Google has launched a Mac version of its Desktop search app.

Windows users have been able to use this for a while now as a kind of poor man’s Spotlight. Now it comes to Mac and brings with it several tricks that Spotlight can’t do. Hardcore Googlistas will love it.

As you would expect, it is able to search your drives for applications, files, emails and folders. But unlike Spotlight, it is also able to search your Gmail messages and web browsing history at the same time.

Desktop for Mac installs itself as a system-wide Preference Pane, where you can set the app’s options, including whether or not to include Gmail and your web-browsing history in the search results:

Another pane allows you to set the hotkey for Google Desktop (⌘ + ⌘ by default) and to determine how results are displayed.

Hitting the hotkey calls up a nicely-crafted search box. A search for “journo” lists emails from Mail.app and Gmail in one hit which is very handy, complete with a little snippet for each one, something I often wish Spotlight could provide:

In an extra nice touch for MailTags users like me, Google has made sure that the app is compatible with existing mdimporters. That means it recognises MailTags keywords, projects and notes and displays them in the results.

You can download Google Desktop for Mac from Google’s Mac software page .mail.app, apple mail, gmail, google, desktop, searching, web history, productivity

Matthew Bookspan (ex-Microsoft?) has written an interesting account of his experience as a switcher for the web site Apple Matters.

Switching back to Macs, he began with high hopes:

I initially tried absorbing every key Mac app to “live the life” of a Mac user. What I found was quite interesting: very task-focused applications designed to do simple things and get them done quickly. These applications include Mail.app, iCal, Address Book, Safari, and more.

But things soon turned sour for him. Address Book and iCal “drove him batty”:

Address Book has too many limitations for the amount of fields you can use and customize. The Address Book Smart Groups are hard to configure unless you have exacting details. For example, it is annoying to create a “Family” smart group when many family members have different last names. Also, the Smart Groups do not work like Smart Playlists in iTunes as they don’t auto-fill the entry field as you type; this requires that you remember the exact spelling of everyone’s name (which renders the feature relatively useless to me). With iCal, I find that it is too limited in defining and updating meeting requests. It seems non-intuitive to define meeting requests in iCal and not in Mail.app. Lastly, the iCal UI is just unattractive, which is surprising given that Apple makes the product.

As a result, he is now using Entourage, which seems more natural to him given his Windows habit of using “monlithic apps” like Outlook. (He tried integration with Daylite, but doesn’t mention if he tried the other “Outlook-like” all-in-one plugins for Mail, iCal and Address Book — CRM4Mac and OD4Contact – now Contactizer Pro).

What I found interesting about this was the realisation that software really plays second fiddle to more ingrained work habits. And old habits die hard. You can hop from one productivity tool or workflow methodology to another, but in the end the resources in your head are more significant for your productivity than the resources on your computer.

This must drive productivity software designers mad.

It makes me think from time to time of going “Back to paper”, in order to fine-tune the resources in my head. I would miss all the whizz-bang “very task-focused applications” and plugins that I have grown to love as ends in themselves rather than as tools to achieve other ends, but that’s the whole point.

Enough editorialising from me. mail.app, apple mail, address book, ical, productivity, tools, unfocussed musing, back to paper

A poster on macOSXHints points out a smart use for the “tokenised” email addresses that Mail.app places in its To: and Cc: fields.

Coincidently, I stumbled across another unexpected use for this at work today.

The macOSXHints poster explains how to quickly enter email addresses in to a web form by first entering the name into a new Mail.app message. Mail auto-completes the names, providing those nice aqua tokens.

These can be be selected and dragged over to the web form, where they transform into a comma-separated list of email addresses. Clever.

But there’s more. Today at work I had to suggest the creation of a new internal mailing list. Rather than type all the email addresses out, I tried the same trick.

I entered the names in the To: field of the message, let Mail auto-complete them, then selected them all and dragged them into the body of the email. Voila! — a nice, comma-separated list of email addresses appeared:

This is not a high-use tip. I’ve been using a Mac for four years now, and this is the first time I was moved to try it. Still, it’s nice to know that it is there, waiting for me to discover all over again when I need to do this in 2011.mail.app, apple mail, email addresses, tips, web forms, mailing list, productivity

Do It is a very clever little task manager app with almost ever option one could hope for — iCal and Address Book integration, a Quicksilver plugin, syncing, lists for each context, skins and more. (See the extensive review in an earlier Hawk Wings post).

The developer has just released Do It 2.4 which adds localisations for Russian, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Dutch and Traditional Chinese, and a few other tweaks like smarter item sorting in its to-do lists.

Since I last looked at it, other new features have been added, including extra options for handling completed tasks:

This is an application worth checking out. If my heart didn’t already belong to MailTags , I’d be using it myself.

Do It is donationware and available from the developer’s web site .productivity, task manager, to-do lists, ical, address book, quicksilver, syncing, contexts,

Bare Bones has announced a new public beta of Mailsmith, its (once upon a time) landmark email client.

Mailsmith 2.2 (beta) is a universal build, so it runs with all the grunt that an Intel Mac can provide.

It also changes the way in which email data is stored. Once you start using it, you can’t go back to Mailsmith 2.1.5.

The new version features an updated user interface:

Mailsmith picks up numerous changes to the UI, built-in text editing, and transformation abilities, all derived from BBEdit 8/TextWrangler 2. They are too numerous to list here, but generally fall into the realm of Unicode support, improved Mac OS X appearance and behavior, and various performance and behavior refinements.

Other updates include more options for handling compressed archives, the ability to import gzipped mbox files, a new “flag” option for messages, a new top-level menu for Bare Bones “Clippings” feature, improved display of emails composed with the “format=flowed” option (hurrah!) and more.

The full list of improvements is provided in an email from Bare Bones CEO Rich Siegal on the Mailsmith mailing list along with this warning:

Mailsmith 2.2 is not ready for release to the general public. It is pre-release software, which has not been completely tested or debugged. We will do our best to fix any bugs that are reported; but you must acknowledge, at least to yourself, that you are assuming a certain amount of risk by using this pre-release version; and that by assuming that risk, you accept all responsibility for the consequences of doing so.

If you dare, you can download a copy of the new beta from Bare Bones web site.

Mailsmith doesn’t support new-fangled things like IMAP or Exchange accounts.

[Via TUAW ]mailsmith, bare bones, email, not mail.app, not apple mail, format=flowed, POP

MacFreePOPs is one of two utilities that allow Mail.app users to access email from web-based services like Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL and more.

MacFreePOPs 2.0, just released, adds two nice new features of the mix.

It now includes an auto-updater, which means that users no longer need to go through the hassle of manually updating the separate plugins for each individual web service. It also checks for updates to the main MacFreePOPs application and the underlying freepopsd engine which powers the plugins:

It is now also “half-universal”. That is to say, parts of the app are now compiled as universal binaries, although the main app is still needs Rosetta to run on Intel Macs. The developer is appealing for donations from happy users to cover the USD 500 cost of new software needed to update the whole app. There is more on this in the app’s readme file.

A new reset/uninstall command is also included.

This update narrows the gap between MacFreePOPs (donation-ware, more complicated) and MailForward (shareware, easier to use).

[Thanks, Gary!]mail.app, apple mail, webmail, hotmail, yahoo, aol, squirrelmail, gmail, plugins, email