Hawk Wings » to dos

Anxiety: Slick bare bones task manager

Tim Gaden — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 12:23:52 +0000

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 ]task management, to-dos, ical, mail.app, apple mail, leopard mail, productivity, getting things done, GTDSimilar Posts:

Hiding to-dos in Leopard Mail

Tim Gaden — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 11:17:41 +0000

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? mail.app, apple mail, leopard mail, to-dos, tips, productivity, smart mailboxes, workaroundsSimilar Posts:

A feast of interesting macOSXHints Tips

Tim Gaden — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 11:47:00 +0000

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 âŒ˜-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, productivitySimilar Posts:

Getting Things Done with Leopard Mail

Tim Gaden — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 10:16:39 +0000

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? getting things done, GTD, leopard mail, apple mail, notes, to-dos, mailtags, mail.app, productiivitySimilar Posts:

Five favourite time-saving Leopard Tips

Tim Gaden — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 10:46:07 +0000

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 âŒ˜-e (Command + â€˜eâ€™) 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 contactâ€™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 contactâ€™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]mail.app, apple mail, ical, leopard, productivity, tips, dashboard, events, to-dos, calculator, spotlight, apple, widgetSimilar Posts:

MenuCalendarClock: Slick new to-do management features for Leopard

Tim Gaden — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 12:54:22 +0000

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 .leopard, ical, menubar, task management, productivity, mail.app, calendar, to-dos, eventsSimilar Posts:

Quickly edit events and to-dos in Leopard iCal

Tim Gaden — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 12:19:07 +0000

In the quest for interface purity, Apple has taken the information pane out of Leopard iCal. A cleaner look for sure, but also an inconvenience for users.

In Tiger you could edit events and to-dos from the information pane. Now, 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. Plus, of course, there’s the principle: It ought to be more efficient. Lots of Mac users are grumpy about it as you can from a very long thread on Apple’s Discussions site.

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

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

[Via Dan Miller via Daring Fireball ]ical, productivity, tips, editing events, to-dos, interface puritySimilar Posts:

MailTags for Leopard: Public Beta

Tim Gaden — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 10:45:47 +0000

MailTags, the prince of Mail.app plugins, is now available in a Leopard-friendly public beta.

Scott outlines in a post on his web site how MailTags retains its productivity edge for Leopard Mail users. Although Leopard Mail includes notes and to-dos, MailTags still does it better. Its notes are smarter, its to-dos more flexible and its project features unmatched.

For example, tagging emails and RSS feeds with the same MailTags project makes it possible to see both sorts of data in one hit in Mail’s search window.

A list of Leopard Mail’s abilities without and with MailTags makes the advantages clear:

The beta has been hassle-free for me since upgrading to Leopard last Friday. Now in its fifth version, most of the kinks have been ironed out by Scott’s squad of beta-test commandos. MailTags to-dos don’t work for the moment, neither does the option to “view the originating message”. But they will.

Download and enjoy.

It’s all good for me, but heed Scott’s warning nonetheless: “We strongly recommend you maintain backups of your mail data or avoid using MailTags in critical situations.” mailtags, mail.app. apple mail, productivity, plugins, projects, notes, to-dos, public betaSimilar Posts:

Do It: Nifty task app, Quicksilver, syncing, skins

Tim Gaden — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 13:07:44 +0000

How I haven’t seen this before, I don’t know.

Do It (formerly known as ToDo) is a very nifty, tricked-out task or to-do management app that features everything but the kitchen sink — Address Book integration, Quicksilver plugin, syncing, lists for each context, skins and more.

In the app’s readme file, the developer describes it as “a small application to manage categorized to do lists. Each to do item can be linked with a file on your computer, a URL, such as the address of a web site, or a contact from your address book. The linked file or URL can be opened directly from the Do It window.”

The interface is nicely done.

Clicking the orange arrows moves from one category (or Context for GTDers) list to the next, and items within each are ordered by priority.

If an item has a file or URL linked to it, clicking the small arrow on the right jumps to the file or web page.

Double-clicking the item’s title allows it to be edited. To edit other details of the item, you need to click the “i” button at the bottom or use âŒ˜-I:

The details are stored in a “MailTags-like” smoked glass pane.

Hovering the cursor over “To Do …” slides down a Notes field and the “Deadline …” (not visible here because it is expanded already) opens up options to add reminders for the task in iCal, use an alarm and something called “Auto upgrade priority”.

I couldn’t work out what that last options does, but it sounds pretty cool.

Dragging a file from Finder or a URL from your browser over the Linked Item box stores it with the task. Here you see the URL of Do It’s web site, but it could just as easily be the TextMate draft of the post.

Do It is designed to be skinned and the developer maintains a list of user-submitted skins:

Quicksilver nuts like me will love the fact that the developer has written a Quicksilver plugin for Do It.

Install it from the Do It menu, quit and relaunch Quicksilver and creating to-do is just a Quicksilver activation keystroke away:

After hitting return, a supplementary dialog appears allowing you to assign the new to-do to the category or context or your choice:

In another nice piece of integration, Do It comes with an Address Book plugin which offers contextual menu options to set reminders to email or phone people in your Address Book:

A similar additional screen lets the reminder be assigned to the category of your choice.

Syncing with .Mac options are controlled within the app’s Preferences.

As if all of that is not unbelievable enough, Do It is freeware.

You can get a copy of it from the developer’s web site .not apple mail, productivity, ical, to-dos, task management, quicksilver, syncing, address book, plugin, Jeepers this is slickSimilar Posts:

DoBeDo iCal widget 2.5: Resizable, Groups, more

Tim Gaden — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 11:05:08 +0000

DoBeDo, one of the smarter iCal widgets, has just been updated.

The new version (2.5) can be resized, adds support for groups of calendars, task clustering and scheduling and offers “natural language” support for due dates.

It now also supports international date formats, which is good news for people who put their months in the right place.

The widget comes with three skins. The one on the left, Duke, is new:

It has a built-in drop-down dialog for entering new tasks:

After the task is created, another drop-down calendar makes assigning a due date easy.

Printer settings allow you to nominate a default printer for printing lists of tasks or the option to preview it as a PDF first.

It now also come with hotkeys. ⌘-D will show or hide dates and priorities, ⌘-F expands the tasks beyond the user-determined future date.

And in a nice touch, ⌘-E will email a list of the tasks to an address you specify:

Some bugfixes round out the new version.

DoBeDo is freeware and available from the developer’s web site .ical, productivity, to-dos, widget, dashboard, email, hotkeys, calendarSimilar Posts: