C6 Top Mac Apps 2007: Productivity

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Well, the year is quickly coming to an end and I thought I’d chronicle our latest Mac app adventures. So what makes this particular list of OS X app picks special? First, I’m not doing reruns, so you’re not going to hear about TextMate and Quicksilver all over again. This list assumes you’ve picked up on the basics from at least one of the gazillion top ten lists on Digg, and made your own decisions. Second, this list isn’t a popularity contest. Some of the apps I’m including aren’t popular (yet), some aren’t even widely known. I dig through a lot of apps to find what’s going to work the best for me (and hopefully look good doing it), meaning I offer this list as nothing more than a documentation of my findings. As always, I’d love to hear what you’re using…

Productivity:

I’ll kick off the list with the productivity applications and utilities, and explain a little bit of my current system as I go. Our online project management, time tracking and task delegation remains with & Tracking Tool : Zoho Projects">Zoho Projects, which I’ve written about before. At the office, we also use several tools for communication and brainstorming, which will be listed in different sections. On my personal computer, I find the following apps to be indispensable for project and task management, and general efficiency:

VoodooPad is a powerful wiki right in your mac. Besides its powerful formatting and easy linking, one of my favorite characteristics of the software is it’s ability to create and respond to URLs for individual pages. I can grab a link to a page and insert it in another document for cross-document connectivity, or I can take that link and insert it into a task in a GTD program, a file manager like Together, or as a webloc file directly in Finder. It can be placed in the notes of a calendar item or a Mailtags note, the list goes on. It allows for some serious webbing between my notes.

I can add to my notes and create pages with clippings using Quicksilver, and its Applescript support offers many possibilities. It’s also scriptable using several languages and can execute complex scripts on rich text pages right within the editor. And I can insert links to project files and folders and embed files and images inline. I can even create snippets for commonly used text and images. It’s a powerful tool for notetaking and organization and I loved it enough that the Pro version seemed perfectly reasonable.

I’m working on a script that will export VoodooPad pages to pbWiki. It’s actually not that difficult, just a few bugs to iron out. This would make it nearly twice as useful!

Price: $29.95 ($49.95 Pro)
From Flying Meat

Together is a relatively new entry, at least in its current incarnation. It’s an evolution of a program called K.I.T. (Keep It Together). It serves as a central repository for my project related files that don’t belong in a task manager and aren’t current working files. My system works like this: A new project includes at least one project in OmniFocus, a folder inside of a “Working” folder on my hard disk, and a folder hierarchy in Together. A Together project hierarchy usually includes “inspiration”, “reference” and emails sent —generally those containing mockups or final print files. Each folder can contain images, pdfs, emails, bookmarks (and web archives), notes (encrypted and non) and other items, all of which can be commented, tagged and further categorized. The only thing lacking from the current version that really irks me is the ability to create links to these items for use in external programs. I’m hoping that feature will be short in coming through the development cycle.

Price: $39
From Reinvented Software

OmniFocus is my task manager, for now. It offers a system based on a good understanding of GTD principles and requires very little creativity to make it work effectively. There’s a bit of a learning curve for those who’ve grown highly accustomed to something else. It also comes with a heftier price tag than some other solutions. I won’t go into a lot of detail on its features, there’s a very nice screencast available at the Omni Group’s page. The other major contenders for me in this area are iGTD/iGTD2 and Things from Cultured Code.

Price (OmniFocus): $79.95 ($39.95 pre-order)
From The Omni Group

TextExpander is a productivity tool, in my experience. I’ve become so reliant on its time saving snippet shortcuts that I have trouble using other people’s computers. From email signoffs to commonly used web addresses to entire form letters, it’s always there when I need it. If I’m working on a website for a company I can just create a two letter snippet for the company’s name and not have to repeatedly type it out. It’s a small thing, but hard to live with out once you grow accustomed to it.

Price: $29.95
From SmileOnMyMac

Jumpcut won my clipboard management contest (the one I recently had in my head). It’s tiny, utilitarian, unobtrusive and free. No frilly graphics or effects, just honest clipboard history. It lacked a few features I thought were handy in other, more robust managers, but it turns out I don’t need them. Snippet storage is handled by other programs for me. Regular text snippets go into TextExpander, and code snippets go into Code Collector (see the Geeking section). The Second Place winner was the Quicksilver clipboard module, but it had a couple of annoying bugs that Jumpcut didn’t.

Price: Free
At Sourceforge

Ziplight is a Spotlight plugin that indexes the filenames inside of zip files. This is a huge timesaver as I tend to request that InDesign packages and other collections are zipped when given to me and tend to store a lot of files as zip archives. I can now run a spotlight query and it will highlight the zip file(s) that contain the matching file name. It’s handy, useful and free. Combined with BetterZip or Springy (see Utilities), it makes archive management a breeze.

