Mail Act-On 1.3 - Key Stroke Plugin for Apple Mail.App

If you’re using Tiger and Mail.app, you need to have a look at Mail Act-On, a free plugin developed by Scott Morrison and Jonathan Paisley that lets you assign keyboard commands that are bound to custom “Rules” you set in your Preferences. This is (very cleverly) accomplished by naming the rule according to the CTRL key you want to assign to it.

A few months back Mike Harris wrote us up a great article on Remind, a very cool and flexible little UNIX app for tracking date-based events. If you enjoy Remind and are using Tiger (OS X 10.4), checkout Nick Vargish’s Remind Widget. Gives you all the power of Remind in a pretty and configurable package. Great work, Nick!

Good movie illustrating how Quicksilver, email, and Backpack can interact.

The main reason I stick with Entourage for all my calendar, TODO list, and—to a certain extent—archival email needs, comes down to one word: glue.

As annoying as Entourage is in so many ways, I love that I can basically associate anything with anything via the “Link” functionality. This provides a handy little landing pad for any task, note, event, email, or contact onto which you can drop any other Entourage object as well as virtually any item from the Finder (for some reason it doesn’t easily handle URLs, which seems kind of dumb: use .weblocs as a workaround). Entourage then perpetually remembers that association in both the linking and linked items. Got it? Group like with like, and then get to anything from anything (Steal this idea, Apple; use Spotlight).

So, I can associate an email message with a TODO, attach a text file to a calendar event (see my article in June’s MacWorld), and even, apparently, attach Applications and folder paths to any Entourage object. Why is this last one so freaking handy? Lemme show you.

iPhoto hung in Tiger until I removed “Keyword Assistant” from the installer.

Looks like a good thread in the green to watch and maybe contribute to.

As Mr. Gruber mentioned yesterday, 2.0 (Tiger) versions of Safari have added the ability to COMMAND-Return from within a web page’s form field in order to send the resulting page to a new tab (go ahead: try it in the 43F search field in the right column of this page). It also appears that you can COMMAND-Click most forms’ Submit buttons to similar effect. This builds on a feature available since (at least) the previous version of Safari in which you can COMMAND-Return in both the Address Bar and the Google Bar to generate a new, populated tab. (n.b: these also work in Safari 1.3 for Panther [Thanks, Roger.])

These may not seem revolutionary on the face of it, but as someone who’s already committed them to Safari muscle memory, I can assure you they’re wildly useful. A few random examples.

Our theoretically weekly roundup of stuff that didn't fit anyplace else.

Gabe's amazing iTunes scripts put Rube Goldberg to shame; I also make a plea for bands (and maybe labels?) to always offer a tip jar via PayPal.