It’s that time of year again.

Here are two lists of greatest hits for the year: the five stories that readers liked the most (that is, the five stories with the highest number of page impressions) and the five stories that I liked the most or felt made the greatest contribution to the themes of the blog:

Readers’ favourites:

1. Ten Mac Tools for Getting Things Done
2. 292 different Apple Mail icons
3. Another Mail.app rule to catch image spam
4. Top ten things every Mail.app user should have
5. Getting Things Done in Apple Mail

My favourites

1. “Talking Mail.app” series wrap up – Merlin Mann, John Gruber, Leander Kahney, Drunken Batman and many more on what’s good about Mail and what sucks.
2. Hacking Quicksilver’s Cube interface for bigger icons – Get readable icons for Quicksilver’s new(ish) Cube interface.
3. Rebuild your database and speed up Mail.app – Simple steps to a speed and space increase.
4. Get your hands on Mail 3.0 now – Getting Tiger Mail’s new features now.
5. Roll your own Mail.app stamp icon – A template for creating a Mail stamp icon of your very own.

mail.app, apple mail, productivity, quicksilver, icons, spam, getting things done, GTD, tips, junk

Jon Crosby has released a new beta of his Actiontastic “Getting Things Done” app (see earlier Hawk Wings reviews here and here).

There are now lots of GTD apps for Mac. This one doesn’t have all the eye-candy of GTD apps like Midnight’s Inbox which you will either love or dislike. Actiontastic also comes with a slick Quicksilver plugin that makes filling your task bucket extra easy.

The updated version features a very useful new addition — it can now sync to a iPod, allowing musical GTDers to take their projects and to-dos with them.

It also has a new tool for processing its inbox.

Hit F3 and a dialog appears which helps you to move quickly through your unfiled tasks, assigning them to projects and contexts with drop-down menus:

Normally, new betas come with a list of bullet-pointed improvements which I try to rewrite into something more interesting. Developer Jon Crosby has taken a different approach:

To get away from the industry-standard bulleted feature list, let’s just walk through a typical flow from idea to action — GTD-style.

His write up of the new beta in action is very fine. I won’t repeat it here. You should read it, even if you use another app.

The public beta is available from his web site and expires on 15 January, by which time I imagine there will be another beta or, if all goes well, a final release.GTD, getting things done, productivity, not apple mail, workflow, task management, quicksilver, ipod, syncing

Benjamin Harley, creator of ABGMerge, the Gmail contacts-Address Book syncing app, has also scripted a powerful iCal action for Quicksilver , which is more flexible and has more options than Quicksilver’s built-in iCal plugin.

It’s complicated (power comes at a cost) but offers a speedy way to quickly enter a complete iCal item on the fly whichever app you are in. I use the current public beta of MailTags to do this when I am in Mail.app, which has the added bonus of automatically creating a URL link back to the email in question. But I’m not always in Mail (sadly).

UPDATE: You can get the latest version of the script here

Download and unzip it, then place it in your ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Actions folder.

You will need to restart Quicksilver and may need to add the Actions folders to your Quicksilver Catalog (Click the “plus” button and use the “File and Folder Scanner”) so that Quicksilver can find it.

UPDATE: You will also need to edit the script slightly. Open it up in Script editor or the app of your choice and change the property for the default calendar from “Home” to whatever calendar you would like the to-dos and events to be created in.

To use it, type “make ical” into Quicksilver’s first window, select “Process Text…” in the Action window and then type the text to create the to-do or event in the third pane.

For example:

This creates a to-do in my Trinity Calendar, specifies a date, adds an alarm and some notes so that I will know where to send the comments on this student’s work, and opens iCal to show me that it was created correctly:

Events are just as quick and just as clever:

This creates an event for a meeting tomorrow.

I don’t need to go back to iCal to edit the event; everything I want to add I can add via the Quicksilver action.

The text for this one adds a note about how the meeting might unfold, a location, a date, a starting time, a two hour duration, specifies which calendar to add it to and adds an alarm so that my boss won’t sack me for forgetting to meet with him.

The only downside is that you need to remember the letter for each option.

Benjamin has provided some initial documentation.

The commands can be entered in any order and they are:

t-- [title of to-do]

e-- [title of event] (use t-- or e-- to determine whether the script will create a to-do or an event. The default is a to-do. So if you just type some text (without t--) it will come out as a to-do)

d-- [start date (or due date for to-dos) in m/d/y format (or whatever your system is set to). The default is today for events (in 3 days for to-dos), +n to set that many days from today], [hour in hh:mm format, 24hr clock], [end date in m/d/y format, or +n for number of days if it is an all day event, default is same as start date], [end hour in hh:mm format, +n is number of hours from start date, default is +1], [a for an all-day event].

a-- [set an alarm (default for events is -1 hour, for to-dos 10 am on due date)

n-- [to add to notes section]

l-- [location]

c-- [calendar - default is home]

p-- [priority n,l,m,h (for to-dos only)]

u-- [URL reference]

cb-- [copy contents of clipboard to notes section - will always come after the text in the n-- section]

s-- or show-- [show the event or to-do in iCal after creation so you can check and see if it is right]

Examples

‘do this d-- a-- c--Work cb-- s-- p--h’ will create a to-do with title “do this”, with the clipboard copied to the notes, with a due date in 3 days, an alarm at 10 am and in the calendar named “Work” (if it exists, otherwise in the default which is “Home’), with a high priority and open iCal and show this to-do as soon as it has been created

‘e-- meet someone l--someone’s house n-- the directions a--2 d-- +2 17:00 +2′ will create an event “meet someone” two days from now starting at 5 pm and lasting for 2 hours with an alarm 2 hours before hand with a location “someone’s house” with “the directions” in the notes.

