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Poll: Greatest productivity app on Mac?

9 points by AdnanChowdhury ↗ HN
Just out of interest, I would like to know what applications/tools that people use on Mac to be productive. I'm particularly keen on reading responses about To-Do lists app.

The best ones i've seen are: Things, Omnifocus, Wunderlist, The Hit List and Evernote.

26 comments

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st3fan
Firefox is my productivity app.
SeoxyS
Terminal, DTerm, Quicksilver and Macchiato[1].

[1]: Yours truly wrote a Markdown editor, which I use to write pretty much everything. See my Show HN post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2858412

mathrawka
Just curious, but what do you use Quicksilver for? I used to use Quicksilver all the time, but I find Spotlight to do everything I needed. In fact, binding Spotlight to CTRL+Q makes it lovely for my needs.
santigepigon
Quicksilver, Evernote, SelfControl, and Terminal. On the web app side of it, I turn to Google (Gmail, Docs, Calendar), and Remember the Milk.
AdnanChowdhury
Nice list there. How do you use Terminal to boost productivity - is it only when your working with code?
santigepigon
Yes it's for code, and also a little more. I've come to learn that vim is quite the powerful editor. I use it to avoid internet distractions while writing code or even prose.
AdnanChowdhury
Yes, I've heard that vim was a popular IDE. Although, its not very appealing to me because i don't like its interface much.
techiferous
As far as to-do lists apps go, I rolled my own by combining a TextMate bundle with a few Ruby scripts and some keyboard triggers using QuickSilver. If you have a programmable text editor and are a programmer, this is a powerful way to go.

I also turned my TextMate into an editable wiki. TextMate bundles are pretty powerful. Because my wiki is basically a collection of text files, I can easily read them on-the-go using my DropBox iPhone app.

AdnanChowdhury
I started using TextMate recently, and I absolutely love it.

Care to share any interesting TM bundles that you like a lot?

wuster
The greatest tool... is not wasting my time with productivity-fu so I can get back to the actual task at hand =P

I kid. I kid.

wuster
Gmail Multiple Inboxes is how I triage incoming mail.

I have 4 panes layered vertically:

Top: Inbox 2nd pane: personal action items (i.e. must do 'today') 3rd pane: reading queue, but nothing personally actionable 4th pane: ding ding ding. Recently completed items that I still want to keep an eye on.

Each of the panes is based off of a saved search query.

grah4
rescuetime. I put together a simple chrome extension which hijacks the newtab page and shows a biz dashboard + personal rescuetime stats/graphs. nothing gets you back to work harder than seeing that today was only 50% as productive as yesterday.
jasonlgrimes
We <3 hearing stories like that at RescueTime! I'd love to see a screenshot. Email jason at rescuetime dot com.
sdfjkl
Quitting Mail.app and iChat when I'm coding.

Also a few useful tools: Alfred, The Hit List, TextMate, 0xED, Terminal, Evernote, BusyCal, Dropbox, Fossil SCM.

maguay
Full screen apps in Lion just may be the best productivity boost I've had in a long time. Need to get away from distractions? If the program you're using can go full-screen, you're set.
oppositionradio
a second on Wunderlist (which I just started using), nvALT, OmniOutliner, MindNode Pro, and Quicksilver.

productivity detractors: firefox (processor pig), snackr (distraction), twitter (good distraction), reeder

SingAlong
I use my own little command-line todo tool - a rubygem called "j" http://akash.im/j I wrote that after I liked t- which RiderOfGiraffes wrote. And then there's tiling window managers, simple editors or whatever works for you and me.

Greatest? IMO everybody has their own greatest productivity app. Bothering about it too much itself is a productivity sink. Just keep using something and you'll find something singing the same tune as you are. Continue using it :)