The Mac platform is blessed with tons of excellent productivity tools, outliners, and task managers. Despite this, the majority of these apps have been founded on the GTD philosophy, and while that’s not necessarily a bad thing, I’ve always wanted a separate application for managing tasks that specifically relate to school. You could certainly do this in an application like Things or The Hit List, but it can get quite messy since you’d have to create tags for classes, then you have to manage assignments alongside your business stuffs, and you just get bogged down in everything rather than the schoolwork you want to focus on.

Enter Schoolhouse, an application dedicated to providing you with the management tools needed to stay on task and get those assignments turned in on time. It also features an incredibly smart grading tool that can calculate weighted and unweighted grades, which is an amazing time saver compared to doing it by hand on the Ti-83.

Keep on reading to find out what makes this app one of my favorites.

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There’s an interesting paradox floating around the Mac OS X scene: there are a lot of interesting apps to manage tasks and make your to-do workflow easier, but most of these apps are difficult to manage. What a nice situation: getting things done with an application that requires 2 minutes just to set up a new task. And trust me: it’s full of apps like these out there. Now, the situation isn’t that tragic fortunately: it’s also true that there are many excellent apps, both for Mac and yes, the iPhone.

Today I’d like to talk about what’s in my opinion the best to-do management and task organizer app currently available for Mac and iPhone: Things. I’ll explain how I’ve set it up in order to manage MacStories’ activities and scheduled tasks and how I made it work as a team project management app as well.

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There are two features of Mac OS X I really couldn’t live without: Exposè and Spaces. Built-in into Leopard and Snow Leopard, Exposè and Spaces are indeed two applications that make managing all your open windows and workflows easier and painless. They’re not two “linked” apps, but basically everyone combines them in order to get the best results. If you don’t what Spaces and Exposè are, you should seriously take a tour into your Mac OS X Utilities folder and System Preferences. Sorry if don’t go into the details of these two apps, but I suppose you already know them.

Now, there’s a developer out there who thought Spaces could be a lot better. And by a lot I mean, a lot. Meet Hyperspaces: a very simple yet powerful addition to Spaces.app.

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Everyday I save a lot of stuff from my internet life: links, pictures, videos..all my digital life usually goes into some applications I use as “buckets” where I throw all these digital media. They’re Yojimbo, LittleSnapper and the recently released web application ZooTool. Having a complete organizer application is usually a good practice, especially if that app supports tags, smart collections and a quite usual folder structure. Now, what about organizing the stuff from my “real” life? I’m talking about CDs, DVDs, gadgets, videogames and so on. Some well sorted room shelves can actually do the job but we’re Mac people - we need an app for that.

And here comes Delicious Library, the perfect tool for organizing, managing and even giving some eye-candy to your stuff. Your real stuff.

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Not all of us know CSS. Some do, and many do not. What a lot of people do know, however, is how to write documents that reference CSS files.

MacRabbit’a CSSEdit is a fantastic editing tool for CSS gurus to the least savvy of the lot.

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I daily look for new Mac and iPhone applications I can write about and promote on MacStories. I’m subscribed to hundreds of blogs, post on many forums, browse Emberapp and read tweets so that I can keep up with the newest releases in the development scene. But sometimes, and this seems to happen very often recently, it’s not a Mac or iPhone app I want to write about, but it’s a web application.

Web applications are great. And useful. And powerful. Sometimes they’re not as polished as native Cocoa software, sometimes they’re not even fast and stable. On the other hand, sometimes they’re amazingly feature rich, gorgeous and blazing fast apps. “This could be a Mac app”, I say when I stumble upon a webapp like that. And that’s why I decided to start this new series on MacStories.

“It could be a Mac app” will feature beautiful web applications that yeah -  they are as powerful, sexy and yet simple as a Mac app should always be. You can either run it in your browser or make it a Fluid app, it doesn’t matter. The first app I’d like to talk about is Zootool, a young startup from Germany, which in my opinion will revolutionize the way we collect data and information on the web.

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For those looking for a decent IRC client for the Mac, it’s slim pickings.

Certainly there are a couple of free solutions available, such as Colloquy, but if you’re interested in a single window IRC client that looks absolutely gorgeous, look no further than Linkinus.

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I knew this was going to happen. The day my “Images” folder would become too big to manage in the Finder and I should switch to a 3rd party software to collect and organize all the images I have on my Mac. I’m that kind of guy that saves very cool and interesting image he finds during the day: it could be a screenshost of an app website, it could be some “fail pic” found on Twitter or even a screenshot of a bug somewhere on a web app. I save everything on my hard drive and organize the new stuff before going to sleep. Then, it came the day I realized I needed a more powerful and efficient tool to manage my Library (yeah, as time passed by it became a library of lots of GBs) as the Finder didn’t offer the features I wanted in order to effectively sort thousands of images and screenshots. I felt the need of tags, a more structured folder organization, I wanted to be able to quickly attach metadata to everything in a few easy steps, I wanted to divide all the files into “type”.

Turns out LittleSnapper was aimed at me.

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Safari is a great browser. It’s fast, simple, elegant and definitely gets the job done. I was using Firefox until some months ago, but then I switched because it became slow, unresponsive and a huge memory hog.So I started using Safari, and I couldn’t be happier than this. Well, actually yes - I could be happier. I’d like to have better support for 3rd party plugins, or at least a more extensible Safari. With more features for sharing, developing, saving stuff.

Thank God I’ve just stumbled upon Quix app, which is very likely to stay in my bookmarks toolbar for the upcoming months.

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