As a graphic designer and blogger my life (and job) wouldn’t be complete without a handful of great apps — some being a must-have, while others proving to be nothing short of amazing and handy.
Below is a list of 16 useful, time saving, and must-have applications (that’s programs, for you PC users) that will make designing, developing and blogging easier.
Skitch
Skitch takes screen capturing to a new level:
1. Ruler guides and pixel dimensions are shown when dragging out the area of the screen you want to capture — great for web designers and bloggers that need images to be a specific size.
2. Add drop shadows or annotate with shapes, lines or text
3. Quickly  save files as .jpg, .tiff, and .png’s
4. Saves a history of all your screenshots so you can easily access them later
Evernote
Evernote allows you to store and organize web clips with tags and also, creates and stores picture, text and audio notes. What’s great is that your information is accessible from anywhere via the web.
Perfect for remembering things… like that awesome blog, The Design Cubicle, you read about and would like to share with your friends! 
TextMate
TextMate claimed “Apple’s missing text editor”, is a great tool for web developers and coders. It’s a suped- up text editor with a huge list of features to help your workflow.
CSSEdit
CSSEdit is awesome, and you should definitely own it if you do anything with CSS. ‘Nough said! Designed for anybody with beginner to advanced knowledge of CSS. I really learned a lot as a beginner with this program. It is much more graphic than just plain lines of code, like most editors.
Cyberduck
Cyberduck is a great FTP program for your Mac without the pricetag of Transmit
Linotype FontExplorer X
FontExplorer is a font manager that easily allows you to install fonts, group fonts, buy fonts and preview sentences within the program. I’m a brand new user to FontExplorer, but me likey!
Dropbox
You can see my review of Dropbox here.
Jing
Jing is a free video screen capturing app for Windows and Mac. Create video tutorials of what you do on your monitor.
MarsEdit
The perfect addition to writing posts in Wordpress — MarsEdit gives you the opportunity to write your posts from a blog editor on your Mac and uploads them directly from the program. Much easier to compile posts this way.
Adobe AIR Apps:
Kuler
Kuler is an Adobe AIR application that generates color themes right from your desktop.
Shrink O’Matic
Batch resize images, change quality and save them in a variety of formats. Shrink O’Matic is a lightweight program so it loads and works fast.
Google Analytics Reporting Suite
Google Analytics for your desktop - perfect for web designers, bloggers, or website owners that need to monitor their website’s activity and areas where they can improve.
Ora Time and Expense
Ora is a great freelancing tool to keep track of time spent on projects. You can also create invoices and track your expenses.
WebKut
Allows you to capture full screenshots of web pages and resize them right within the program. WebKut fixes the “scrolling problem” of screen capturing.
TweetDeck
By far the best Twitter client for the desktop. TweetDeck breaks down your feeds into manageable ‘GROUP, SEARCH, REPLY and DIRECT MESSAGE’ windows. Great way to stay up-to-date with the latest and greatest news and resources from around the web.
Wordpress Moderator
A nice AIR app that allows you to view, accept and moderate your comments from your desktop. Wordpress Moderate even shows you the number of unmoderated comments in the dock.
So what’s in your toolbox?
Feel free to add your favorite apps that make your blogging, designing and developer lives easier.
I like Panic’s Coda for web development. It is basically Textmate, CSSEdit, and an FTP app all in one. It even has SVN support.
I like ExtendMac’s Flow for FTP if just uploading things non site related files.
I use Twitteriffic for Twitter.
And most importantly Billings 3 for time tracking and invoicing. It’s great cause of the control you have over how your documents look when being created. And let’s you create some nice templates for reports and other documents.
Brian, great list - I NEVER get sick of these types of lists because I’m always finding or renewing my love for certain apps that I’ve forgotten about! Trying out the moderator one for wp now
Mike -
Thanks for the great apps. I will definitely check them out. Also, I used Twitterific for awhile and it did not cut it for me. If you haven’t had the chance to give TweetDeck a try, definitely give it a go.
Adelle -
I just approved your comment with moderator
A Great list! Here’s a few more
http://www.panic.com/transmit
Paparazzi!
http://www.titanium.free.fr/pgs/english.html
I second “Coda” as a development program, nothing comes close.
I prefer “Fetch” for uploading FTP
“Twitterfox” is a lot easier and lighter than a full desktop app in my opinion.
