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 ⌘-e (Command + ‘e’) 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 contact’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 contact’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, widget

MenuCalendarClock is a menubar app for iCal that gives you quick access to your iCal events and to-dos. Another menubar app, High Priority, had the jump on it in Tiger, as High Priority offered the ability to create new to-dos and mark tasks as completed.

Now, the new Leopard-friendly MenuCalendarClock 3.0 offers the same interaction with to-dos. There are no plans to rewrite High Priority for Leopard, so MenuCalendarClock is worth another look.

It adds a menubar item with the date and/or the time, replacing the default System date/time display. Clicking on it opens a drop-down box with the current month, and a list of events and tasks for the day which can be toggled on and off.

Hovering over the calendar displays a tooltip containing that day’s events.

The Action wheel opens a menu with options to reveal a search field, copy today’s date into the clipboard, display the app’s preferences and more.

MenuCalendarClock is also very well provided with keyboard shortcut. By default Control-Option-Command-C pops down the display, although the combination can be set by the user in the preferences.

A further option in the preferences enables a tooltip display of the days events and to-dos when the mouse is hovered over the menubar item.

The Preference Pane controls options for general display, customising the font and colour of the time display and the choice of a number of icons.

Further options allow you to set which iCal calendars it should display and options for dealing with the birthdays of your Address Book contacts.

New in the latest version is the ability to create tasks and to edit and mark them as complete. Needless to say this passes through seamlessly into iCal and Leopard Mail’s new to-do lists.

A keyboard shortcut pops up a “heads up display” for creating a new task. I find it easier to use that the list of to-dos in Mail (subject for another post, but why are Mail’s to-do features so underdone?!).

Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like one can tab through the fields in the display, which is a pain. Also I find that I can associate a to-do with any of my iCal calendars in MenuCalendarClock, something I can’t do in Mail.app. The to-do icons are colour-coded to the particular iCal calendar. The option to colour the text of the to-do as well would be nice.

Highlighting a task, pressing Command-I to bring up the Inspector allows existing to-dos to be edited, Shift-Command-C marks it as complete. It’s fast and it’s easy to master.

MenuCalendarClock costs USD 19.95 to register. You will need to buy a licence to access the to-do management features, although some basic features can be used when it is unregistered. Also, it does the job in English, German, Finnish, French, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, Catalan, Russian, Norwegian, Japanese and Simplified Chinese.

Get it from the developer’s web site .leopard, ical, menubar, task management, productivity, mail.app, calendar, to-dos, events

Scott Morrison has released a new public beta of his IMAP-savvy MailTags 2.0 plugin.

Public Beta 10 introduces the ability to turn off the automatic saving of tags to IMAP servers and to manage it manually. It also fixes numerous bugs, especially issues related to smart mailboxes and “to do”-related criteria.

Since tagging IMAP messages can create extra bandwidth usage, there is now an option in MailTags’ Preferences to switch off the autmoatic saving of tags to the IMAP server. This preference is on by default. Turning it off means that tags are only saved to the local cache files. You save bandwidth, but the tags are naturally not available to other computers.

For added fine-tuning, you can choose not to save tags on messages over a certain size:

When a message has tags that are only saved to the local cache, an extra button “Save To IMAP” appears at the bottom of the tags panel.

Clicking this button will immediately save the locally cached data to the IMAP server. A similar option appears in the MailTags menu and in Mail’s Contextual menu. Or you can just highlight the message and press ⌃⌘S.

Given Scott’s trademark attention to detail and completeness, a new criterion has been added for smart mailbox configuration: “IMAP Tags are/are not saved to server”.

A new icon in the MailTags column quickly indicates which messages have tags saved to the IMAP server or not. The messages with the orange tag icon have tags saved locally only:

Lastly, as extra insurance, tags not saved to the IMAP server are retained during mailbox rebuilds.

The latest public beta also contains a bucketful of bugfixes. The interface has been firmed up, HUD windows are better positioned, and customised MailTags columns behave better in the Mail Viewer.

Smart Mailboxes based on To Do items, especially on completed items, are smarter and will now work as expected, although you may need to reindex your tags using the new “Reindex Tags” option in the Preferences).

To dos now display using the user’s internationalization (or internationalisation) settings. Huzzah!

MailTags and iCal now mutually update deleted to dos and events more consistently.

Rules management has also been further improved. Two potential crashes when applying or editing rules have bene corrected, and rules are more efficiently applied.

Users with Dovecot IMAP servers will be glad to hear that MailTags no longer overwrites its X-Keywords headers when rebuilding mailboxes.

MailTags’ SpotLight importer has been updated to take account of new to do counts, completion status and IMAP save status.

This long list only picks the best bits out of a much longer changelog on the MailTags web site.

You can read more about MailTags 2.0 and download the new public beta from Scott’s web site , where you will also find a forum for any questions. mail.app, apple mail, productivity, mailtags, public beta, ical, applescript, events

Scott Morrison has released another public beta of the undisputed prince of Mail.app plugins.

How do you make the best plugin better? By making it even more reliable, slicker and easier on the eye.

