Author Archives: Patrick Rhone

OK, so Om Malik threw down a challenge on his blog to the rest of us to let the world know our top ten favorite Macintosh apps. The rules were we had were to focus on the great small shareware and freeware applications that are out there. Therefore, without further ado, here are mine in no particular order:

Newsfire – My favorite news reader. Fantastic interface and it saves me hours a day.

OmniOutliner – The best outlining program I have ever used. I am obsessed with outliners and have paid for several over the years so that is saying a lot. I use it for everything from brainstorming, project management, to do lists and even organizing my bills and expenses (yes it really is that powerful and flexible).

MacJournal – Developed by my friends at Mariner Software. I use this for all of my journal entries mainly as it has the ability to act as a blogging client. It can do much, much more than this but that is all I use it for. I still love it for that alone.

Mariner Write – Another Mariner product. I have written about this simple yet powerful word processor before. It still saves me from the bloat of Word and remains one of my favorites.

Fetch (wait, make that Transmit) – What can I say, I have been a Fetch user since, like, the birth of FTP. Therefore I have never tried anything different. Then last night, based on it’s appearance on every other top ten Mac app list I read, I downloaded and played with Transmit. All I can say is that I never knew what I was missing and I will be switching as soon as I can.

Notational Velocity – This is, by far, one of the cleverest note programs I have ever seen. I have also written about this one before. So simple, an interface that gives new meaning to sparse and just about every aspect of it keyboard driven. I store all sorts of little snippets of info in here.

Quicksilver – There has been so many things written about this application that I don’t know if I can do it justice. Just download it, read everything Merlin Mann has written about it and consider your life changed.

Notetaker – A great note taking application and outliner. I like it a lot but it has largely been replaced by OmniOutliner and Notational Velocity. I still highly recommend it though. It has a number of very cool features. Once again, I have written in greater detail about this one before.

VLC – Plays almost everything that Quicktime can’t and it is free. How can you go wrong.

Konfabulator – Because Dashboard does not hold a candle to it. Although, I do admit, I wish there were some third party Dashboard widgets that Konfabulator had.