Today is ‘iCal Day”, the date displayed by default on the iCal icon.

To celebrate, I offer you a list of great add-ons or utilities that extend iCal’s ability to organise your life, with links to past Hawk Wings reviews:

Widgets

If you like widgets, DoBeDo is a great way to stay on top of your to-dos.

Highly customizable, it displays to-dos, allows you to add them, mark them completed and print them out. It comes with enough skins to please everyone:

Freeware. Get it from the developer’s web site .

Menubar utilities

High Priority gets my vote over MenuCalendarClock, not only because it is a third of the price, but also because it offers more flexible ways of managing your to-dos from the menubar. (Alhough, in fairness, if you shell out the USD 18.95 for MenuCalendarClock, you get a utility that displays events as well).

It allows you to sort your to-dos by Calendar, Due Date, Priority, Status or Title and to toggle the display of priority icons. You can use it as freeware but need to register to create to-dos. Shareware (USD 6). Get it from the developer’s web site .

Integration with Mail.app

I confess. My heart belongs to MailTags .

If it didn’t, or if MailTags’s other features aren’t important to you, nothing better integrates Mail.app and your email with iCal than Event Maker. It quickly creates normal or all-day events and to-dos from a selected message. It’s donation-ware and available from MacUpdate .

Alarms

iCal’s rich suite of alarm options is great, but it’s a pain to create them manually for each event. iCalFix 0.3 offers customizable automatic alarms for iCal, making it easy to get reminded, even if you forget to set an alarm manually. It’s donation-ware and available from Robert’s web site . (See also the shareware solution, iCal-alarmist).

Backup

Many people understand the importance of backing up their email, but don’t extend the same precautions to their iCal data.

Following an unfortunate incident with his mobile phone, Nick at Socklabs has written an AppleScript that will create backups of your iCal and Address Book data into a new folder. It also tars and gzips them and then pushes the backup to a remote host.

Of course, there are plenty more iCal utilities in the Hawk Wings Plugin and Addon List. ical, ical day, widgets, menubar, addons, alarms, backup, integration, mail.app, apple mail

Logan Design’s Mail Unread Menu notification utility for Mail.app has been updated.

The new version is now packaged as a mailbundle, which allows for real-time updating of the unread message count.

The new format also allows Mail Unread Menu’s options to be moved to a pane within Mail’s Preferences.

The developer is actively working on new features, including the ability to move the icon in the Menubar and, possibly, multiple mail counts (e.g. one count for work-realted emails, one for a home account, one for a mailing list and so on).

You can get the updated version from the developer’s web site .mail.app, apple mail, notification, plugins, menubar

Mail Unread Menu is a new Menubar notification utility for Mail.app from Logan Design (which also makes a menubar notification utility for NetNewsWire ).

The name will sound familiar. It is remarkably close to an old favourite, MailUnreadStatusBar, and the application is very similar too.

It sits in your Menubar and polls for unread messages at a user-definable period. When it finds some, the number of emails is displayed next to its icon. Menubar utilities like this are less distracting than the notification provided by Growl or Mail.Appetizer.

The drop-down menu offers you options for immediate mail-checking, access to the preferences and the app’s readme file:

Mail Unread Menu has only just been released, so it doesn’t have a swag of features. The Preferences pane mainly offers a place to set the time period for polling Mail.app:

It doesn’t have any of the account-specific features of MaulUnreadStatusBar, which allows you to specify which mailboxes to keep an eye on. Perhaps the developer will add these things later.

Mail Unread Menu only works if Mail.app is running.

It’s a universal binary, freeware (donations not refused) and available from the developer’s web site .notification, mail.app, apple mail, plugins, menubar, unread messages

Jonathan Nathan has released an updated version of EntourageABMenu, a menubar utility that offers system-wide access to Entourage’s contacts.

The new version offers geographical menu for sorting contacts by city, state and country.

Also, you can now search your contacts by multiple search terms (that is, search by name and company at once) and define your own settings for how the results are displayed.

Remote lookup performance has been improved and it works faster with large numbers of contacts.

Jonathan also has an Address Book version of this utility, which will be released next week with similar improvements.

By itself, EntourageABMenu costs USD 10, but Jonathan is offering a special bundle deal (USD 20) with Jon’sPhoneTools , his dialler app that can call phone numbers in your Address Book or on a web page with Vonage, CallVantage, Skype, IP phones from Cisco or Snom, softphones from the Gizmo Project and others.

You can get EntourageABMenu by itself or as part of the bundle offer .entourage, contacts, menubar, productivity, dialler, address book, phone numbers

Clipboard extenders, which save your recent clipping and copying history, are a great way to boost your productivity and reduce the amount of switching around you need to do from one window to the next.

JumpCut, CuteClips, CopyPaste+yType all do this job well, as do Quicksilver and Butler which have clipboard or pasteboard histories.

PopCopy takes a slightly different approach. It lives in the Menubar, where it displays the title of the most recent clip.

When you click on the title, it launches a drop-down menu listing all the most recent clips. (The demo is limited to five clips):

However, it can also be activated with a hotkey (Command-Shift-V by default), which produces a pop-up dialog:

Hitting the hotkey again cycles through the list of stored clips, until you find the one you want.

PopCopy is shareware, like CuteClips and CopyPaste, but unlike JumpCut which is freeware. It costs USD 12 and you can get a crippled demo from the developer’s web site .

The developer plans to use any money raised from the app to help finance a trip to Japan to pursue his career as a professional wrestler.clipboard, extender, productivity, menubar, helpful apps

JABMenu is a utility that offers easy and quick access to your Address Book contacts from the menubar.

Selecting each kind of data from the drop-down menu executes a user-specified action — a new email from an email address, a map look-up from a postal address and so on.

An updated version released today offers many improvements, including significantly faster launching and searching.

It now contains support for contact URLs and notes, improved handling of international address formats and more options for handling groups.

It also expands the number of map services you can select by default, offering the choice of Expedia, Google, MapQuest, Maps, MSN or Yahoo.

The Entourage version has also been updated.

JABMenu is shareware (USD 10) and is available from the developer’s web site .Address Book, contacts, menubar, map lookups, groups

The Hawk Wings Plugin and Addon List now contains 133 plugins, addons, scripts, widgets and helpful apps that make work with Mail.app (and iCal and Address Book) easier, quicker, more efficient and more enjoyable.

The following six have been added since the last update:

• Mailfollowup (more natural replies to group conversations) was added to the Added Functionality section.
• JABMenu (Address Book Menubar utility) and EntourageABMenu (useful Exchange server address support for Mail.app users) were added to the Address Book section.
• PocketLight (Spotlight-like searching for Panther (10.3) Mail, iCal and Address Book users) was added to the Added Functionality section.
• Missing Attachments (a plugin that checks for missing attachments in a Mail.app message) was added to the Added Functionality section.
• An AppleScript to backup iCal and Address Book data was added to the iCal section.

mail.app, apple mail, ical, address book, plugins, applescript, utilities, menubar, contacts, backup, attachments