My list of frequently used Mac applications

Posted by Hugh
Aug 15, 2010 at 10:52 AM

There’s been a lot on this forum recently about applications such as Scrivener, Curio and DevonThink Pro which I use regularly, so I won’t dwell on those.

Here are three that have been mentioned less often or not at all:

DevonAgent: http://www.devon-technologies.com/products/devonagent/
Concentrate: http://getconcentrating.com/
OfficeTime: http://www.officetime.net/

DevonAgent is just as interesting as DevonThink Pro. It calls itself a research assistant. For me it’s a very useful web crawler/relevance marker, working hand in glove with DevonThink. Concentrate is well worth investigating by those who spend many hours at the screenface. There are cheaper ways to promote focus and flow (the free Freedom app, for example, or a collection of Applescripts), but Concentrate is very versatile and can do much more. OfficeTime is a time-tracker; there seem to be loads of them now for all platforms and online, but OfficeTime is the best I’ve found on the Mac.

I’ve also collected various free or inexpensive utilities, including Hazel, Caffeine, SizeUp, Quicksilver, KeyCue, KeyClick, Tiler, CoconutBattery, Onyx, Growl and (of course) Dropbox.