Autograph is an example of an app that does only one thing, but does it brilliantly. All Autograph does is allows me to sign things on my computer. A simple press of a universal shortcut causes a window to pop up, inviting me to sign my trackpad. I sign the trackpad, press return, and the signature is inserted into whatever I’m working on.

That is all it does. There are other, less elegant, solutions to this problem. I could have a scanned and stored JPG of my signature which I would import into a document as and when needed. But this solution is so simple and so elegant that it’s worth the couple of quid the app costs.

Check out their website, and see if you wouldn’t find a use for Autograph. I really recommend it.

I don’t understand why Kuvva isn’t more popular. It’s brilliant, simple and free: what more could anybody want?

Each week, Kuvva get an artist to design a series of desktop wallpapers. The free app then changes the desktop wallpaper to a new design each day. Over the course of a week, the wallpapers are all from a single artist, usually in a single style. Then, the following week, it’s a new artist and a new style. Sometimes it’s photography, sometimes it’s digital art, sometimes it’s hand-drawn. It’s a really brilliant idea, and it’s totally free.

Occasionally, the art is bizarre enough for me not to want to display it at work, but there is a function to designate “favourite” artists, and have only their work appearing.

Overall, Kuvva is brilliant, free, and available for Windows and Mac. What are you waiting for?

I’m a fairly recent convert to extensive bookmarking. Despite doing an awful lot of stuff online, I’ve survived most of my time with about 30 bookmarks in my bookmarks bar. Up until recently, I considered bookmarks as quick-access links to commonly used sites.

It’s only relatively recently that I got frustrated with losing sites that I didn’t use all that frequently, but wanted to refer to from time to time. And so, after reading about it on the Guardian site, I tried using Pinboard to allow me to store and search through far more bookmarks. This cleared some of the less frequently used ones from my bookmarks bar, which was appreciated, and meant that I got much better at bookmarking any site that I thought I might want to refer back to in future.

Pinboard has a bookmarklet system which allows you to add new items, but Delibar takes this to the next level. Delibar sits in the menubar, and gives me instant, searchable access to all my bookmarks. It also installs a (customisable) universal shortcut which allows me to bookmark any page in mere moments.

It’s a very, very simple app, but one that does it’s job perfectly. It also works with delicious, but I’ve never felt able to get on very well with that particular service, so can’t really comment on how well that works.

Delibar and Pinboard have revolutionised the way I bookmark, and they might do the same for you. Give them a go!

Since I use and love Evernote and Dropbox, you might wonder what possible use I can get out of Droplr. After all, all three apps store things in the cloud, and all three apps have sharing features.

The thing I love about Droplr is its pure speed and simplicity. It doesn’t do anything that Evernote and Dropbox can’t do, it just does it more gracefully. Essentially, if I want to share something – be that a file, a URL, or just a chunk of text – I drag it to the Droplr icon in my menubar. That automatically uploads it to Droplr and sticks a short URL on my clipboard. So, to send that last sentence to Droplr, I simply dragged it to the icon, and it generated this URL: http://go.sjh.im/IsGt. A simple Cmd-V then inserted it into this post. That’s just two actions: drag it to the icon and paste.

It’s that simplicity that I love about Droplr. And it’s free. So why not give it a go?

When I first came across Read it Later and similar services, I struggled to understand what they were for. This might sound odd, because I had a long-term habit of emailing myself links to stories and videos that I wanted to deal with later. For example, an interesting link might appear on twitter when I haven’t the time to follow it. Previously, I would (really) email myself the tweet. Then I discovered a better way.

Read it Later is now Pocket, and I use it all the time for saving links that I might want to follow up later. I use ifttt.com to send all of Bobbie Johnson’s If You Only tweets directly to Pocket, and then delete them from there on the rare occasion that I’m not interested in the subject matter.

I do most of my Pocket reading via my iPhone or iPad, but occasionally I fancy reading something on my Mac. I could, of course, go directly to the Pocket website, but I like something a little cleaner. The answer to this problem is a simple app: Read Later, which works with both Pocket and Instapaper. It’s a ridiculously simple app, which shows a list of my saved stories on the left, and a simplified, easy-to-read view of the article on the right. Perfect. There’s a also buttons to share articles by any one of a number of means, be it email, Twitter, Facebook, Pinboard, or something else.

The beauty of Read Later is that it reduces the barrier to reading all of that stuff that I mean to read. I don’t have to fire up and login to a website, it’s a single click on my Dock, and I’m in. It’s fantastic, free, and worth a download.

YoruFukurou is my favourite desktop twitter app. In most apps, it’s simplicity that I like, but YoruFukurou is one of the more complex, deeply customisable twitter apps. I like the fact that I can customise everything about it, picking colours carefully and getting everything just right.

Other twitter apps all seem to have something missing, or just don’t feel right for me. That said, if a desktop version of Tweetbot was released, I’d ditch YoruFukurou in a second. Tweetbot is an absolutely exceptional iOS twitter client that I use constantly and really love. But, having tried lots of different desktop options, it’s currently YoruFukurou that does it for me.