Scott has polished the interface. You will see substantial tweaks to the to-do pop-up. Alarms have been added for to-dos and events (message with or without audio alert), a nice calendar makes picking the due date for to-dos easier and the tab key now does what it is supposed to:

A long-standing issue with the possible double download of messages in some situations has been fixed. And .Mac accounts now authenticate properly.

Memory leaks have been plugged, leaving Mail “more stable, snappier and less memory-hungry over time”.

You won’t believe how fast Mail now opens large mailboxes.

And the main MailTags pane continues to see improvements. The old “Due Date” section gets a name change to “Deadline” in order to avoid confusion with iCal items.

Parts of the pane are more compactly designed and the Notes section collapses more elegantly.

Behind the scenes, a “Reindex Tags” button has been added to the About/Register Tab of the MailTags Preferences.

This performs a Spotlight import of tags if smart mailboxes are not working properly.

The expiry date for Public Beta 9 has been extended to 15 April 2007, when Scott expects that the final version will be out.

Not bad, eh?

This long list only picks the best bits out of a much longer changelog on the MailTags web site.

You can read more about MailTags 2.0 and download the new public beta from Scott’s web site , where you will also find a forum for any questions. mail.app, apple mail, productivity, mailtags, public beta, ical, applescript, events

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, dashboard

The latest public beta of MailTags 2.0 has been released.

It’s unlikely but possible that some Apple Mail users don’t know what MailTags is. It’s a plugin for Mail.app that brings powerful tagging and management to your email, smarter integration with iCal and forms the cornerstone of Getting Things Done with Apple Mail.

Improvements over the previous public beta are most visible in speed, stability and a tweaked interface.

Tagging and opening large mailboxes are both now markedly quicker. Scott has optimized that way rules are applied, postponing IMAP updates to end of rule application.

Stability is also improved. Messages are no longer sometimes deleted when tags are rapidly applied to a large number of messages and the number of temporary duplicates has been reduced. In addition, MailTags now more reliably deletes iCal events attached to the message when clearing all tags via the MailTags pane or menu.

Tabbing through the to-do and event pop-up windows no longer crashes Mail on occasions.

In the kind of nice touch that belongs to an app nearing its final polish, the MailTags tag icon no longer appears printed messages.

In the main MailTags pane, the same polish is noticeable.

The widgets and buttons have been redrawn to match better the overall look and feel of Mac OS X. An Action button on each to-do or events gives quick access to editing/viewing/deleting options.

The pop-up windows have also been reworked a little. Copy and Paste functions now work in the text fields, which also accept non-English characters.

The pp-up windows look good and are easy to work with:

Some niggling problems remain. MailTags and PGP signatures don’t agree with each other. And some beta-testers find that MailTags will sometimes make .Mac accounts reject the account’s password (although a restart fixes that) and sporadic crashes sometimes occur when printing.

Overall, MailTags 2.0 now looks and feels like a plugin that is almost ready to be released in final form.

The prince of Mail.app plugins hovers on the verge of even greater greatness.

You can read more about MailTags 2.0 and download the new public beta from Scott’s web site , where you will also find a forum for any questions. mail.app, apple mail, productivity, mailtags, public beta, ical, applescript, events

Scott Morrison has released public beta number 6 of his forth-coming MailTags 2.0 plugin for Mail.app.

The big change with this release is the ability to add multiple to-dos and events to a single message.

He has been busy. Users will quickly notice the main changes to the MailTags pane and the pop-up interfaces for adding to-dos and events to messages.

Events and to-dos for a message are now listed together in the re-designed pane.

Right-clicking (or Control-clicking) on an item displays a Contextual menu that allows you to edit it, to view in iCal or delete it. Old-timers will remember that these options were once provided by small buttons on the pane.

The buttons on the pane have also been refreshed. They no longer look “clunky” and add extra unity to the plugin’s interface.

Users are less likely to see another important change under the bonnet. This public beta features a new optimised way of applying rules to incoming messages. Rules now process in sequence when multiple rules apply at the same time or in close sequence.

As a result it is much, much harder to crash MailTags by going at it lickity-split, hammering away with as many fast Mail Act-on keystrokes as possible. Believe me. I’ve tried very, very hard.

The interfaces for entering to-dos and events have also been redone. They are both now smoked glass pop-ups. The to-do interface contains everything you need:

The events pane is new but follows the same pattern:

Scott notes that this beta is now “feature-complete” before the final release: “Nothing new to add and only bugs to work out”.

Whenever Scott releases another version of the public beta, I need to think of some new superlative to describe this prince of plugins.

Perhaps I should leave the flowery rhetoric to one side this time and tell it to you straight: there is no other plugin, add-on, hack, script or work-around that has added more grunt to my Mail.app than MailTags. Some days I consider Mail.app a plugin for MailTags, not vice-versa. It is simply the cat’s whiskers.

You can read more about MailTags 2.0 and download the new public beta from Scott’s web site , where you will also find a forum for any questions. mail.app, apple mail, productivity, mailtags, public beta, ical, applescript, events