Check out “On the Job” for time tracking and invoicing
I highly recommend “Things” for task management. Easy and simple (and available for iPhone)
Thanks so much for the list, there are a few really interesting ones here that I didn’t know about. Definitely going to have to try Skitch and Wordpress Moderator.
I love Klok (http://klok.mcgraphix.com/klok/index.htm) for time management.
Great list, thanks for sharing! I am already a regular user of kule and FontExplorer and I will add my thumbs up for these as well. The rest of the list looks very interesting, in particular Skitch and WebKut. I keep meaning to try out Tweetdeck so I’ll get onto that asap.
This is a great list! I use a couple and I’ll check out the others tomorrow.
Great list. Thanks for share
Keep it up !
Brian, Awesome list! Will try Ora, I already use Evernote and I love it! but other tools like Textmate I can’t coz I am stuck on a pc! Although I did find a decent alternate to textmate its called e-texteditor (Shhhh!).
ohhh ill have to check out the wordpress moderator app! thanks for the list!
On a related note I had a post i did a while ago called ““Be lazy, let the interwebs do it for you” that has a great collection of helpful and some not so helpful web aps
oops! the url of the post is here: http://www.nikibrown.com/designoblog/2008/07/21/be-lazy-let-the-interwebs-do-it-for-you/
Great list! I just wish that I had an Apple computer now, since 5 of the 9 pre-Adobe Air apps on this list are Mac-exclusive. That makes me a sad panda…
Awesome list! thanks for sharing these useful apps.
Wow Brian thanks for this list there are a couple of thing on here that I am definitely going to add to my toolbox.
~ Aaron I
Great list! Now I have some more fun things to play with.
This list rocks! I am now using Analytics Reporting Suite and WP Moderator -
I would like to add Zoundry - http://www.zoundryraven.com/ , it is a blog editor similar to MarsEdit for Windows.
ColorCop is a go anywhere pick any colour eyedropped. See http://colorcop.en.softonic.com (because http://colorcop.net is currently broken!) - I can’t live without it.
And FireFTP is a Firefox FTP plugin that works from inside FF - sweet and simple
Font Book can preview sentences within the program!!!
press command + 3 in Font Book then type in the text u want!!
Niki -
Great apps! I’ve used WooFoo before and love it! the other one’s are mostly new to me so I will definitely be giving them a look.
Mohsen,Tyler, Aaron, AJ & Arron -
Glad you guys found it to be useful. I am a huge software fan and always on the search for the latest and greatest apps to help my workflow.
Meryl -
Thanks for the ColorCop tip. If you on a Mac, in your Applications folder there is a Utilities folder, which an app called DigitalColor Meter can be found. Very similar to ColorCop
Athena -
Well I’ll be damned…it can! haha Glad you pointed that out…Thanks so much!
Great list man. This is awesome!!! I had no idea that Analytics had a desktop app and its freakin amazing! Keep up the good work Behoff.
Does everybody have FireBug? It is a gift from the gods for anybody doing CSS.
Thanks for putting up this list.
There is a neat little desktop tool called Fanurio http://www.fanuriotimetracking.com . I love it! You can try it for free too. You can just click to start, pause it, etc and you can do nifty reports. I use it to track the time I spend on client projects.
Even though I only bill hourly for consulting projects, it helps me to see how much time I’m spending to make sure my rates are in line. With Fanurio you can customize invoice templates using your own layouts and export them to HTML or PDF.
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I really like http://contentcube.com . As a designer, I love that it is built to handle my photoshop and illustrator files and it lets me custom brand the pages my customers use to retrieve their proofs. Very cool.
Skitch totally rocks!!!!
Also check out these other OS (free) apps for Mac:
thumbs up - batch image re-sizer
inkscape - alternative Illustrator (vector package)
Gphushed is a great app for gmail users on iphone: http://www.componentworkshop.com/blog/2009/09/01/component-workshop-releases-an-iphone-application-gphushed
Yo don’t need Jing if you use Snow Leopard. Quicktime X has a function in it which allows you to capture you’re screen as a movie.
Nice collection - definitely some apps I wasn’t aware of there that I want to try out.
As for screencapturing, I really like Fireshot - a firefox add-on that allows for capturing the entire browser content without having to stitch together. There’s a free version, and while admittedly, it can only capture what is inside Firefox, I rarely find the need to capture other desktop content. When I do, I use the inbuilt Mac shortcuts.