For programmers, there's two tools that they will use everyday. A terminal and a text editor. For writers it might be a text editor and a knowledge management tool like Evernote. What I'm trying to say is that for everyone there's a number of tools that you will use everyday. What about those tools in the background, the ones that you will use everyday, but do the little tasks in the background?

Here's a complete list of the background tools that I use daily:

• 1Password - The best password manager out there and also means that I don't need to remember my passwords anymore.
• Alfred 2 - Application launcher and automator. Used daily, Alfred is my first point of interaction to all my applications and their actions. New blog posts, searching, programming docs, colour codes and more are all taken care of by Alfred.
• Anvil - As a Rails developer, it's great to be able to manage applications I'm running locally. I use POW to get my development applications running locally, but Anvil provides a nice interface on top of this from the menu bar.
• Broom - Disk space manager. Great for identifying large files and folders.
• Divvy - When it comes to my desktop setup, I'm very set in my ways. I have my laptop screen split into two panes. Small area apps like Kiwi, occupy the left pane, about 30% of the screen in terms of width, and other apps sit on the right pane. I've had it set up this way for months. Using Divvy makes this super easy as I have keyboard shortcuts for putting windows in these panes as well as 50/50 splits and using the full screen.
• Fantastical - Fantastical is my gateway to my calendar. Using a shortcut key, I can add meetings and appointments to my calendar on any day without having to reach for the mouse.
• f.lux - Keeps my screen easy to read depending on the time of day and my location. Great for early morning coding.
• PopClip - I'm a bit of a newcomer when it comes to PopClip, but having that popup when you copy and paste stuff is such a timesaver. When you select text PopClip appears with a number of actions depending on the application you are using. I've only added a couple of custom actions so far, but it's already proving to be very useful.
• RSS Notifier - I already use Feedbin for my RSS subscriptions, but RSS Notifier takes a special set of RSS feeds that are related to my job. I use it to get get updates on hosting platforms, service levels and outages. Having this run with notifications means that I can see if any of my clients will have any technical problems with the hosting of their sites and applications.

That's it. All the tools that I view as background tools that support my day to day working. These apps are always lurking in the background doing something to help make my day easier. Apps like this usually have a single purpose that they do really well. They might have other features as well, but as long as they do their primary function well, I'll keep using them.