10 Best Mac Apps

I use my job as a paper-thin excuse  for staring at the screen of a 13in Macbook Pro all day. It’s just as well I actually like the thing. And to take the edge off the working day, here’s the apps that have earned a permanent place in the dock…

Omnigraffle Professional

If you have anything to do with website ideas or design, OG Pro is a must-have. Easy to pick up and use in minutes, ‘Graffle makes the creation of visual maps the work of seconds. If you need to go deeper (the annotation of a complete set of wireframes, for example), again OG is up to the task. Worth every penny for the Pro version. And if you encounter someone daft enough to actually like Windows, ask them to find a tool anywhere near as capable of slick for under £500. They’ll fail.

NetNewsWire 3.1

Now free of charge, NNW is King of the Mac desktop newsreaders. Beautifully designed and capable of handling thousands of feeds at once, it makes river-reading a delight. Unlike Google Reader, NNW is easy to customise. Want a three-pane vertical view? Done. Why not an expanded view of stories, which you can move through page by page? Easy. The whole thing syncs with Newsgator’s online RSS reader, so you can access your feeds at any PC anywhere in the world. Does it quickly, too.

Firefox 3.5

The new Firefox for Mac is a major step forward – not a whizz-flash-bang way, but in a solid, Christ-this-thing’s-well-thought-through way. Want to find a bookmark? Hit Apple-L to highlight the address bar, and start typing. See the drop-down menu that appears? It’s a list of real terms taken from your bookmarked items – fast, clever and natural, once you get used to it.

There’s also smart bookmark folders that store your most visited pages, along with any pages you ’star’ (which is a single click to enact). And at last, it actually looks like a Mac application, thanks to the new Proto theme (still available as an add-on at this stage, but due to be part of the final release).

Evernote

The perfect place to keep those 1001 bits of info you normally file under ‘read later’. Evernote is available for Mac and PC as a desktop application, there’s a mobile-friendly interface, and the company recently released an iPhone App. You can pop text notes, photos, web clippings or even audio into any of those baskets, and they’ll sync via Evernote’s servers automatically. The service is simple, stable and cheap (as in free, if you stick below the 40MB upload limit).

Forklift

Leopard’s upgraded Finder is all very well, but it lacks one obvious killer feature – twin panes. Enter Forklift; as pleasing on the eye as Apple’s new Finder, but with a twin-pane view that makes filing stuff away the work of seconds (and so much tidier than having to open hundreds of Finder windows).

Omnifocus

The desktop app for GTD geeks. Fill it up with your todos, and file them by project and context, and mark them by due date. Omnifocus then creates the job list for you. There’s a handy Quick Entry window you can invoke from the keyboard without going anywhere near the main application, and Omni has just released an iPhone App that can be set to sync with your desktop todos via MobileMe or your own server.