Get a copy of this list here.

[Big hat tip to Benjamin for sharing]quicksilver, ical, action, script, to-dos, events, productivity, on the fly

The Quicksilver plugin for Yojimbo was updated today.

In the absence of any release notes, one can only guess what might have changed. Having to guess like this is part of Quicksilver’s charm generally, so here goes…

It introduced something which is either new or at least new to me: an “Append Text (makes plaintext)” option specific to Yojimbo rather than the generic Text Manipulations action.

This allows you to select an item in Yojimbo and append some plain text to it, for example quickly to add to a list of books that I need to borrow when next at the library:

Obviously, this especially nice for people who use Yojimbo as a hub for “Getting Things Done” (GTD) or for managing a series of plain text to-do lists.

If this feature has been there all the time and I just haven’t seen it, someone will no doubt let me know.

UPDATE: As some readers have noted in the comments, I should have mentioned that you will need to turn the action on in Quicksilver’s preferences. Go to Preferences > Actions and search for “text”. Then check the box to the left of the action in the list. Then refresh. Then enjoy:

yojimbo, quicksilver, gtd, getting things done, append text, plugin, not apple mail, productivity

Hawk Wings contains over 1,300 posts full of tips, plugins and add-ons for using Mail.app, iCal and Address Book faster, smarter and better.

There’s also a fair bit here on the productivity app Quicksilver and personal information managers like Yojimbo , and SOHO Notes (the app formerly known as SitckyBrain).

Some of these posts are more useful, interesting and enduring than others.

The front page has a search function which works pretty well and the archives are sorted by category.

By far and away the most popular page on this site is the Hawk Wings Plugin and Addon List which lists over 130 plugins and tools for Mail, iCal and Address Book.

The other nine most visited and (presumably) most useful posts are:

1. Top ten things every Mail.app user should have
2. Ten Mac Tools for Getting Things Done (GTD)
3. A list of 295 different Apple Mail icons
4. A Mail.app rule fix for image spam
5. Getting Things Done in Apple Mail
6. Mail Appetizer – Notification for those who can’t wait
7. MySync: .Mac syncing without .Mac
8. Mail Act-on – Getting sorted, saving time
9. The full list of files needed for a complete Mail.app backup

Subscribe to Hawk Wings in your news reader of choice for the full catastrophe or get a digest of daily posts in your inbox.mail.app, apple mail, ical, address book, productivity, quicksilver, tips, plugins

Alisdair McDiarmid has produced a walk-through for one of Quicksilver’s lesser-known but very powerful time-saving tricks—executing very fast web searches in Wikipedia, on Amazon, news sites or wherever.

I knew Quicksilver could do this, but hadn’t forced myself to experience how good it is until today.

By highlighting some text and pressing ⌘-E, you can copy text to Mac OS X’s shared find clipboard.

Then, by bringing up Quicksilver and selecting a web search bookmark (there are hundreds of pre-made ones to choose from for every imaginable query), you can search your web site of choice in seconds:

Now I can find books on Amazon, the latest news from the BBC on the rise and rise of Borat, definitions for obscure technical terms and acronyms on Wikipedia, words in the Oxford English Dictionary or software on MacUpdate in much less than a tenth of the time it took me yesterday.

And so can you.

[Props also to Allan Odgaard of TextMate fame whose walk-through on this feature seems to be the original.]quicksilver, not apple mail, productivity, web searches, news, books, time-saving, tips, tricks

Steve at InsertTitleBlog.com has produced three screencasts which walk through various things you can do with Quicksilver , which is as Steve says, “an extremely powerful productivity app for Mac OS X”.

Quicksilver gets a lot of good press in the blogosphere and deservedly so. However, it is not always easy to work out how to use it to its full potential, which is either a charming part of its mystery or frustrating, depending on the kind of person you are.

The first one is an overview of the app that provides a demonstration of how it works and covers installation and set-up.

The second one shows you how to navigate files and folders, how to move and delete files with Quicksilver, how to send attachments and emails through Mail.app and how to use Quicksilver to append text to files.

The third covers using the clipboard and shelf and how to set up triggers, including a trigger to email the currently selected item (file, image, whatever).

If Mail hadn’t already made me deliriously happy, Quicksilver would. It’s my second favourite Mac app.

These videos repay the time it takes to watch them. Old timers may pick up a trick or two; newcomers will find these screencasts an excellent way in.apple mail, mail.app, quicksilver, productivity, screencasts, tutorials, tips, act without doing