I recently noticed there are a set of apps in my Dock which are constantly open. I use them all every single day, almost without fail. Why not write yours in the comments below – these are mine!

The Hit List – It took more than 10 years to move away from pen & paper. After 10 years of failed electronic todo lists, came The Hit List. On the face of it you just press Enter, type your todo and that’s it. But if you need it, there are lots of powerful features that keep you organised and delivering my projects on time.

BBEdit – I’m in the business of text. Lots of text in many different languages. BBEdit is the perfect text editor: great colour coding, multi-language auto-completion, folder view, split view, support for every text encoding under the sun. I switched from SubEthaEdit to BBEdit and, apart from collaboration, it outclasses it in every way.

Skype – I communicate with up to 30 different people in one day. They may be clients or translators, friends or family. Despite a lot of grumbles about Skype’s UI, I couldn’t imagine doing my job without it. Years ago I used to use iChat, but you couldn’t rely on it and it wasn’t universal. I’m a paid Skype user and I love it.

Notational Velocity – Dealing with so many requests and projects, Notational Velocity is a simple, UI-clean way of keeping track of payments. In accounting terms it’s my log book. It syncs with SimpleNote too so I’m always able to get hold of my information. Really easy, no thought note tracking.

MarsEdit – MarsEdit was a surprising purchase. After losing many wordpress posts mid-writing, I decided to look for a native client. MarsEdit makes posting and updating your blog ridiculously easy. Not only that, productivity has increased ten-fold. I write far more of these annoying posts than every before

Espresso - Everyone who works with HTML/CSS has a favourite app. Mine is Espresso. A few years ago when I was comparing it to Coda, it just worked for me. Espresso 2 is even better and makes making changes to my website a breeze.

Spotify - Last but not least, a little fun while working. Spotify was easily my best purchase of 2011. I’ve discovered so much music, something I was quite lazy at doing before. People actually ask me “how come you have so much music?” and within 10 minutes they’ve bought a subscription too. Just great.