I’m currently beta-testing two new Mac apps that I love and at least one is approaching “can’t live without” status.

Mailplane is a desktop wrapper around GMail that used webkit and provides all kinds of Mac-like spit-n-polish for Google’s ubiquitous webmail platform. There are command-keys for new message, discard, archive, star (a favorite: command-*). etc. You can drag files onto the Mailplane compose window to attach them to the document, and it even has a shortcut for taking a screenshot and emailing it to someone. Using Mailplane means that I can close/open new browser windows all day long (and being a web developer means I am) without having to remember to re-open Gmail when I accidently close that window/tab. It also means that clicking mailto: links open in Mailplane/GMail. W00t!

The other is Plasq’s Skitch, which I was turned onto after Merlin Mann mentioned it on Macbreak Weekly.

I’ve been using Skitch for all my screenshots on this site for a few months now, I’ve used it at work for processing screengrabs for our applications, and it’s a huge timesaver. While Plasq provides a “MySkitch” web service to host your screenshots, I setup SFTP so uploading an image is as easy as clicking “upload”, then “copy” and pasting the html into a blog post.