I use two of the five (Alfred and Caffeine), and a forked project of a third (I use nvALT instead of Notational Velocity) on this list of apps to increase your productivity on a Mac. I haven’t tried Boxcar or Homebrew:
5 Apps to Increase Mac Productivity | Erics Tech Blog: “5 Apps to Increase Mac Productivity”
Seeing Boxcar brings a bigger issue to mind: are we more productive when we’re getting notifications from an app like this? Or are we better off “rowing out to the island” ourselves to get updates? I’m inclined to believe the latter.
I think it’s important that with notifications, you simply need to find a healthy balance between urgent and non-important matters. I used to have a Gmail Notifications Chrome extension installed, but decided to remove it since it always distracted me from what I was doing as soon as a new message arrived. Same can be said about text messaging, but that’s probably more difficult to control.