Hawk Wings » Dashboard

Replace Leopard Address Book’s missing SMS feature

Tim Gaden — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 10:51:55 +0000

For reasons best known to itself, Apple removed the SMS functionality from Leopard’s Address Book.

A new widget emitSMS brings back the ability to send text messages from Dashboard, using the Bluetooth connection on many Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, SonyEricsson and other mobile/cell phones.

The back of the widget includes options for searching the mobile phone field of contacts in your Address Book, enabling long messages, including a read receipt and storing the text messages:

For reasons best known to itself, Apple has restricted the Bluetooth functionality of its iPhone to pairing with headsets, so I can’t test this. And I very happily returned my Treo 680 to the IT Department, so I am out of options. But I have a hunch that if I could test this, it would work well.

emitSMS is donation-ware and is available from the developer’s web site

[Via macOSXHints ]Address Book, Leopard, SMS, text messages, mobile phones, cell phones, widget, dashboardSimilar Posts:

iCal Events Widget gets Leopardised, tooltips

Tim Gaden — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 11:10:24 +0000

Hmmm… Ever published a blog post, only to discover a better solution thirty seconds later?

The iCal Events widget has been updated for Leopard and now sports a more pretty interface.

The developer says that on Leopard the widget is “dramatically less processor- and memory-intensive” that it was under Tiger.

It pulls your events out of iCal and displays them, nicely colour-coded, for today and as many days into the future as you care to set in the preferences on the reverse of the widget.

Clicking an event takes you to it in iCal. It now also features a useful tooltip. Hover your mouse over the event and it displays the contents of the notes field and the location in the widget’s status bar.

The Preference Pane on the back also allows you to select which calendars the widget will pull events from.

iCal Events is freeware and available from the developer’s web site .ical, widgets, dashboard, events, leopard, productivitySimilar Posts:

Five favourite time-saving Leopard Tips

Tim Gaden — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 10:46:07 +0000

I’ve been using Leopard for long enough now to collect five tips that save me time and effort. Let me pass them on to you.

Find emails faster in Leopard Mail

Before Leopard it was possible to find emails in the list view of a mailbox faster by using the Mail Type Select plugin. With this installed, Mail.app jumped to the first message that matched your keystrokes, just as Finder does. So typing “Ros” quickly found the first email in the mailbox from Rosemary.

Now this feature is built into Leopard Mail by default. Try it out. It makes a difference.

Do your sums faster

Now that I am a Dean and need to set and manage budgets, I need to do sums more than ever before. A nice new feature in the Spotlight window, does your sums for you.

Just type in an equation, say, “12 * 34″ and Spotlight goes to Calculator and does the sum for you, giving you the answer in the Spotlight results. Nifty.

Edit iCal to-dos and events faster

In Tiger you could edit events and to-dos from the information pane. Now, iCal’s sidebar has gone to God. To edit an iCal item, you need to double-click it, wait for the details pane and then click again on the edit button on the bottom.

These extra clicks add up over time. Especially if, like me, you live in a fluid world in which tasks and meetings are always changing.

Luckily, there is a short cut to get straight to editing an event or a to-do.

Click once on the iCal item to highlight it. Then press âŒ˜-e (Command + â€˜eâ€™) and you launch into an edit dialog straight away.

Create better iCal events in Mail faster

Hovering the mouse over a name or details of an event in Leopard Mail activates Leopard’s Data Detector and produces a drop box with the option to add it to Address Book or iCal.

That’s pretty smart, but there is something even smarter lurking here.

If you block all a contactâ€™s information before you hover over the name, for example, or details of an event for iCal, the data detector pastes all the information into the new contactâ€™s or event’s notes field.

Get more out of iCal’s Dashboard Widget

The iCal Widget in Leopard has a secret up its sleeve. If you click on it once, it displays the monthly calendar we all knew and loved in Tiger.

Click on it once more, and it pulls your events for the day out into a third pane:

I get this information more easily from MenuCalendarClock, but if I didn’t have it, I’d value it here. UPDATE: Thirty seconds after posting this I found a smarter Dashboard solution.

[Via macOSXHints , TUAW , trial and error and poking around]mail.app, apple mail, ical, leopard, productivity, tips, dashboard, events, to-dos, calculator, spotlight, apple, widgetSimilar Posts:

GTD-style widget for iCal to-dos

Tim Gaden — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 11:58:11 +0000

ConceptDraw Lab has produced a little Dashboard widget that “partially implements Getting Things Done” by allowing for the quick creation of iCal to-dos without the need to open iCal.

It works by presenting each calendar in iCal as an Inbox, which can be selected from a drop-down menu at the top of the widget.

Entering text then creates to-dos attached to the selected calendar.

In the Next Events view, it displays all events scheduled for today.

Despite my normal charitable outlook, I struggled to see how this would gain a place in someone’s GTD toolbox.

Event Maker remains the tool of choice for creating iCal events and to-dos for those not using MailTags or Quicksilver (one, two Hawk Wings post on Quicksilver and iCal) to do the same job.

For power and ease of use Event Maker is hard to beat.

