There are lots of good ways to create iCal events and ToDos from Mail.app messages. I like to use MailTags for ToDos and Event Maker for events.

But even in the most email-focussed life, sometimes you need to make events and ToDos that are not related to an email.

Quicksilver offers at least two slick ways to deal with that quickly and efficiently.

The fastest way is provided by the Mac OS X Service, Calendar Creator. I’ve posted about Calendar Creator before. It’s great.

With the Services plugin installed in Quicksilver, creating an event is as easy as activating the interface, pressing the fullstop (or period) to access text mode, typing in something like “Coffee with Dicko next Tuesday, 10.30 am” and selcting “Add an event” from the action pane:

The “smart parsing” in Calendar Creator is an enormous time-saver. You can get this freeware Service from the developer’s web site .

A poster on the Quicksilver forums provides an AppleScript that offers another way to achieve the same thing. In fact, if you don’t use Quicksilver, it will launch just as happily from the Scripts menu or with a hotkey provided by an app like FastScripts .

Set it with a Quicksilver trigger and it presents you with a series of dialogs asking for the title, description (which goes in iCal’s Notes field), a date, start and end times and which calendar to use. This takes longer but gives you more control.ical, quicksilver, events, triggers, services, calendar creator, applescript, tips, productivity

The AppleBlog has put together an excellent list of Quicksilver Tutorials from a variety of sources.

You will find tips on creating and using triggers, tagging files with Spotlight comments, and tutorials from Dan Dickinson aimed at people just starting out with Quicksilver .

Readers of Hawk Wings will probably want to add Merlin Mann’s tutorial on sending short emails with Quicksilver and a tip on using Quicksilver to email a file to the list.quicksilver, tips, tutorials, triggers, spotlight comments, email, mail.app, apple mail