The good people at Smile on my mac, who make TextExpander, have made a kind offer.

The company are providing a special discount of 20% for Hawk Wings readers, which brings the price of the app down from its usual price tag of USD 29.95 to USD 23.96.

Further, they are willing to extend the discount to the TextExpander Family Pack, for up to five users in one household, bringing the price of that bundle down to USD 35.96 (usually USD 44.95)

To get the special, just click on this link: http://www.smileonmymac.com/hawkwings/

The offer expires at the end of the month, 31 July 2008.

What do you get for your money?

Above all, you get your life back, as the snippet manager and typing expander saves me (and my fingers) ten or fifteen minutes a day. Getting that back for a one-off charge of USD 23.96 is a bargain indeed.

See these Hawk Wings posts for more TextExpander goodness:

1. How to boilerplate frequent email replies
2. HTML snippet file for TextExpander
3. Clever TextExpander clipboard snippet trick
4. TextExpander auto-corrections list
5. TextExpander: Update, Tips and TricksTextExpander, snippet manager, typing, time-saving, productivity, mail.app, apple mail, html, apple

Aral Balkan has written a clever applescript that makes it possible for mail.app to reply to multiple emails.

By default you can’t do this. If you select multiple emails in the Mail Viewer, the Reply and Reply All buttons in the Toolbar grey out.

Aral’s script, based on a previous example posted on macOSXHints.com, saves time and effort by giving you the power to respond to a bunch of emails about a similar problem in one hit; especially useful if you have been on an extended break at the beach and have returned to an inbox heaving with emails.

Copy the text of Aral’s script , paste it into Script Editor, compile it and save it somewhere clever like ~/Library/Scripts/ Applications/Mail so that it is always at the top of the AppleScript menu when Mail is the active app.

Then select all the emails you received about new cutting edge “Getting Things Done” (GTD) apps that knock every other previous GTD app into a cocked hat, or how frustrating it is that the background of emails in Mail.app can’t be changed or whatever, and run the script.

Mail produces a new message addressed to you with all the senders of the original emails in the BCC field:

Promise to check out all the new GTD apps right away, hit send and suddenly your inbox is fifteen emails smaller.

For extra-speedy multiple replies, you could bind the script to a Quicksilver trigger or use a utility like FastScripts to bind it to a keyboard shortcut of your choosing. mail.app, apple mail, replies, applescript, productivity, time-saving, GTD, tips,

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

Keyboard shortcuts are great time-savers, as everyone knows. The only problem: you need to remember them to save the time.

KeyCue is a nifty little app that will — at a single keystroke (by default the ⌘ key) — list all the available shortcuts for the currently active app, in this case Mail.app and iCal:

Press another modifier key and the screen will highlight the matching keys in yellow. Select the shortcut you couldn’t remember, and the screen disappears.

The app’s Preferences pane offers option to customise the keystroke which calls the app, the contents of the window and when the window should disappear.

KeyCue is shareware (USD 14.99) and is available from the developer’s web site .

[Thanks, Adam] productivity, keyboard shortcuts, keystrokes, time-saving, apple, Mac OS X

If you spend a lot of time taking screenshots (as I do), you will like Screenshot Plus, an image capture widget with a very neat trick up its sleeve.

Like other screenshot widgets (Capture for example) it can take fullscreen grabs, selections or particular windows. Unlike Capture, it can also do timed screenshots and grab individual widgets. These options are presented nicely on the front of the widget:

On the rear, the widget offers something truly time-saving. By default it displays the screenshot as a preview after capture, but you can set it (as above) to import the screenshot directly into your image editor of choice.

In my case that’s Photoshop. The time (and finger-wear) I will save by not clicking and dragging from Desktop to app is immense. It will even launch the editor for you if it’s not already open.

Of course, I can still make a cup of coffee while Photoshop loads, but that’s not the widget’s fault.

A drop-down menu allows you to specify your destination of choice—another image editor or iPhoto or whatever.

Images can be captured as png, tiff, jpg, jp2, pdf, gif, bmp, or pict files.

A new version released a few days ago adds 10.4.7 compatibility and better French language support.

Screenshot Plus is freeware and available from the developer’s web site . screenshot, capture, images, productivity, widget, time-saving, helpful apps, not apple mail

A tip on macOSXHints points out a short-cut for text entry in Address Book.

Pressing Option-Escape in a text field, opens an autocomplete dialogue with options from previously entered cards.

Like all these tips, it makes perfect sense when you think about, but who ever thinks about it?

For example, type the first two or three letters of the name, hit Option-Escape and then just choose from the options that appear:

This is especially useful with spouses or large numbers of employees from one company or those English Fotherington-Smythe cousins.

Unfortunately, Address Book Quick Entry (now my preferred faster way of entering contacts) isn’t as smart about this. Hitting Option-Escape here brings up a general autocomplete list rather than previous values from Address Book itself.productivity, address book, text entry, keyboard shortcut, time saving, tip