Perhaps I am becoming a “Productivity snob”. It’s not always about power. For some people this might be just the ticket and serve as an excellent bucket for collecting things to do.

GTD widget for iCal is freeware and available from the developer’s web site .ical, to-do, events, calendars, GTD, getting things done, not apple mail, quicksilver, productivity, widgets, dashboardSimilar Posts:

DoBeDo iCal widget 2.5: Resizable, Groups, more

Tim Gaden — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 11:05:08 +0000

DoBeDo, one of the smarter iCal widgets, has just been updated.

The new version (2.5) can be resized, adds support for groups of calendars, task clustering and scheduling and offers “natural language” support for due dates.

It now also supports international date formats, which is good news for people who put their months in the right place.

The widget comes with three skins. The one on the left, Duke, is new:

It has a built-in drop-down dialog for entering new tasks:

After the task is created, another drop-down calendar makes assigning a due date easy.

Printer settings allow you to nominate a default printer for printing lists of tasks or the option to preview it as a PDF first.

It now also come with hotkeys. ⌘-D will show or hide dates and priorities, ⌘-F expands the tasks beyond the user-determined future date.

And in a nice touch, ⌘-E will email a list of the tasks to an address you specify:

Some bugfixes round out the new version.

DoBeDo is freeware and available from the developer’s web site .ical, productivity, to-dos, widget, dashboard, email, hotkeys, calendarSimilar Posts:

DoBeDo: To-do widget gets big update

Tim Gaden — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 12:13:55 +0000

DoBeDo is a nifty Dashboard widget that displays iCal to-dos, and allows them to be added, marked as done or edited (see an earlier Hawk Wings post for more details and screenshots).

The developer has just released an updated version with a large number of new and improved features.

It now supports iCal groups and provides basic URL support. Keyboard shortcuts are more consistent and the to-do sorting options are better behaved.

Tasks can now be moved across calendars and takes with future due dates can be hidden.

It adds another skin (or theme) to the existing options, a wide format that matches the Calendar widget (pictured, slightly reduced).

Printing improvements include a print button on the front of the widget and print-outs titled with the list’s name. Users can choose a default printer or send the list to a PDF in Preview.

The developer has also included various speed and memory optimisations.

It’s a nice piece of work and it’s freeware as well. You can get it from the developer’s web site .ical, widget, dashboard, productivity, todos, not apple mailSimilar Posts:

xCut: Keyboard Shortcut Reference widget

Tim Gaden — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 13:19:47 +0000

The Dashboard widget xCuts is a keyboard shortcuts reference that lets you easily browse the shortcuts for Mac OS X, Quicksilver and more.

A recent update adds a section for switchers, which gives them easy access to the Mac OS X equivalents for the Windows shortcuts they already know.

To save space, the widget can be collapsed to the small size of the graphic in the top right of this post. When you need it, click on it to expand to the full interface:

Searches can be focussed by category, scope and object. The magic is powered by a MySQL database, accessed over the web with Ajax.

xCuts is freeware and is available from the developer’s web site .

[Thanks, Adrian]keyboard shortcuts, mac osx, productivity, quicksilver, widget, dashboard, not apple mail, apple, switchingSimilar Posts:

Howler of the Year?

Tim Gaden — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 12:06:53 +0000

“For Apple to make fun of Microsoft copying the idea of their “widgets” into “gadgets” is so unbelievably hippocratic that it makes me sick.”

[Spotted in the Dashboard section here ]howler, apple, dashboard, hippocrates, widget, humour, not apple mailSimilar Posts:

SwiftMail: Gmail, .Mac, Yahoo or AOL from the Dashboard

Tim Gaden — Mon, 31 Jul 2006 11:11:46 +0000

With the SwiftMail Dashboard widget, you can quickly dash off an email using your Gmail, .Mac, Yahoo or AOL email account.

It offers a quick username and password setup or the option of entering detailed server information.

The widget saves the last five subject lines and the recipients in drop-down boxes to the right of the fields:

Call me a pre-Tiger throw-back if you like, but I don’t see the point of these email widgets.

It’s no faster than switching to Mail.app or using Quicksilver to dash off the note.

Perhaps it is faster than switching to Entourage or Thunderbird or the web-based interface of those services.

You can get the freeware widget from the developer’s web site .

UPDATE: Once briefly QuickMail before becoming SwiftMail (briefly), the widget is now called “DashMail” (for the moment).

[Via TUAW ]widget, dashboard, email, gmail, aol, yahoo, dotmac, productivitySimilar Posts:

Reminder widget: Remember things easily

Tim Gaden — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 15:29:25 +0000

Reminder is a useful little Dashboard widget that allows you to create quick reminders to yourself in iCal, rather like a local version of the Reminders feature in Backpack .

Entering the reminder is easy.

After installation, just call up the Dashboard, enter the time after which you want the reminder and a summary of whatever you need to remember:

A reviewer on dashboardwidgets.com says, “Just the most useful widget so far for me!”

Reminder is freeware and is available from the developer’s web site ical, reminders, widget, dashboard, clever little piece of work Similar Posts: