Cult Readers Pick Chrome And OmmWriter As Best New Applications Of 2009

Giles Turnbull ()

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Just before Christmas, we asked you: What were your favorite desktop apps of 2009?

Based on the responses we got, two apps got fractionally more mentions than most: Google Chrome, and OmmWriter. Neither of which were apps I expected to see topping many end-of-year lists.

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Chrome appeared as an official Mac beta just at the beginning of December, and with a bunch of features missing: no extentions, no bookmark manager.

But lots of people love it anyway. It’s fast as hell, the separate processes for each tab is great, the history manager rocks, and it’s been doing very nicely thank you.

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And OmmWriter? Wow, that was an app that really caught people’s imagination. When I first wrote about it at the end of November, I was somewhat bemused. I couldn’t see the appeal. But a lot of people could. OmmWriter has an enthusiastic following on Twitter and recently released an update with new features like word count and auto save. It’s clear that this is an app on the up, and development is ongoing in earnest. Keep your eyes on it.

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One final brief thing to note is that Twitter clients also featured well in our list, with Tweetie, Tweetdeck, and Socialite all getting mentions. It’s a sign of Twitter’s growing dominance that desktop Twitter apps are cropping up on people’s lists of favorites.

9 comments »

About the author

gilest

Giles Turnbull is a freelance writer in England. He writes for the Press Association and The Morning News. He has a website you can ignore and a Twitter account you needn't follow.

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Posted in News, OS X, Software |

  • Miguel_A

    I dislike them both.
    The New Age ambient of Ommwriter makes me nervous, and my favorite new is browser is Camino 2

  • http://gilest.org Giles Turnbull

    +1 for Camino, Miguel. Chrome’s nice, but nothing has yet persuaded me to abandon Camino wonderfulness :)

  • Allie

    Yep, same here. I use Camino all the time. Only about once week I fire up Safari to check if a site has loaded properly in Camino, only to find out that Safari doesn’t do a better job than Camino.

  • Mezzrow

    Google still gives me the creeps, and I still prefer Camino over Safari or Firefox. It’s probably not as fast as Chrome, but it’s still faster than the other two on my Mac.

  • ged

    I looked at the ommwriter webpage and I thought WTF is it?
    How can that be? Mronic it seems to me.

  • Charel

    For me Camino displays pages Safari has problems with. Safari is my default browser though.
    Google takes away too much of my privacy to trust them.

  • http://mottr.am/omw Jack Mottram

    I’m completely bewildered by the popularity of Ommwriter – I always give new text editors a decent try-out, and this is the first one in 15 years on the Mac that has actually managed to make me *angry* (this may say more about me than Ommwriter, admittedly) once I’d established it definitely wasn’t a hoax designed to mock the GTD loons.

  • http://timscouten.wordpress.com/ Tim

    Love it, Ommwriter is the bomb, Just posted on it the other day. http://timscouten.wordpress.com/2010/01/08/ommwriter-a-quiet-place-for-your-mind-to-write/

  • Mandy

    I wouldn’t call OmmWriter a text editor. It doesn’t edit anything. It just gives a pretty, peaceful atmosphere for writers to write in – which is especially helpful for ADD sufferers or those with writer’s block. I’ve used it to churn out a few pieces and I’d go so far as to say the ambiance made my writing better.