MemoBlock is a slick notepad application for Mac. You can store text notes in any font/color style you like, transfer content to iPods, export as vNote files and more.  MemoBlock also has a cool alarm feature that you can set for individual notes, and notes can be divided into as many categories as you like.  The latest version brings an improved find box, support for vNote (.vnt) files, and a over a dozen other changes.

NewsLife is an RSS aggregator designed around the concept of simplicity and ease of use. There aren’t a lot of confusing settings or configurations to fight through, and that’s a good thing. What NewsLife does, it does very well - and very simply. You subscribe to a feed, and it displays it… easy as that.

The interface in NewsLife is very intuitive and they start you out with a few feeds to get you going. Any you don’t like are a just an apple key + delete away from never bothering you again. Likewise adding your own feeds is as simple as hitting apple key + N and pasting in the address of any feed you’d like to add.

Changes Meter will keep an eye on any URL and let you know if the content on that page changes.

You know that we are big fans of using RSS feeds to keep up with websites. But not all sites offer feeds. With Changes Meter, you can enter any url and you’ll be notified if the page changes.

You can use the incredibly useful menu bar icon or you can keep an eye in the roster window.

I know that nearly everyone shudders at the mention of “bulk email” but sometimes there is a legit reason for sending an email to a large group. For instance, recently I found something interesting about my family history. I wanted to tell my large family about this find, but putting the full list of email addresses in my “To:” field may have put up some flags of spam with some email providers. This is where Serial Mail comes in.

With Serial Mail, you just put all the recipients into a group in your Address Book. Then, you create a draft of the email in Mail.app. Once it is saved as a draft, you highlight it and run Serial Mail. This app will create a separate email for each address in the group and send it along to that person.

As you can imagine, this would work well for coaches, scout leaders, teachers, business owners and anyone else who has a large group that they lead. It worked great for me. Even with all 112 family members.

Buddi joins the ranks of other financial apps on Freemacware.com. I consider this one of the best in the class. Buddy has a nice icon and a clean interface. You can setup checking accounts and loans, add transactions, and then generate reports and graphs of your activity. It’s really straight forward to use. It can also encrypt your data file for added security.

AppFresh will check all the applications, plugins, widgets, etc on your machine and check to see if they are up to date with the latest version available. The setup is simple and easy to understand and this application has the potential to save you a ton of time.

Right now, AppFresh doesn’t replace your apps. It just downloads the new version and places it on your Desktop. Then, you are able to do the updates that you want.

With all the applications that I download for FreeMacWare, I had a lot of updates to do. My one complaint is that you are only able to do one at a time. I’d much prefer to have the ability to continue choosing apps to update while the others are downloading. It turns out that you can do more than one at a time, but you have to select them all and then hit the Update button.

Preview.app does a good job at opening PDF files, but I end up printing a lot of my PDF files out because I like to mark them up and jot down notes. Now Skim lets that marking happen in my digital work flow. Skim is a PDF Reader and note-taker for OS X.

You can create circles, notes, highlights and read it all in full screen.

Google Desktop lets you search your own Mac. (This has been available for PC for a while, but was just released for Mac.) You can search files, documents, music, email, chat transcripts, and Address Book contacts all from a single window. Sounds familiar? It is indeed a competitor to Spotlight. One cool feature is that it puts search results from your computer in the Google interface. So if you do a Google search in Camino, you can search Web, Images, Video, etc. OR Desktop — your own Mac.

Google Desktop installs a lot of files to achieve this functionality, and reviews haven’t been glowing, but the uninstaller successfully removes them all if you choose you don’t like it. It’s certain to get better over time and with user feedback.

David Allen wrote the book on Getting Things Done, which has some great principles for increased productivity. For a summary see the Wikipedia article or Merlin Mann’s 43 Folders.

iGTD brings David Allen’s workflow to the Mac, including an inbox, projects, contexts, pending, “maybe” taxes, and “waiting for” tasks. You can drag tasks between contexts and projects, and you can drag Address Book entries into iGTD.

It also comes with a Quicksilver plugin so you can funnel stuff through Quicksilver to the iGTD inbox.

I wish I could list tasks in multiple contexts and simultaneously in projects, but overall iGTD facilitates the GTD workflow pretty darn well.

Shindler makes it easy to keep track of what is on your external hard drives and USB devices. Just drag and drop a folder or or drive on the app’s icon and it will create a text file that lists all the files by their location.

I’ve been looking for a way to do this for free since Touvaly went the way of the almighty dollar.

(Note: This developer also offers some other useful apps.)