Kinopio

This one's very dear to me. It's a brainstorming/mind-mapping/inspiration boarding/etc tool that does a couple of things differently than most of the tools on the SaaS landscape.

It's not striving for minimalism, in fact, it's rather maximalist: there are watercolor backgrounds, pastel cards, wiggly connector lines, clay characters... I avoided it for a long time because I thought it was cute but not a tool you could be productive with. Coming from apps like iA Writer and Things, it felt somehow... off. But after some time it just clicked. It's messy, but so is my thinking. It's very tactile, something I didn't even know I missed when it comes to software. And sometimes you just want your workspace to have a certain mood.

After the last redesign, it does look a bit cleaner: it uses system fonts instead of a custom monospaced one and it's less chunky. But it still looks delightful – I wouldn't want every app I'm using to look like this one, but I'm sure glad this one does.

Pirijan, the guy building Kinopio on his own, also writes a blog and tweets a lot about his process and is a really down-to-earth humble dude, I highly recommend following him.