ad-free version for $14.95. Although the feature set is a bit sparse in comparison to some of the newer apps, this is still one of the sexiest OS X apps and it is a great option for users who want to keep up, but don’t want to have their lives overtaken with Twitter.

Tweetie (Free, $19.95 ad-free) — The iPhone app was so popular, Atebits was bombarded with requests to make a Mac Twitter client. The result: Tweetie for Mac is one of the best Twitter apps for the user who wants something that doesn’t overtake their screen, but still provides options like search, multiple account support and the ability to follow/unfollow in app.

TextExpander ($29) — TextExpander is one of the big names in the text-expansion space, and for good reason — it’s scriptable, adaptable and compact. Many of the features in TextExpander are also available in the other programs, but one standout is built-in scripts for bit.ly and digg short urls. Just copy a link, type in “/bitly” and voila, the shortened version of the URL in your clipboard is inserted. This is great when working with Twitter applications.

The recently launched TextExpander Touch brings your expansions to your iPhone or iPod touch.

Typinator ($29) — Typinator is very similar to TextExpander and is also scriptable to attach certain commands to certain programs. You can also add snippet-libraries for CSS, HTML and auto-correct rules for even more productivity.

Evernote (Free, Premium $5 month/$45 a year) — Because it is cross-platform in nature and available on a slew of mobile devices, Evernote is a very popular service. You can store photos, notes, bookmarks, sketches, video files, voice notes, pretty much anything you want, and then pull those notes up from the web, or an app on your Mac or PC or on your phone.

LittleSnapper ($35) — Admittedly, this app is more for people who take tons and tons of screenshots or need to grab images from elements of a web page. Because I take so many screenshots or web shots a week, LittleSnapper is a lifesaver to me. It’s basically like iPhoto for your screen snaps, so you can collect and tag shots from your desktop or from the web, crop them, and add annotations in the app, and then export them out to be used on the web, or upload them to Realmac’s Ember service.

What I love about LittleSnapper is that I can select specific DOM elements from a webpage. This is great when you just want to get a certain snippet of the page. It’s also great because you can open your snaps directly in Photoshop or whatever image editor you use, for additional refinements.

The Ember service is great for users who like to share their collections or images all over the web.

Quicksilver (Free) — Quicksilver is an app that is near and dear to many Mac productivity geeks’ hearts. Unfortunately, the app is also more or less abandonware (yes, yes, it’s open source now, but so little has been done to keep it updated, or more importantly to keep the add-ons that made it so great updated, that it’s basically dead). Still, for users on Tiger (or Leopard without many needs for add-ons, Snow Leopard support is iffy at best), this is the app for you. The array of plugins developed for Quicksilver over the years is one of the reasons so many users still cite this as one of their top productivity apps.

The developer of Quicksilver is now working on the Google Quick Search Box for Google, so maybe we’ll see a return of sorts in the future.

Dropbox (Basic 2GB account Free, 50GB account, $10 a month, 100GB account $20 a month) — Dropbox is one of those deceptively simple concepts that just gets better the more you use it. You sign up for a free 2GB storage account that you can access across machines and with other users. What makes Dropbox so brilliant — and better than other disk-storage services — is that it is integrated perfectly with the OS X Finder. You can easily add a file or folder to your Dropbox account and make changes to your Dropbox files locally and watch as they instantly update online.

One of my favorite uses for Dropbox is with my encrypted 1Password keychain. This way, I can share my 1Password files with my Mac mini in the living room and on my MacBook in my office, without having to manually sync anything. The file is in a shared dropbox between those two computers so changes on one automatically update on the other.

Xmarks (Free) — Formerly known as Foxmarks, Xmarks is a wonderful way to keep your browser bookmarks in sync and updated across both browsers and computers. A plugin is available for Firefox and Internet Explorer, and a special preference pane is available for Safari.

What I like about Xmarks is that I can assign different browser profiles and usage profiles. So if I have some bookmarks I only want to sync with Firefox, I can do that — if I want some bookmarks only to sync on work-related machines, I can do that. It’s a brilliant way to keep your bookmarks managed. [Mashable]

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