Anxiety is a new and well-crafted “no frills” task mananger for Leopard that manages a list of your to-dos and syncs them with iCal and Mail.app.

Personally, I like the big, fully-featured approach to task management (OmniFocus, iGTD , etc), but not everyone needs all the bells and whistles.

If these big hitters are not for you, then Anxiety is well worth a look. As the developer says, “With a tiny desktop footprint and clean minimalist aesthetics, the application is simultaneously small, beautiful and effective”.

It presents a simple list of outstanding tasks, which can be displayed and hidden again by clicking on the app’s Menubar or Dock icon:

When it has focus, hitting Return brings up a pane to create a new task. Tabbing through you can quickly enter the task and assign it to the calendar of your choice. Once it is created in iCal, it is soon synced into Leopard Mail as well.

Double-clicking on a task in the list opens the to-do in Mail or opens the task’s Edit pane in iCal (you can set this in the app’s Preferences).

Checking the box on the left, completes the task, which turns a violent green and then disappears.

Anxiety’s Preferences allow you to determine whether it displays tasks by individual calendar or in a unified list, whether the icon is displayed in the Dock, Menubar or both, and various display options:

Anxiety is freeware (donations not refused) and is available - along with a comprehensive list of its many virtues - from the developer’s web site .

[Via digg ]

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I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again, the lack of options for displaying to-dos in Leopard Mail is disappointing. And frustrating.

A poster in the macOSXHints forums has come up with a good work-around for avoiding that long list of finished tasks.

He has created a Smart Mailbox called “Not Done” which is set up to display all to-dos that are incomplete:

Simple, really. Why didn’t I think of that?

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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.

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Rory Bowman is taking to Leopard Mail with a passion. He has written up some pointers on “Getting Things Done” (GTD) with Mail’s new notes and to-do features.

He presents a sample screenshot using a note to list things that need to be done, talks about using Leopard Mail’s RSS feature to speed up the time you spend reading the web and what smart mailboxes are good for.

Unfortunately, my notes don’t sync to my iPhone as he suggests.

It’s not really a systematic attempt to implement GTD in Leopard Mail, but it is an interesting summary of the productivity-boosting features in Leopard Mail.

Myself, I am reluctant to incorporate the new features of Leopard Mail into a tweaked workflow for getting things done.

To tell the truth, I am bit underwhelmed by the notes and to-do features, the to-dos especially. Remember the Keynote at which Steve Jobs explained in an excited voice how he “lives in Mail”? Ah-a, I thought, that means we are now going to see something really special.

But in fact the implementation of to-dos is really crude. They are there, but the flexibility to display them sensibly (hide completed, show to-dos for upcoming week, show only a particular calendar, etc, etc) is missing. Perhaps that’s why he lives in Mail; the features are too underdone to help him get his work done and live outside Mail for a while!

The old way which uses only technology already available in Tiger is good enough for me.

I am waiting for Leopard MailTags to get its to-do and event creation features back.

How about you? Has Leopard Mail changed your productivity or workflow for the better, or do you (like me) still use it as if it were Tiger Mail, just a bit more shiny?

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I’ve been using Leopard for long enough now to collect five tips that save me time and effort. Let me pass them on to you.

Find emails faster in Leopard Mail

Before Leopard it was possible to find emails in the list view of a mailbox faster by using the Mail Type Select plugin. With this installed, Mail.app jumped to the first message that matched your keystrokes, just as Finder does. So typing “Ros” quickly found the first email in the mailbox from Rosemary.

Now this feature is built into Leopard Mail by default. Try it out. It makes a difference.

Do your sums faster

Now that I am a Dean and need to set and manage budgets, I need to do sums more than ever before. A nice new feature in the Spotlight window, does your sums for you.

Just type in an equation, say, “12 * 34″ and Spotlight goes to Calculator and does the sum for you, giving you the answer in the Spotlight results. Nifty.

Edit iCal to-dos and events faster

In Tiger you could edit events and to-dos from the information pane. Now, iCal’s sidebar has gone to God. To edit an iCal item, you need to double-click it, wait for the details pane and then click again on the edit button on the bottom.

These extra clicks add up over time. Especially if, like me, you live in a fluid world in which tasks and meetings are always changing.

Luckily, there is a short cut to get straight to editing an event or a to-do.

Click once on the iCal item to highlight it. Then press ⌘-e (Command + ‘e’) and you launch into an edit dialog straight away.

Create better iCal events in Mail faster

Hovering the mouse over a name or details of an event in Leopard Mail activates Leopard’s Data Detector and produces a drop box with the option to add it to Address Book or iCal.

That’s pretty smart, but there is something even smarter lurking here.

If you block all a contact’s information before you hover over the name, for example, or details of an event for iCal, the data detector pastes all the information into the new contact’s or event’s notes field.

Get more out of iCal’s Dashboard Widget

The iCal Widget in Leopard has a secret up its sleeve. If you click on it once, it displays the monthly calendar we all knew and loved in Tiger.

Click on it once more, and it pulls your events for the day out into a third pane:

I get this information more easily from MenuCalendarClock, but if I didn’t have it, I’d value it here. UPDATE: Thirty seconds after posting this I found a smarter Dashboard solution.

[Via macOSXHints , TUAW , trial and error and poking around]

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MenuCalendarClock is a menubar app for iCal that gives you quick access to your iCal events and to-dos. Another menubar app, High Priority, had the jump on it in Tiger, as High Priority offered the ability to create new to-dos and mark tasks as completed.

Now, the new Leopard-friendly MenuCalendarClock 3.0 offers the same interaction with to-dos. There are no plans to rewrite High Priority for Leopard, so MenuCalendarClock is worth another look.

It adds a menubar item with the date and/or the time, replacing the default System date/time display. Clicking on it opens a drop-down box with the current month, and a list of events and tasks for the day which can be toggled on and off.

Hovering over the calendar displays a tooltip containing that day’s events.

The Action wheel opens a menu with options to reveal a search field, copy today’s date into the clipboard, display the app’s preferences and more.

MenuCalendarClock is also very well provided with keyboard shortcut. By default Control-Option-Command-C pops down the display, although the combination can be set by the user in the preferences.

A further option in the preferences enables a tooltip display of the days events and to-dos when the mouse is hovered over the menubar item.

The Preference Pane controls options for general display, customising the font and colour of the time display and the choice of a number of icons.

Further options allow you to set which iCal calendars it should display and options for dealing with the birthdays of your Address Book contacts.

New in the latest version is the ability to create tasks and to edit and mark them as complete. Needless to say this passes through seamlessly into iCal and Leopard Mail’s new to-do lists.

A keyboard shortcut pops up a “heads up display” for creating a new task. I find it easier to use that the list of to-dos in Mail (subject for another post, but why are Mail’s to-do features so underdone?!).

Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like one can tab through the fields in the display, which is a pain. Also I find that I can associate a to-do with any of my iCal calendars in MenuCalendarClock, something I can’t do in Mail.app. The to-do icons are colour-coded to the particular iCal calendar. The option to colour the text of the to-do as well would be nice.

Highlighting a task, pressing Command-I to bring up the Inspector allows existing to-dos to be edited, Shift-Command-C marks it as complete. It’s fast and it’s easy to master.

MenuCalendarClock costs USD 19.95 to register. You will need to buy a licence to access the to-do management features, although some basic features can be used when it is unregistered. Also, it does the job in English, German, Finnish, French, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, Catalan, Russian, Norwegian, Japanese and Simplified Chinese.

Get it from the developer’s web site .

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