Weblog on the Internet and public policy, journalism, virtual community, and more from David Brake, a Canadian academic, consultant and journalist
6 July 2006
Filed under:Email discoveries,Software reviews at1:15 pm

MailTags – as its name suggests – lets you add keyword tags to email messages in Apple Mail and do a variety of other interesting things with your email to help you sort it. Best of all – a feature just added – you can set it to effectively display your own subject line in the “message list” pane. So you can scan your email and quickly find something you label “important advice” instead of having to remember that that email had the subject line “Re: that thing you said”. (This is a feature Eudora had for ages which I really missed when I moved across to Apple Mail).

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  1. […] Utilities: Active Timer – Tracks the amount of time you spend in each application on your Mac. A pretty basic feature set but it’s easy to use and it’s free. AudioScrobbler – Tracks what you listen to in iTunes and automatically creates a profile for you on last.fm which should help you find music you like. Its support for Classical music is rubbish (it doesn’t handle the ‘composer’ tag) but otherwise well worth a look. Aurora – An alarm clock for your Mac that ties in with iTunes – excellent! BluePhoneMenu – Handy utility for controlling a bluetooth phone via your Mac. Since superceded by BluePhone Elite which offers more features but is shareware. Still downloadable, though. Compost – Lets you control the way the Trash works so you can instantly delete big unwanted files without flushing all of the files in the trash unneccessarily. Default Folder X – gives you much better control of which folder you open when you get the open/save dialogue on your Mac (as well as adding lots of other misc features). Reminds me of a very early Mac addon, ‘Boomerang’. (I still don’t know why this isn’t a part of the OS by now). Delocalizer 1.1 – Gets rid of foreign language support files you are not using to free up hard disk space. ION, the Open Media Network and DTV – Trying to make it easy to find and download internet video podcasts. Greasemonkey – an add-on to Firefox that enables lots of useful enhancements to your web browsing – like Quicksilver (below) it’s something you have to try before you see what use it can be. Eyehide – makes it easy to create an invisible, password-protected folder to hide files you don’t want everyone to have access to (so you can retain some privacy without password protecting your whole computer against everyone). Mailtags – Must-have utility for organizing Apple Mail messages (see this post) Memory Usage Getter – (also measures CPU usage) Figure out which of your applications is a memory or CPU hog and figure out if you need more RAM. Quıcĸsilver – Swiss army knife keyboard shortcut application many rave about but I haven’t really delved into yet. R-Name – Easy way to change several file names at the same time on your Mac. Romeo – Excellent free Mac application to let you control your Mac (eg your iTunes or your Powerpoint presentation) using your Bluetooth phone Screen Spanning Doctor – Use more than one screen or use a large screen at > 1024×768 with your iBook by installing this. SimpleWget – Provides a basic non-control-line interface to Wget which automates copying web sites onto your hard disk for later browsing. SMARTReporter – May be able to warn you in advance when your disk is in danger of failing. Synk – easy-to-use file synchronisation and full disk backup app for the Mac – free to academic users, cheap for others. Textpander – (Mac only but PC options are also available) – automatically substitutes text for other text in every application you type in – useful for common mis-spellings and can also insert the date when you type “ddate” etc. Time Out – Warns you to take a break away from the keyboard (Mac only) Tidy Up! – Find duplicate files TinkerTool – gives you access to additional preference settings Apple has built into Mac OS X VLC video player – Excellent player for many kinds of video content – more versatile than Quicktime for this and includes a full-screen mode (which Quicktime ‘basic’ does not). WhatSize Disk Inventory X – Lets you see at a glance where the big files and folders are on your hard disk so you can free up space. WireTap Pro – Shareware Mac utility that lets you record streamed audio into files for later listening. Yasu 1.3.1 – Performs various low-level Mac (UNIX) “maintenance” operations. Use with caution. I have to say I only used it once so far because I am not clear what it does or why I would need it… […]

    Pingback by Blog.org by David Brake academic, consultant & journalist — 25 October 2006 @ 6:18 pm

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