Recently, I’ve been on a kick to increase productivity and find better ways of getting things done.  Nothing too extreme, mainly streamlining, learning from others, and finding productivity aids.  Here’s some software that I’ve looked into.

MenuCalendarClock.  Okay, not a true productivity enhancer, but Apple’s own menu clock wasn’t the greatest, and I wanted a quick way to view a calendar without bringing up iCal or Entourage.  Heck, I’ve been “testing” MenuCalendarClock for over 1500 days and finally paid my dues (and registration fee).  Since MenuCalendarClock syncs with iCal (or Entourage), you also have a fast way of viewing what’s coming up on your schedule.

Evernote.  To collect notes, images, and all kinds of other tidbits, I’ve been using Yojimbo, primarily for its syncing ability with .Mac/MobileMe.  I can save something in Yojimbo, and it’ll show up on my sync-ed computers.  But something happened that broke the synchronization and fixing it sounds hard.  So this is an opportunity to reassess what’s out there, and that’s where I heard about Evernote.  Evernote is impressive.  At its core, it functions similarly to Yojimbo, but its ubiquity is way better.  Evernote syncs to its own servers and has apps for mobile devices, a desktop app, a web interface, a mobile web interface, and ties to Twitter.  You can tweet to Evernote, and it’ll save that tweet in your Evernote Notebook.   Yojimbo is limited to a desktop app only.

The main drawback with Evernote is the cost for the premium service.  An annual cost is $45 but includes additional services and features, but over time, this price will definitely add up.  For now, I’ll try the free service and also look at SpringPad.

Transmit.  I haven’t made the switch to Panic’s Transmit FTP client.  I’m still using Fetch, but I keep reading great reviews for Transmit.  And my version of Fetch (v5.3) is not eligible for a free upgrade to the latest 5.6.  What’s the big deal with an FTP client?  I’m not really, really sure hence me staying with an out-of-date Fetch, but if productivity gains are there with FTP, I just might have to move to Transmit.

Backblaze.  To backup all this productivity, I’ve been looking at Backblaze.  Amazingly, this service backs up majority of your data to its online service so that you have an off-site backup.  This save-your-butt solution goes for $50 a year without any data storage limitations.  Backblaze will not backup single files bigger than 4 GB, but that’s okay with me.  I’ve heard of Mozy, Jungle Disk, and Carbonite, but the “unlimited” data storage for Backblaze can’t be beat.

Alfred.  Back in March, I asked about Mac app launchers.  Marvo highly recommends LaunchBar, Foojish uses Butler, and Steve mentioned Google’s Quick Search Box.  LaunchBar might be overkill for me and costs $35.  Butler really wasn’t what I wanted, so I quickly gravitated to the free and usable Quick Search Box.  While it worked, it was slow and would crash several times in a week.  I recently moved to Alfred and am pleased.  It’s fast, does what I need, looks modern, and is free!  But it is in beta status.

And there you have it, my recent kick looking at productivity enhancing apps and services.  What are yours?