I've already reviewed Quicksilver here before, but I'm coming back to it.

This latest (b66) adds the ability to pop up a Quick Look window for any file (or URL) you enter. This makes it SO much easier to find things, it's just ridiculous (after all, don't almost all of us have a bunch of files with very similar names, where we'd like to figure out which one's which? Regardless of where they are in our directory structures?)

It's simply a bad-ass piece of software. Not perfect, but bad-ass for sure. Oh, and they give it away. So at least TRY Quicksilver for a couple weeks before you BUY a "launcher" program. None of QS's "competitors" offer anything like the power of Quicksilver.

Sparrow does basically the same thing Mailplane does: make the Gmail service behave as a native Mac application. Sparrow is a much, much better implementation of this idea, however. Where Mailplane just wraps a few Mac controls around the HTML-based Gmail, Sparrow rebuilds the Gmail interface from the ground up.

Sparrow puts all your Gmail labels into pop-up menus, so that you can right-click a message, and instantly apply the desired labels. It presents messages in a three-pane horizontal interface, so that you can view your inbox and a message/thread at the same time. It allows you to maintain multiple Gmail instances at the same time, and you can switch between them by clicking on the buddy icon representing that account at the far left of the Sparrow window. (Nice, nice touch.) And it gives you a global shortcut for "new message."

Contrary to some reviewers, I don't think Sparrow uses an egregious amount of RAM. If you're really using your Gmail capacity, the client will have to cache a lot of stuff, and it's nice to keep some of that in memory, where you can get at it. In any event, Sparrow uses less memory according to "top" than Mailplane does for me.

I wish that I could tweak the colors of certain UI elements. For example, I don't think there's enough contrast in the stripe that shows which email in your inbox is selected. Color selection is the only "missing" feature I've identified so far, though I'll probably think of others in a few days.

I have been on NNW for a while, and still think its interface for browsing is near the top. (NNW does not support swipe gestures, though, for reasons that I cannot figure.)

But NNW recently shipped a very buggy, weird release, so I went out looking for a replacement. I like the Google Reader sync, so I looked at Reeder, Gruml, and NewsRack. Reeder doesn't even make sense to me. Gruml's tab handling seems awkward.

NewsRack seems to get most things quite right. If I could use 1Password with it, I'd dump NNW in a heartbeat.

I have not tried PokerZebra. So why am I writing this comment?

To let you know that PokerZebra does essentially what PokerStove does. PokerStove is a free Windows application. Mac users can simply get PokerStove (for free, at pokerstove.com), and package it up as a standalone Mac app using WineBottler (http://winebottler.kronenberg.org/). It takes about five minutes.

Or, you can pay $4.99 for PokerZebra.

If you want a poker analysis package for Mac, I would really suggest going with the venerable PokerTracker, which has been released now for Mac. Although it's a little clunky, UI-wise, it provides very, very deep stats, and all of them are easily used on poker strategy websites. It's not much more than CoPilot, and has a much more flexible database.