Welcome to Nik’s Picks. This is a little spot where I’ll devote some time to mentioning some of the best Mac-related hardware and software out there.

To begin with, I figured I’d mention the single application that keeps my life in order, gathers my thoughts, and spits them out in an orderly fashion: OmniOutliner Professional.

OmniOutliner Professional is a top notch outlining , list keeping and personal productivity application.

Okay, what the heck does that mean?

Let’s say you want to keep a list with some measure of organization. Well, OmniOutliner’s great for that. You can even add notes to items in the list. Pretty slick, eh?

Okay, I admit, that wasn’t too impressive. Let’s say that list is, instead, a list of important dates you need to memorize for a history test. So you can add a date column and keep a date in there.

Or, maybe it’s a hierarchy of people you know and how much they earn. Add a number column, maybe a job-title column, and you have a wonderful, sortable list. You can also record sound into the application, add URLs, images, and even embed whole files in there!

But sure, there’s tons of outlining and snippet keeping applications out there. What makes OmniOutliner so impressive?

Well, it’s the little things that add up to big things. The custom columns are a dream. Spotlight and automator actions and an amazing Applescript dictionary. (So good, in fact, that you can make whole applications, using nothing but it’s Applescript dictionary!) Great user interface, responsive support, and it’s native on MacIntels! (That’s “Universal Binary” in official Apple terms.)