If you regularly move your laptop from one place to another, you are going to love this app. John C Welch , never one to pass on a colourful phrase, says “Dude, this is the shit! I’m…I think I’m in love! Seriously, you just made a lot of people really happy.”

I am one of them. NetworkLocation is a smart network location-switcher. It not only senses automatically whether you are at work or home and switches you Mac’s accordingly, it offers a shedload of other location-specific actions.

For example, every morning when I arrive at work, it not only automatically switches to my work location, it sets my work network printer as the default, turns off Airport, swaps in work’s SMTP server, mounts my network share, and sets my iChat status to away (it is _work_ after all).

When I get home, everything is reversed, and Tunnelblick , a VPN client, is launched so that I can get at my work files from home.

The developers, Centrix.ca, provide a full listing of all the tricks that NetworkLocation can perform:

It can be set to switch locations automatically. Otherwise, when it senses a change in the network environment, it pops up a nice smoked glass Chooser (other skins are included):

The app’s Preferences provide options to adding specific actions to particular locations, skinning the interface and more:

The company has also created a SDK for other developers to create their own plugins. Heck, there is even one for Entourage!

Certainly, this is the cat’s pyjamas.

NetworkLocation is shareware (USD 25) and available from the developers’ web site . not apple mail, not mail.app, productivity, network, roadwarriors, location

Goodness knows Spotlight is powerful enough.

It’s almost too powerful for its own good. For example, it loves to get going as soon as you type in the first few letters of your search, which can be frustrating. And it loves to find everything it can, smothering you in an avalanche of hits from your hard drive.

Productivity takes a hit from the waiting and from the extra sifting of results.

Two apps can help. HoudahSpot helps you to control Spotlight’s power for more focussed searches and Searchlight extends Spotlight’s reach to files on a network’s server.

HoudahSpot: Sharper focus for Spotlight’s muscle

HoudahSpot is a “front-end” for Spotlight. It offers an easy way to create complicated Boolean searches in Spotlight and to restrict results easily to a particular class of object (image, document, PDF, etc).

It comes tooled up with pre-defined templates for “long lost” documents and recent documents, and with hotkeys for saved searches.

The interface consists of a series of familiar fields for constructing your search:

Say, for example, I wanted to find a paper I began two years ago, which seemed like a good idea at the time but ran out of steam unfinished. I know that it was about Tertullian, but I don’t want to wade through the 450+ hits Spotlight will produce by itself.

I remember that it mentions Tertullian and Augustine and that it was a Word Document.

A HoudahSpot search quickly finds the most likely matches and even gives me a preview of the selected one so that I can double-check that it’s right:

HoudahSpot is shareware (USD 14.95) is available from the developer’s web site .

Searchlight: Spotlight searching for servers

Searchlight brings Apple’s Spotlight to the network.

Searchlight brings Spotlight searching to a Mac OS X server, allowing all the clients on the network to search it for files. The recently released version 1.1 also supports SMB, so that Spotlight can also search mounted Windows volumes.

It provides a web interface to its searches, built with Ruby on Rails and accessible to Mac, Windows and Linux users.

Document subscription via RSS keeps users informed when documents change or new ones are created.

Searchlight is shareware (USD 29.90) and is available from the developer’s web site .spotlight, productivity, searches, tips, helpful apps, server, network, not apple mail

CalTalk is a helpful app that enables the sharing of iCal calendars over a local network using the Bonjour protocol built into Mac OS X 10.

You can share iPhoto and iTunes like this out of the box.

CalTalk lets you add iCal to the list, just as Address-o-Matic adds the same option for Address Book.

After launch, the app resents you with a window containing two panes:

The second window allows you specify which calendars to share.

The first window shows you your network and the available users. Mine’s blank because my Mac is on the only computer in the house that is switched on.

A Preferences window allows you set further options, including which port you want to use, security settings and so on.

CalTalk is donation-ware and is available from the developer’s web site .ical, sharing, calendars, bonjour, network, address book

Address-O-Matic is a utility that allows you to share Address Books on Macs connected to the same local area network.

It makes use of Mac OS X’s Bonjour service to publish contacts from one Mac designated as the server and to allow client Macs to subscribe to those contacts.

An icon in the menubar anchors the utility’s drop-down menu:

You can determine which contacts or groups to share over the network. The Preference pane contains further options, including the ability to set a port for the service which your firewall will not block:

Other options for sharing your Address Book over networks exist. Check out Address-o-sync and Whereabouts.

Address-O-Matic is shareware (USD 20) and is available from the developer’s web site.address book, contacts, sharing, network, LAN, Bonjour, helpful apps

macOSXHints has a tip on how to send emails from your .Mac account when port 25 is blocked.

It is complicated and will only work for people who use IMAP with their .Mac accounts. The process involves saving all your emails as drafts, logging into .Mac’s web interface and then sending them.

If you find yourself on a network that blocks port 25 (the default port for SMTP traffic) make sure that you try the alternative port 587 first by changing the settings in the Accounts pane of your Preferences before looking around for a more complicated solution.