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 beta

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 ⌘-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 slick

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, calendar

Benjamin Harley, creator of ABGMerge, the Gmail contacts-Address Book syncing app, has also scripted a powerful iCal action for Quicksilver , which is more flexible and has more options than Quicksilver’s built-in iCal plugin.

It’s complicated (power comes at a cost) but offers a speedy way to quickly enter a complete iCal item on the fly whichever app you are in. I use the current public beta of MailTags to do this when I am in Mail.app, which has the added bonus of automatically creating a URL link back to the email in question. But I’m not always in Mail (sadly).

UPDATE: You can get the latest version of the script here

Download and unzip it, then place it in your ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Actions folder.

You will need to restart Quicksilver and may need to add the Actions folders to your Quicksilver Catalog (Click the “plus” button and use the “File and Folder Scanner”) so that Quicksilver can find it.

UPDATE: You will also need to edit the script slightly. Open it up in Script editor or the app of your choice and change the property for the default calendar from “Home” to whatever calendar you would like the to-dos and events to be created in.

To use it, type “make ical” into Quicksilver’s first window, select “Process Text…” in the Action window and then type the text to create the to-do or event in the third pane.

For example:

This creates a to-do in my Trinity Calendar, specifies a date, adds an alarm and some notes so that I will know where to send the comments on this student’s work, and opens iCal to show me that it was created correctly:

Events are just as quick and just as clever:

This creates an event for a meeting tomorrow.

I don’t need to go back to iCal to edit the event; everything I want to add I can add via the Quicksilver action.

The text for this one adds a note about how the meeting might unfold, a location, a date, a starting time, a two hour duration, specifies which calendar to add it to and adds an alarm so that my boss won’t sack me for forgetting to meet with him.

The only downside is that you need to remember the letter for each option.

Benjamin has provided some initial documentation.

The commands can be entered in any order and they are:

t-- [title of to-do]

e-- [title of event] (use t-- or e-- to determine whether the script will create a to-do or an event. The default is a to-do. So if you just type some text (without t--) it will come out as a to-do)

d-- [start date (or due date for to-dos) in m/d/y format (or whatever your system is set to). The default is today for events (in 3 days for to-dos), +n to set that many days from today], [hour in hh:mm format, 24hr clock], [end date in m/d/y format, or +n for number of days if it is an all day event, default is same as start date], [end hour in hh:mm format, +n is number of hours from start date, default is +1], [a for an all-day event].

a-- [set an alarm (default for events is -1 hour, for to-dos 10 am on due date)

n-- [to add to notes section]

l-- [location]

c-- [calendar - default is home]

p-- [priority n,l,m,h (for to-dos only)]

u-- [URL reference]

cb-- [copy contents of clipboard to notes section - will always come after the text in the n-- section]

s-- or show-- [show the event or to-do in iCal after creation so you can check and see if it is right]

Examples

‘do this d-- a-- c--Work cb-- s-- p--h’ will create a to-do with title “do this”, with the clipboard copied to the notes, with a due date in 3 days, an alarm at 10 am and in the calendar named “Work” (if it exists, otherwise in the default which is “Home’), with a high priority and open iCal and show this to-do as soon as it has been created

‘e-- meet someone l--someone’s house n-- the directions a--2 d-- +2 17:00 +2′ will create an event “meet someone” two days from now starting at 5 pm and lasting for 2 hours with an alarm 2 hours before hand with a location “someone’s house” with “the directions” in the notes.

Get a copy of this list here.

[Big hat tip to Benjamin for sharing]quicksilver, ical, action, script, to-dos, events, productivity, on the fly

Mike Abdullah has updated his excellent Event Maker utility which allows for the quick creation of to-dos or events from an email in Mail.app or from scratch.

Coupled to a Quicksilver trigger (or similar), it is available system-wide, not only in Mail, as a slick way to get meetings and reminders into iCal.

The most recent version (0.4.3) fixes bugs in the Undo and Redo menus and tweaks the display of its alarms option.

Since, I last posted about it, the app has also added AppleScript support for alarms and keyboard shortcuts for adding and removing alarms.

Extra nifty, something that I had not noticed before, it allows you to set multiple alarms for the one event, in this case an email 45 minutes before, a message alert fifteen minutes before and then to launch a script that starts the event:

I’m not going to be able to forget that one easily.

Of course, most of the time I am using the clever new features in the public beta of MailTags to do this kind of scheduling work, but Event Maker is a very handy addition to my productivity tool-kit for the rare times that I am not in Mail but still need to schedule stuff.

Event Maker is donation-ware and you can get it from MacUpdate .mail.app, apple mail, ical, productivity, to-dos, events, plugins, applescript

When Leopard Mail was previewed last month, it provoked a lot of reaction. One of the things people broadly welcomed was the introduction of more “productivity features” like to-dos, notes and the integration of RSS feeds.

It looks like the Apple Mail Development Team is giving Mail some more grunt for getting things done, and might even muscle in on the territory currently occupied by MailTags .

A poster in the MailTags forum asked today,

With the promised tighter integration of Leopard’s new Mail and iCal, including managing ToDo’s directly from Mail, why should I invest in MailTags 2.x now? What more will MailTags be offering?

Good question. And MailTags developer Scott Morrison has produced a good answer. He has listed all the things that MailTags will continue to offer than Leopard Mail doesn’t (as far as anyone knows):

If this is too hard to read, you can see a full-sized version of the list on the MailTags forum .

From what I’ve seen, there’s no reason to think that MailTags will be redundant when Leopard Mail arrives.

It will continue to provide a comprehensive structure and process for my workflow through its projects, keywords and priorities, something that Leopard Mail cannot offer.

What do you think?mail.app, apple mail, mailtags, leopard mail, to-dos, notes, productivity

Notepad is a widget that takes the Sidenote idea to the Dashboard.

It is a note-taker with built-in searching, printing, resize features, iPod syncing, locking, lists and sketching.

It also comes with three nice skins:

The tickable lists obviously lend themselves to to-do lists. A drop-down list at the bottom of the widget offers quick access to all the notes, which can also be exported as text files.

For today only, you can get it for 38% off through MacUpdate’s new “MacZOT-like” cheap-for-a-day promotion .

Normally Notepad costs USD 7.95. For the next 17 hours or so you can get it for USD 4.95.

Notepad is a creation of the WidgetMachine .widget, dsahboard, note-taking, quick notes, to-dos, productivity, not apple mail