Price: Free
From Barast Technologies

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mac 11.22.07 / 8am

[…] C6 Top Mac Apps 2007: Productivity […]
Blogging Business Live, everything about markets! » C6 Top Mac Apps 2007: Productivity 11.22.07 / 10am

[…] iTech News Net | Latest Tech News, Gadget News and more… wrote an interesting post today!.Here’s a quick excerpt This post is part of a series (C6 Top Mac Apps 2007):C6 Top Mac Apps 2007: Productivity Well, the year is quickly coming to an end and I thought I’d chronicle our latest Mac app adventures. So what makes this particular list of OS X app picks special? First, I’m not doing reruns, so you’re not going to hear about TextMate and Quicksilver all over again. This list assumes you’ve picked up on the basics from at least one of the gazillion top ten lists on Digg, and made your own decisions. Second […]
Rob Stivens 11.29.07 / 11am

Good post! Since you’re interested in project management software I thought you might be interested in my experience. I’ve tried a couple of those tools you wrote about. Zoho projects didn’t click with our team, seemed to be not flexible enough. Now we set several projects in Wrike. The tool proves to be perfect for small and medium teams. It’s email based so it’s very easy to follow the progess. The great thing is we can involve our clients into collaboration.
brett 11.29.07 / 12pm

Serendipitous. I ran into a few hangups in our system and stayed up all night last night going through over 50 different web apps ranging from simple time tracking to full productivity suites. Wrike was among them. It was definitely a top contender but I ended up really liking Central Desktop in combination with Harvest (nice widgets) for time tracking. Central Desktop combines all of the collaboration tools I need with the selective client access privileges and task delegation, so I’m going to give it a test run for a few days. We’ll see where I end up. Zoho’s been good, and their suite in its entirety is amazing, but it’s not coming together as cohesively as I’d like. This got kind of long for a comment, didn’t it? I’ve been awake for too long…
ds 01.05.08 / 9am

Enjoying following your journeys. Just curious—would Daylite from Market Circle do you any good? (I tried it and gave up, but I kept feeling that a better man than I could get some good mileage out of it). ds
Tate 02.01.08 / 2pm

I actually originally got to your website through iGTD and its interesting that your using OmniFocus now. I am too, but I have to say iGTD2 looks pretty cool as does Things and once they get the kinks worked out I might be switching since I like the look of the interfaces a little better.

I tried out Central Desktop (CD) for a while and did like it. Unfortunately, most of the researchers I manage projects for really just want to check up on progress and didn’t “adopt” the true collaborative potential. So, it was hard for me to justify the monthly expense.

I ended up installing Project Pier (the still open source fork of active collab) as a place on our servers to store all relevant files for a certain project as well as some very light task management (again more just to demonstrate progress.)

Project Pier is a different kind of alternative that might be useful to some.
brett 02.01.08 / 2pm

The Things interface is great, but I’m really looking forward to iGTD2 smoothing out because it’s got powerful options for grouping notes, links and even files to tasks and projects. Not as pretty, but should fit my needs better than any of the others at this point.

One thing I love about CD is that it notifies selected individuals of changes via email, and if they respond to that email, it posts comments to the page, file or discussion. That keeps my less technically inclined employees interested and collaborating. I’ve even got a couple of clients down with the system, but I don’t push it on anyone.

I’m locked in with CD for a while (and very happy), but I’ll have to take a peek at Project Pier. I looked at Active Collab when I was researching this, but it felt too unfinished at the time. The features available through CD were well worth the money for me :).
Tate 02.01.08 / 2pm

I totally agree with you about how useful CD is (especially in its email integration, which makes adoption much more likely than the other alternatives in my opinion), but the nature of the projects I personally manage puts most of the load on me and the architecture proved to be just a little too much for my situation. (Don’t these people know I’ve got to GEEK OUT every once and a while even if every task seems to be assigned to me?)

Anyway, there is a new theme in PP (Marine) that makes it look pretty nice and I’m hoping to use it to ramp up the researchers and staff I work with to the idea of an online collaboration tool. Until then I’m focussing my geek, GTD energy towards my personal task organization via OmniFocus - etc. Unfortunately, my girlfriend is not a MAC user and I’ve also been trying to use Remember the Milk for our home stuff, which has been clunky for me. I think a true, errorless and safe synching of these task management programs is really important and a yet undiscovered land.

I actually thought about your iGTD screencast when I saw some of the iGTD2 features since they really do seem to be super-powerful and feature-rich. Maybe this will be the thing that causes me to break down and install Leopard despite all the scary comments on Apple’s site! Your original iGTD screencast is what made me see the value in harvesting to-do’s right from my email. So, maybe an even more comprehensive system can be created with iGTD2 if the interface gets a little more useable.

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C6 Top Mac Apps 2007: Productivity

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