Event Maker 0.4.3: Quick to-dos, events from Mail.app
Mike Abdullah has updated his excellent Event Maker utility which allows for the quick creation of to-dos or events from an email in Mail.app or from scratch.
Coupled to a Quicksilver trigger (or similar), it is available system-wide, not only in Mail, as a slick way to get meetings and reminders into iCal.
The most recent version (0.4.3) fixes bugs in the Undo and Redo menus and tweaks the display of its alarms option.
Since, I last posted about it, the app has also added AppleScript support for alarms and keyboard shortcuts for adding and removing alarms.
Extra nifty, something that I had not noticed before, it allows you to set multiple alarms for the one event, in this case an email 45 minutes before, a message alert fifteen minutes before and then to launch a script that starts the event:
I’m not going to be able to forget that one easily.
Of course, most of the time I am using the clever new features in the public beta of MailTags to do this kind of scheduling work, but Event Maker is a very handy addition to my productivity tool-kit for the rare times that I am not in Mail but still need to schedule stuff.
Event Maker is donation-ware and you can get it from MacUpdate 
.
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December 1st, 2006 at 2:18 am
I was under the impression that EventMaker would at least make an attempt to identify date/time info for a new event from the content of a message, but it doesn’t seem to in any of the cases I’ve just tried. Is this the case, or have I misconfigured it somehow?
December 1st, 2006 at 10:01 am
I prepopulates the event for me. How are you using it?
December 1st, 2006 at 2:30 pm
It prepopulates the form, but only with tomorrow’s date, 9 am, regardless of the content of the email I have selected.
December 1st, 2006 at 5:59 pm
That sounds weird to me. Why not drop the developer Mike Abdullah a note? He’s a nice guy.
December 1st, 2006 at 9:37 pm
Hi, to clarify, Event Maker does not attempt to read the date from the e-mail you selected. By default, a new event is simply set to 9am the following day.
It is my eventual aim to try and do this with Event Maker, however at present I do not have the time available to write a system to perform this rather tricky analysis. One day!
December 2nd, 2006 at 2:48 am
Thanks, Tim, and thanks Mike. I still really like your application and plan to use it regularly. I just misunderstood its aim at first. Keep up the great job, I for one really appreciate it.
December 2nd, 2006 at 7:38 am
Thanks, Mike. The date is always 9am but the rest of the fields should pre-populate from the email, shouldn’t they? They do for me.
December 5th, 2006 at 5:01 am
Indeed Tim, that is right. A basic rundown is:
Kind: Remembered from the last event you made.
Title: Taken from the e-mail’s subject line.
Calendar: Remembered from the last event you made.
Location: Always blank.
Start: 9am tomorrow.
Length: Set in the Preferences.
Notes: Set in the Preferences. Either blank or copied from the e-mail contents.
There is also a bug in Mail which means that most e-mails with an attachment do not have their contents copied to the notes field.
December 5th, 2006 at 9:12 am
Excellent. Thanks for explaining that. It really is a clever little app! :)