5 More Mac Tools That Organize Your Digital Life.

Mac OS X can be a pleasure to help you organize your digital life. From iCal to Addressbook, Apple gives you the basics.

Basics only. There are many more excellent Mac utilities which organize your digital life.

Not many years ago Mac360, went on a crusade for Mac organizing tools. Over the following months we uncovered a dozen Mac utilities, some which we still use and love.

iCal and Addressbook are a good start and do well for the average Mac user. Keeping contacts, phone numbers, addresses requires some discipline, but the rewards are obvious. So it goes with iCal.

A calendar application, Mac or PC, is a godsend these days. An effective calendar requires discipline, effort, and devotion to make it work for us in our busy lives.

What is there beyond iCal and Addressbook? We have a list of favorites and there are more added to the list every few months. Here’s my Top 5 List of Mac Tools to Organize Your Digital Life.

Mori
There may not be a better, more flexible, more affordable organizing utility than Mori. The user interface is at once familiar and easy to navigate with the standard left column organizational structure.

Mori grows as you learn how to use it. For the most part, Mori collects and holds information. Text, screen grabs, images. Many Mac tools do that. Mori’s elegance puts it on my list.

I use Mori to track those dozens of snippets of text I find online each day. Ideas for articles. Quotes. Photos that I may need later but are not worthy of iPhoto.

Even better, Mori allows you the freedom to organize your information your way and doesn’t pre-define a file or folder organizational nesting structure. I like that.

Notebook
CIrcusPonies Notebook tool is at the other end of the scale. There may not be a richer experience in an outline and notebook metaphor on the Mac.

Notebook looks like, well, uh, a notebook. Yellow, spiral, legal, whatever you want it to be. Inside is a powerful outliner that grabs and stores everything, including photos and videos and links and text.

The big difference with Notebook is the learning curve. It’s not an overnight success like Mori, though it can do much more. Take the time to learn Notebook.

Mori and Notebook are not free. Journler is.

Journler
This nifty Mac journal application is self-described as “elegant, beautiful, powerful.” Journler is all that and more. While Notebook and Mori can capture anything you can type, Journler integrates with iLife to capture parts of your life in a journal.

Organization of a digital life isn’t just calendars, outlines, projects, and contacts. Some of our life can be organized and captured in a journal.

Journler is an entry-based information manager, perfect for thinkers, writers, teachers, students, business people.

OmniGraffle
Organizing your digital life isn’t limited to calendar and addressbook, or outliners, or notebooks. You can also organize with a graffle. OK, I have no clue what “graffle” means, but I used OmniGraffle anyway.

OmniGraffle is from Omni Group, the same folks who make OmniWeb. Your guess is as good as mine as to the meaning of Graffle. What it does is diagramming and drawing.

There are times when you just need to communicate better and diagram charts do that better than words and OmniGraffle does it better than any tool I’ve used, Mac or Windows.

Flow charts, org charts, family trees, office layouts, home layouts, projects, anything that needs a diagram can be done in OmniGraffle.

It isn’t just organizing, it’s how you organize and how much effort you put into it. OmniGraffle can be very simple to use, yet has enough tools and features to keep the most anal retentive organizer busy for days.

Process
The problem with most organizational tools is that there isn’t just one that does a little of everything. We live in an age of specialists, so we need a tool for every problem.

Jumsoft’s Process goes against the grain and brings together a few specialties like organizing, scheduling, planning, coordinating, collaborating-- all in a single, straightforward application.

There’s notes, projects, tasks, sharing, file storage, and more-- all in a single window. If you don’t want five tools to learn, then learn one that does five things.

Our digital lives are more complicated than ever. What do you use to organize yourself? Go through the list. Text, Projects, Tasks, and so on. Do you use more than one tool? How many and which ones? Share your experience in the Comments section below.

Off Topic Note: Have you ever noticed how much Apple’s “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” television commercials remind you of Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote? Seriously.