Since I got my iBook, I’ve been using Bibdesk to manage a BibTeX database of the papers I’ve downloaded (and bothered transferring to my laptop). It’s quite cool. Well, once you get past a few bugs, it’s quite cool. It ties in with Preview’s recent documents or will move a file that you select to your “papers folder” (it won’t do both as far as I can tell).
Whilst this is pretty cool, I’ve been thinking that BibTeX is a little annoying (what with it wanting to rewrite capital letters unless you use braces as the string delimiters, etc). Lately I’ve been thinking that perhaps an XML format might be just what the doctor ordered. DC probably supports as many fields as necessary. The only problem might be the bunch of publication types that bibliography styles typeset differently, though I’m sure that there is a DC element (and maybe a dictionary of terms) to describe document types.
In any case, I’m too lazy to switch from something that works (BibTeX, et al) to something that I’d have to write myself (because using someone else’s would defeat the purpose :-).
Other things that might be useful are some software to convert PDF and PS documents to text and an automatic text condenser and an outline editor. The former would help process those pesky documents without abstracts, whilst the latter would help note-taking and the like. If anyone happens to read this and knows of any free software (for Mac OS X, or UNIX) which fits the descriptions here, post links in a comment.