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, calendar

There are ways to assign hotkeys or keyboard shortcuts to just about everything.

Service Scrubber brings them to Services, FastScripts to AppleScripts, you can even roll your own for a Menu item in any app.

Now, using Shortcuts 1.0, you can add them to Contextual Menu items as well.

It only works with Contextual Menu items that are provided by plugins, like items Automator and Folder Actions add to the Contextual Menu by default.

Assigning the shortcuts is easy. The app’s window lists the items that can be assigned hotkeys. Here is a screenshot half-way through assigning one to the Automator action, “EmailObject” (something I used a lot before I discovered Quicksilver):

click on the image for a full-sized view

Another window pops up prompting you to define the keystrokes for that item, say, Command-Control-Option-E. That’s it.

Now all I have to do is highlight a file in Finder, hit the hotkey combination and the file is passed to a new message in Mail.app. Clever.

It comes with a plugin of its own, called “CocoaTextSelectionHelper” which is an optional helper to get text selection from the front text view in Cocoa applications.

Shortcuts is freeware and available from the developer’s web site where you can also find a fuller online explanation of how it works.productivity, contextual menu, shortcuts, hotkeys, keyboard shortcuts, automator, folder actions, cocoa text

This morning on TUAW I read about Griffin’s Proxi, which has been released as a public beta.

Griffin is using it as a utility for working with its various hardware products like the PowerMate and Radio Shark.

But the reach of the app is much wider. Proxi is in fact a kind of FastScripts / HotKeys / Growl / Quicksilver mash-up. It performs some of the functions of all those utilities, without totally replacing any of them.

Proxi comes with pre-built scripts and “blueprints” to interact with a number of apps—iChat, Mail.app, iTunes and Skype—as well as general AppleScript and application launcher abilities.

Because this is Hawk Wings, we are interested mainly in Mail.app. After the jump you will find some screenshots and two quick suggestions on how it works with Mail in useful ways.

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