Probably my favourite little application in a quite a while is Pukka. It does relatively little, but makes what it does do – posting to del.icio.us – an absolute cinch. del.icio.us itself has a simple but well thought out web-based interface which I really like, but, even with the bookmarklet, it can still be slow waiting for web pages to load when you just want to file something away and get on with things.

Pukka allows you to post a link either by dragging a URL to it or by using its bookmarklet, which works in a similar way to the regular bookmarklet, pre-filling the URL and Title fields automatically for you. Pukka caches your existing tags regularly and provides the handy type-ahead suggestions you’d expect. It handles duplicate URLs well too, helping you keep your account nice and tidy.

I’d recommend you take a quick dive into the settings and set it to hide itself after submitting a post, regardless of how long this takes. It will then notify you via Growl once it’s been successfully added, if you wish.

Even though it keeps things simple, Pukka still has an extra couple of tricks up its sleeve. Right clicking on the dock icon allows you to navigate your bookmarks via tag and, more recently, it’s also started caching a local copy of your bookmarks for searching in Spotlight. This is still a bit hit-and-miss unfortunately it seems but Justin, the developer, pushes out updates regularly so this is bound to get even better.

Bored of your desktop wallpaper? Like a bit of variety? I just came across a neat little app called DeskLickr which, coupled with its very own Flickr group, will give you a nice random desktop wallpaper from the above group at regular intervals automagically. If you don’t like their images, you can have it pull in images from your favourites or any other Flickr tag, which means a pretty much endless supply.

The only down-side is that doesn’t seem to work with multiple monitors yet.

One of the strangest ideas for an application I’ve seen in some time is Blackhole’s Noise. The basic idea seems to be that in order to mask nearby noise, you mask this by the application’s built in white, or pink, noise, which is basically fizz, ahem, “signal with even power distribution on a logarithmic frequency scale”.

I was skeptical, but decided to try it for myself, so gave it a whirl just now. Alas, it really isn’t something I could listen to for more than about 3 seconds – I just found it annoying. I’d be interested to see if anyone does actually find this solution useful though.

On a side note, I really love the icons for all of the Blackhole applications.