Mail2iCal and Mail2iCalToDo have been updated.

These AppleScripts will create an event or a ToDo in iCal from a highlighted message in Mail.app.

The new versions of the scripts fix a hiccup that could occur if no message was selected and add a feedback option for users in the event of an error.

The author has also added comments throughout the source code.

Mail2iCal 1.3.1 and Mail2iCalToDo 1.3.3 are freeware and are available from the developer’s web site.

Top Tens must be a seasonal thing. Everyone’s doing it. Digg blogged a list of top ten apps for Mac. TUAW made a kind of anti-list.

There’s a list of ten fastest growing branded web sites with Apple on top. There’s even a list of ten signs that you are a GTD disciple.

Here’s my list – the top 10 plug-ins, add-ons, scripts, and helpful apps that every Apple Mail user should have. The best stuff is at the top:

1. MailTags. (That was easy). Just get it.
2. Mail Act-on. Sorting emails on the fly with user-defined rules.
3. MailAppetizer. Beautiful and useful “in your face” notification.
4. Mail Scripts. Excellent AppleScripts for Mail.app. I haven’t blogged them in detail. Andreas Amann’s own web site is the best introduction.
5. Mail Stamps. Those lozenge-shaped buttons in Mail 2.0! What were they thinking? Banish them forever.
6. MailUnreadStatusBar. Discreet and useful notification.
7. JunkMatcher or SpamSieve. It’s a draw for me which of these offers the better additional protection from spam.
8. Take Control of Apple Mail in Tiger. The only book dedicated to help you get the most out of Mail 2.0. Packed full of tips and other goodness.
9. QuickSilver. Generally excellent and the most valuable third-party app I use. It sneaks in here because you can also email files directly from its interface and do lots of other neat things. Free. Astonishingly.
10. Spell Catcher X. Spell checker, snippet manager, on the fly formatter. Useful in Mail.app and elsewhere.

There are lots more that didn’t make it due simply to the way I use Mail. But you can find them all in the Hawk Wings Plug-in and Add-on List.spam, top 10, top ten, GTD, email

A while ago I blogged my first attempt to set up Apple Mail to work with David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” system.

Since then, I have read the book (always a good idea!) and discovered the fabulous kGTD — “Kinkless Getting Things Done” — a collection of applescripts and templates that turns OmniOutliner Pro and iCal into a very slick GTD tool.

kGTD is being improved at break-neck speed by the developer, Ethan Schoonover, who is pumping out new features and bugfixes almost daily with good humour and wit. Reading the RSS feed of comments by Ethan and other kGTD users is now a daily highlight.

Anyway, reading the book and using kGTD, I got some things done. Bugger me; it works!

I also did some thinking and tweaked my Mail.app set-up a little to capture the guiding principles of GTD better.

One important lesson for me has been learning not to use my inbox as a lazy way of storing emails without making GTD-esque decisions about what to do with them. Emails can fester away in the Inbox for a long time before anything is done about them. You think because you have read them, you’ve dealt with them or somehow automatically will.

So I modified my set-up a little. The Next Actions Smart Mailbox (for next actions and for things that I am currently waiting on) and the Tickler Mailbox (for things that I have marked as “deferred”) are still there, but I added two more: an Unread Inbox and and an Unread Lists (for Mailing list posts — mostly grazing material, stuff I don’t have to do anything about).

I am learning not to look in my inbox at all. I don’t need to. Everything thing at comes into my Mail.app accounts turns up in one of the Unread mailboxes. All the work I need to do after processing the emails is contained in the Next Actions and Tickler mailboxes.

In fact, this system forces me to make a decision about each email when I first read it, because I know if I don’t tag it as something, it will fall out of the smart mailbox system and be lost for ever. (Unless I open up the Inbox and see it. But I’m not going to do that!)

Over the weekend, I’ll blog up how I tweaked my Mail Act-on and MailTags arrangement to make it work smarter for me.

I was highly skeptical of GTD when I first encountered it, as I tend to be about all Management-speak.

I’m not a true-believer yet, but I’d call myself a fellow-traveller. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and I am getting things done and feeling more relaxed. Sweet!

commander is a collection of AppleScripts that allows you to request information from your Mac remotely by sending it emails.

It is similar to RCMail, another collection of AppleScripts that unlocks remote access to your Mac.

I find the idea a bit spooky. But the developer thinks it’s great and describes how he uses it:

I find it useful, e.g., when I’m on hollidays and suddenly I need some info from my desk. I look for a computer, send an email to commander, and get back that document I need or an address in my address book, or info about something I keep in a database.

I also use it as an Information Center, where users in a network or company can request info or execute actions simply sending emails to a mail address (eg, create PDF given a document or add an entry to a TODO list).

It comes with a series of scripts or “modules” that can be activated by an email, returning to you a document, information from Address Book, execute a Force Quit or a variety of other things.

It is designed to allow people to extends its ability easily by writing their own additional scripts.

You can download it from the developer’s web site.