In the past few days, my macOSXHints RSS feed has churned out an astonished number of interesting tips for iCal, Address Book and Mail.app.

Not all of them are equally useful or productivity-boosting, but all of them are interesting, if only because there are sometimes better ways to get these things done.

1. Use Quickview for Mail.app attachments

One tip explains that highlighting an attachment in a Mail message and pressing the spacebar opens Quickview.

Not much more useful than using the Quickview button next to the “Save” button under the headers perhaps, but in the comments, another poster points out that pressing ⌘-Y when viewing a message opens all the message’s attachments in a single Quickview window, with arrows to move from one to the next.

2. Adding notes and to-dos to individual emails

Another post details a way to add notes to an individual email using Leopard Mail’s to-do feature. This is a “hack” for Leopard Mail’s inability to attach notes to individual emails.

I hardly need to tell regular Hawk Wings readers that there is a more excellent way .

3. Apply filters to Address Book contact pictures

This was news to me. If you click the “swirly cube” button next to the camera button in Address Book’s contact image editor, you are rewarded with 35 different filters that you can apply to the picture.

In effect, this brings Photobooth (my kids’ favourite Mac app) to all your Address Book contacts. There is a lot of fun to be had here, especially with the photos of contacts that you don’t much care for.

4. Use Drag ‘n’ Drop to replace icons in an item’s Inspector pane

From time to time I like to chance the icon of my Mail.app. After all there are more than 450 options and changing the icon under Tiger was easy.

Now it is even easier. A macOSXHints tip explains how to change an icon not by opening two Inspectors and cutting and pasting between the icon field in each, but simply by dragging and dropping an icon into the icon field of the target app’s Inspector. That’s much quicker.

5. Unlearn words you learnt by mistake

Mac OS X’s spell checker is a wonderful thing, surpassed only by Spell Checker X, now in the process of private Leopard-friendly beta testing and soon to reappear.

But is is possible to learn a word too quickly, a tipster on macOSXHints points out , adding a misspelt word to your dictionary which the spell checker will never again pick up. Now unlearning it is as simple as right-clicking (or “Command-clicking” in the old language) on the offending word and selecting “Unlearn Spelling” from the contextual menu.mail.app, apple mail, address book, tips, macosxhints, icons, spell checking, contacts, mailtags, notes, to-dos, productivity

Tags: Address Book, Apple Mail, Apple Mail Tips, contacts, icons, macOSXHints, mail.app, mailtags, Notes, Productivity, spell checking, to dos

Evan Gross has released a “lite” version of his excellent Spell Catcher X utility.

Spell Catcher X is a multi-facetted app that offers interactive spelling correction, text snippet management, a substantial array of text manipulations (smarten the quotes in a selection or strip white space, for example) and more.

See Bob LeVitus’ review of Spell Catcher X on MacObserver (“Who Kneads Spill Chicken?” ) more more.

The most-used SCX feature on my MacBook Pro is the interactive spell-checking, which not only detects errors as you make them, but offers suggestions on what you meant to type:

Wonderful stuff. This alone pays for the cost of the app within a month.

The Lite version shaves USD 10 off the price of the full version. For that reduced price you have to make do without the interactive auto-completion of words you are typing, the Ghostwriter feature which saves text as you type for recovery in case of disaster and the text manipulation features.

Also, it only supports US English and the additional extra-cost language modules. The other six “default” languages won’t work.

Evan has produced a detailed list of differences .

The full version of Spell Catcher X costs USD 39.95; the Lite version USD 29.95. Both of them and a demo are available from Evan’s web site .mail.app, apple mail, text, spell checking, productivity, text snippets, working faster smarter better

Tags: Apple Mail, mail.app, Productivity, spell checking, text, text snippets, working faster smarter better