Mac Applications Making My Life Simpler

I began using a Mac over 3 years ago when I bought my 12″ Powerbook. It wasn’t long later that we became completely convinced and bought a Mac for our home computer as well. There are so many things that I love about the Mac, but one of them are the applications that I’m using every day to make my life simpler. Some of them friends have recommended to me, some of them I’ve found myself – probably the most unusual way I find programs is just about every time I see someone with a Mac, I look at the programs on their Dock and ask them about any of them that I’ve never seen before.

Anyways, for those of you who use Macs, I thought I’d let you know the programs that I’m using every day that are making my life simpler that aren’t the standard programs like iTunes and Microsoft Word…

Journler
Just found out about Journler a couple of months ago, but it’s already getting a significant amount of use, and the more that I use it, the more important it will become for me. It’s actually kind of a hard program for me to explain, and a lot of people use it in different ways, so let me tell you how I’m using it…

As I read books, I write quotes and thoughts from the books into Journler. Whenever I hear someone speak and they say something interesting that I want to remember, I write it into Journler. When I’m reading the Scriptures and have an interesting insight, I write it into Journler. If I see something strange or funny happen, I write it into Journler. I then tag each of those entries with a bunch of different words that might be useful sometime later – especially for sermons. Then when I go to write a message, I’ve already got a huge collection of cross-referenced research – so, when I write a message, I’m working with months worth of research rather than a week’s worth. As I compile more and more stuff in Journler, it will become a huge resource for me.

iGTD
I’ve been using this for a few months now, and I love it. I wrote about it here when I first started using it. This has become huge for me in keeping organized since I’m not naturally administrative and organized, I have to work really hard and be really intentional about doing it. One of the best things about it is that the developer keeps updating it (there’s a new update about every week), and it keeps getting better and it is continually becoming more and more integrated with other applications.

MailTags
I originally got this because of the integration with Apple’s Mail program and iGTD that it enabled. It is way more powerful than what I use it for, but it’s a great way to organize emails using tags, projects and due dates. It makes Apple’s Mail program a much more powerful program that’s more usable than just a personal email program.

NetNewsWire Lite
This is my newsreader, and it’s free (scroll to the bottom of the page for the free version), which makes it even better. I use it to track around 80 blogs and news sites. I like it better than bloglines or google-reader because it downloads anything new on the blogs and news sites that I’m reading and then I can get to them whenever I have some extra time to read, and don’t have to have an internet connection to do it.

MarsEdit
MarsEdit is a blogging software…in fact, I’m writing this post from MarsEdit. It integrates pretty well with WordPress and I’m able to write posts when I don’t have an internet connection and can upload them later.

Groupcal
A few months ago, I stopped using Entourage for quite a few reasons, but to fully make the switch, I needed a way to sync iCal with an Exchange Server. Groupcal does it pretty well, although I will occasionally still get duplicates on my calendar. Really, iCal should have Exchange Server support built in, and I think I understand it will with Leopard, but until then, Groupcal works pretty good for me.