One of my very favourite time-saving, finger-sparing, productivity-boosting apps is on sale at MacZOT! today.

You can pick up a copy of TextExpander, the text snippet manager, at a 33% discount.

Nothing else helps me whip through my inbox as quickly (I don’t use MailTemplate) or manages my signatures as well in Mail.app and elsewhere.

On sale. Just for today. USD 19.95 instead of USD 29.95.

Drop everything. Go get it .

[Thanks, Marcel]

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Whether you’re a hard-core Thunderbird user or, like me, just dip into Thunderbird from time to time, you will benefit from Leslie Franke’s Thunderbird cheatsheet.

It’s hard to keep all those shortcuts in your head, so a single page that sets them all out by category is a great tool:

You can view it as a web page or download the PDF.

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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.

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This browser bookmarklet, “Gmail This“, creates a new Gmail message containing the URL of the web page you are viewing.

Just drag it to your Bookmarks Bar (Safari/Camino) or Command-click on it and select “Bookmark this link…” (Firefox).

That’s it.

[Via email.about.com ]

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I’ve blogged before about using the Dictionary and Thesaurus in Apple Mail and about rolling your own Shortcuts.

A neat tip on macOSXHints combines the two.

Not wanting to send an email by mistake when trying to check a word in the Dictionary (like this poor guy), the poster decided to change the keyboard shortcut for the Dictionary from Control-Command-D to F7. (You could, of course, choose any shortcut you like, following the instructions here and modifying the “Look up in Dictionary” shortcut.)

What’s extra clever about this, though, is that the new shortcut becomes something more than the old one was.

The poster discovered that the new shortcut acts as a kind of “toggle switch”. After pressing F7 he could move the mouse over as many words as he liked and get a definition for each. When he was finished, hitting F7 again toggled the “Dictionary mode” off again.

Excellent tip. Never has it been so easy to understand those emails from friends who take pride in being obscure!

(This will work in other apps too.)

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The Toolbar notification utility Mail Status Control has been updated.

It now features a new application icon and, more importantly, the ability to display the number of unread messages in Apple Mail next to its icon.

The message count display can be configured to show only the inbox or all unread messages. These enhancements bring it closer to MailUnreadStatusBar, although the latter still holds the edge in flexibilty, allowing you to specify more exactly which mailboxes to keep an eye on.

Mail Status Control has a number of other settings that you can determine, including the ability to set keyboard shortcuts for checking mail, launching a new message and showing Mail.app:

Mail Status Control is freeware and can be downloaded from the developer’s web site.

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