I’ve used Google Reader for years. I find it a really useful way of managing the many RSS feeds I subscribe to, but I hate its online interface. This means that I’ve spent years using various desktop applications that work with it. I’ve tried lots of them, but the one that’s currently occupying a space on my dock is Reeder, which I also use on my iPhone.

Reeder has everything I want in an RSS reader. It allows me to manage my Google Reader subscriptions from within the app, which many alternatives don’t. It clearly shows my entire RSS inbox on the left, and the contents of each individual item on the right. The weblink to the full article is a click away, as is the Readability version, which I usually try first. It will allow me to tweet or email articles with a single click, and also has a button to send them straight to Pocket. There are built-in options for loads of other services too.

I think Reeder is brilliant, and I highly recommend it.

I spent five years at university studying medicine, yet somehow remained completely unaware of the existence of referencing software. I don’t know how this came about, but I manually referenced every single assignment I did during my medical degree – and so did Wendy. How the existence of EndNote in particular passed us both by, I’m not entirely sure.

By the time I embarked on my Masters in 2010, I was aware of EndNote, but we were far from friends. The couple of times I’d tried to use it, I’d had nightmarish corruption errors, and had always quickly reverted to referencing by hand. With the prospect of a whole load of Masters assignments and a dissertation looming, I thought that there must be a better way. And I discovered Mendeley.

Mendeley is an excellent free reference manager. It stores your reference library in the cloud, so that you can (should you so choose) even access it via an iPhone app. I never really found a use for that feature, but Mendeley did see me through a number of Masters assignments. But Mendeley, like Endnote, has an occasional irritating moments of stubbornness, where it will claim that a document connection has become corrupted, or some such nonsense, and will require a bit of sorting out. Generally, copying and pasting the entire text into a new document did the trick, but the frequency with which this happened make me nervous.

Then, I discovered Papers 2. It’s completely brilliant. I actually don’t really understand how it works, but it doesn’t rely on flaky plugins, or any requirement to use specific word-processing software. It just works, has fully cite-while-you-write functionality with a global shortcut, and is a joy to use. It isn’t free, but does have a free trial, and offers a generous academic discount for students. It has an iOS app too, but I’ve never used it, as I still don’t understand why I’d want that functionality. It’s available on Windows as well as Mac, though I’ve never tried that version.

Before using Papers 2, I’d thought that the whole software category of reference managers was, by definition, flaky and unreliable. Yet I don’t think I’ve ever seen Papers 2 crash, and it has certainly never messed up the references in an actual written document.

Papers 2 is a total, total joy to use, both for organising papers, and for citing them. It’s an app I cannot recommend highly enough for anybody who does even vaguely academic writing. It’s completely brilliant.

My life runs on Evernote. Evernote is my virtual filing cabinet, which contains both my work and my life. Evernote means that I can access important documents from anywhere – including my iPhone and iPad. It means that I don’t lose scraps of paper, either because things never make it to paper, or because I scan and upload to Evernote. Evernote means that I can search everything, including all of my scanned documents via OCR. And Evernote is fast, reliable, and has a generous free provision (though I pay for extra storage).

The best bit about Evernote is that it allows me to appear far more organised than I actually am. If anybody ever asks if I have a copy of something, I almost always know that the answer is yes, and I can find it in seconds with a simple search. That’s something that my haphazard filing system (comprising mainly a pile of documents on my desk) could never achieve.

I know that many people are evangelical about Dropbox for similar reasons to my Evernote evangelism. I understand why people love Dropbox, and I use it myself (mainly for backing up certain files that aren’t in my Evernote), but Evernote is something slightly different. I could replicate my Evernote organisation with a hierarchy of folders, but it wouldn’t feel the same, mainly because it would be displayed differently. I like that a note can contain multiple files as well as text – admittedly, a folder could do the same, but not in the same integrated way.

I was very sceptical about Evernote at first, but thought I’d give it a go. I was sold mainly on the search and anywhere-access capabilities, but have come to appreciate the whole way Evernote works. I’d strongly suggest giving it a go, and seeing if Evernote might just fit into your life and workflow.

I frequently recommend some of the apps I use on my Mac to other people, and generally get a positive reaction. However, I’ve never really written about them on this blog.

From tomorrow, that changes. For the next few weeks, I’ll be writing about a different desktop app that I love each week. It will appear online on a Wednesday morning, and will continue for as long as I have an app in mind that I use regularly, really love, and want to recommend (about ten weeks, I imagine). I hope you’ll enjoy it.

I’m also working on my “personal canon”, inspired by Robin Sloan’s excellent Fish (and David Cole’s excellent example). That won’t include apps, but I am planning to include books, music, and television alongside weblinks. That’s probably a few weeks away from being finished (or, as finished as the first iteration will ever be), so keep an eye out for that.