Good question! I don’t think you can. At least, I can’t work it out (which may not be the same thing).

Luckily because of the new system-wide task database in Leopard, your choices are not restricted to Mail.

You can, of course, do it in iCal. But it takes a lot of stuffing around with the options in the Print dialog to whittle things down to a lean, tasks-only list. And then more clicking to get it to print out as, for example, a PDF.

But in the end you can get there:

You could do it in a GTD app like OmniFocus or Things, but that seems like a hammer and walnut solution for the problem. Jon just want to email a list of tasks.

Fortunately, a quicker, more efficient and free solution is not far away. The task management widget DoBeDo (which also does a lot of other things — see earlier Hawk Wings post) has a print option that can quick spit out a list of tasks in Preview as a PDF or to a specified printer.

After you set the option on the back of the widget, it is a one step operation (mouse-click or ⌘P), and produces a nice list:

It also has a one-click option (⌘E) to send the list to an email address that you specify.

DoBeDo has recently been updated, and now features a “Last Day of the Month” scheduling option and treats “procrastinated” tasks without a due date as due today.

It also has more skins that the last time I looked (selection below):

The Apple Calendar skin looks nice next to the other black widgets in Dashboard:

DoBeDo is freeware. It is available along with detailed documentation of its options and keyboard shortcuts from the developer’s web site . mail.app, apple mail, tasks, todos, ical, printing, lists, dobedo, widget, pdf, productivity, tips, leopardSimilar Posts:

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As well as redesigning the plugin so that offers better control of how attachments are handled, he has also tweaked it for Leopard.

Mail Attachment Iconizer 2.0 offers several improvements over Mail.app’s native attachment handling. It offers particular advantages for people who often receive large PDF or PostScript files:

Using the new Preference Pane in Mail’s Preferences, you can determine exactly how attachments will behave. For example, you could choose to see PDFs inline, but Bitmap images as icons, or vice-versa:

You can also opt to set the content so that the recipient of your email sees it in the way you want.

Mail Attachment Iconizer is shareware (USD 14.99, discounts for owners of MAI 1.0) and is available from Adam’s web site attachments, mail.app, apple mail, plugins, pdf, icons, productivitySimilar Posts:

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Unlike other “Email to Yojimbo” scripts, this one offers the option of exporting the email into Yojimbo as either a note or a PDF.

Select the message, run the script and a dialog appears:

Drummond doesn’t have a web site to host the script on, so it finds a home on Hawk Wings for the moment.

Download it here

Don’t stop there though. Other useful Yojimbo scripts include:

1. A script to push Yojimbo notes onto an iPod.
2. A script to send a Yojimbo item with Mail.app.
3. A script to email yourself notes that are automatically inserted into Yojimbo.
4. Scripts for Yojimbo, NetNewsWire and de.licio.us integration.
5. All the other scripts you can find by searching Hawk Wings for “Yojimbo” and “script”.

mail.app, apple mail, applescript, yojimbo, pdf, notes, ipod, netnewswire, delicious, tips, productivitySimilar Posts:

• Put Yojimbo on an iPod
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One of those emails was the kind of tip that you never think of yourself, but which seems so obvious when someone else describes it.

At the end of an iChat session, if you select the Print dialog in iChat and choose, “Save PDF in Yojimbo” you will get a nice PDF of the chat in Yojimbo, the texts of which is fully searchable. Nifty!

[Nice tip, Ted.]yojimbo, ichat, transcripts, chats, pdf, productivity, tipsSimilar Posts:

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When Bare Bones Software launched their new information manager, Yojimbo, last week I decided to give it a go.

I’ve been using it a lot and I like it.

If you are interested in information managers and organising yourself (“productivity”), you can read the full review after the jump.

Looks the business

The first and most surprising thing about Yojimbo is how good it looks. Bare Bones’ flagship products, BBEdit and MailSmith , are not known for their eye-candy.

They have serious, no-nonsense, almost pre-Mac OS X interfaces like this:

Yojimbo, however, is very handsome indeed.

It has a very polished interface that offers yet more evidence of the rise and rise of the Mail.app-like look:

The “Mailbox Drawer” on the left contains pre-made folders and any custom folders you have created. You can give your folders any image that QuickTime understands.

Does the business

Not only does it look good, it has organization muscle too.

Yojimbo can save and manage links to web pages and other online resources, short texts or notes, clips, quotations, instructions, song lyrics like any other information manager.

It also has some neat features that help it stand out from the pack. It can keep your login and password information for web sites and servers, encrypting them for added security. It also stores serial numbers and can save snapshots of entire web pages as Web Archives.

In another clever trick, an option is added to the PDF services menu in your Mac’s Print panel, allowing you print a receipt for an online purchase directly into Yojimbo, where you can store and encrypt it.

Four features in particular have impressed me:

Smart folders: The pre-set folders, called “Smart Collections”, display all your flagged item, the 20 most recently added items, all your web archives and PDFs, passwords, bookmarks and serial numbers, regardless of which custom collection you have stored them in. Another smart folder shows you all the items that are not yet in any custom collection.

It would be even nicer if you could make your own smart collections, but this is still a very useful feature for finding stuff fast.

UPDATE: Founder and CEO of Bare Bones, Rich Siegel, confirms in the comments below that the ability to create your own smart collections is something Bare Bones is working on. Excellent!

Quick Input Panel: Yojimbo lacks the StickyBrain’s Contextual Menu options for clipping without leaving the app you are in. But Yojimbo adds a Quick Input Panel to do the same job. Copy something to the clipboard, then hit a hotkey to bring up the Input Panel:

It is quite clever at auto-inserting the clipboard contents into the relevant field for each kind of note you can create on the fly.

You can also use this (as here) to create a new note, storing a thought for later without interrupting what you are doing at the time.

The Drop Dock: Yojimbo has another way of adding new items. The Drop Dock adds a Drop Drawers-like tab to the edge of your desktop. Selecting something with your mouse and then dragging it over the tab, opens the drawer. You then have the option of dropping the item directly into your Library or a custom collection:

.Mac Syncing: StickBrain uses .Mac to make a backup which you can them restore to the same computer or download to another.

Yojimbo takes .Mac use to a higher level. Using Tiger’s sync engine, it allows you to add all your settings and items to the list of things that are automatically synced between your Macs:

A set-and-forget, always synchronised database of the information you need, whatever computer you are sitting at. Sweet.

Is the business

StickyBrain has been around for longer and has a richer feature-set. Some of those things I will miss (until Bare Bones adds them) — the ability to email a note, linking different items together and linking items with Address Book contacts.

These days no app seems quite complete without a QuickSilver plugin, so I’m looking forward to that too. (Although see the tip posted in the comments below).

But I am impressed enough with Yojimbo to switch. In addition to the things mentioned above, Yojimbo feels faster and seems to suck less energy from my system.

Like all of Bare Bones products, the attention to detail is amazing. The help documentation is beautifully laid out and illustrated. Little things like that speak volumes.

It can only get even better. Bare Bones got my money (USD 39).

Links:
Yojimbo at Bare Bones

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StickyBrain and Yojimbo compared
Out goes StickyBrain, in comes Yojimbo
Yojimbo Review address book, bare bones, bookmarks, contextual menu, information manager, mail.app, organization, passwords, pdf, productivity, quicksilver, smart folders, stickybrain, sync engine, yojimboSimilar Posts:

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