Mac|Life - July 2008

23. TWITTERIFIC _TwitterificWe’ve given up on trying to explain to non-Twitterers what Twitter is and why it has such appeal. In case you don’t know, it’s a micro-blogging service that gives you yet another way to kill time online (as if you need one). The fact is, it’s great fun once you get a few friends signed up. Twitterific liberates the service from the browser by providing instant notifications through a menuless floating window. It also makes some of Twitter’s lesser-known features—replies and direct messages in particular—one-button operations.

None of these people are actually our friends. We just like to know what they’re doing. Is that creepy?

Call Recorder for Skype www.apple. com/downloads/ macosx/email_chat/ callrecorderforskype. html Cost: $14.95 Developer: Ecamm Network Requirements: OS 10. 4, Skype 1. 4

24. CALL RECORDER
FOR SKYPE

In the early days of podcasting, recording a voice call over Skype and adding it to a podcast meant using three separate applications. So we overjoyed to discover

Call Recorder for Skype, which installs inside of Skype, and

handles video and audio with ease. Encoding options let you control the format and file sizes of recorded calls, and AAC-encoded audio is easily dragged into GarageBand for editing.

Recording Skype calls for podcasting purposes was a lot harder back in the days before Call Recorder for Skype.

EMAIL
We never thought we’d hear our grandma say, “Can you just email it to me?” But now that grandmas everywhere
are hip to email, you might as well up your game in Mac Mail too. Downloading these apps is your first step.

25. MAILT AGS MailTags www.indev.ca/

MailTags.html

Cost: $29.95 Developer: indev Software Requirements: OS

10. 4. 7

I f you keep a largeemail archive(ours i s 8GB), you knowhowfrustrating itcan b eto find a singlemessage, even with Leopard’s much improved Spotlight.

Mail Tags makes your messages easier to search by allowing you to add Web 2.0–style keyword tags to individual messages within

Apple Mail. Tags can then be added as filters within Smart Folders, making it easy to browse tagged messages, regardless of where they’re stored.

Mail
Attachments
Iconizer

Tag your messages with Mail Tags and never lose them again (for pointers, see the how-to below).

26. MAIL ATTACHMENTS ICONIZER We can always tell when someone has sent us a large image attachment in Mail, because right after we select the message, our hard drive starts grinding and the dratted spinning beach ball appears. This is because Mail tries to render images inline in the message, which, given how strange some of our friends are, is rarely a good thing. Mail Attachments Iconizer forces images over a certain size to display as icons—a huge time saver. Force Mail to neaten up attachments.

CREATE TAGS AND TASKS FOR MAIL MESSAGES WITH MAILTAGS If you’re like us, a majority of the items on your to-do list hit your email inbox first. Traditionally, making a task from a message involves a lot of copying and pasting. But with Mail Tags, it’s all done in Mail from the message preview pane, just like tagging.

1. SET YOUR TAGS Once you get in the habit of tagging important messages, they’re much easier to find. First, select a message, and click the Mail Tags icon in the upper right-hand corner of the preview pane. Assign keywords to the message by entering them in the topmost field. Saved keywords can be searched within Mail or assigned as search criteria within Smart Folders.

Separate tags by pressing Return.

2. MAKE A NEW TO-DO

Click the New To Do button, and use the popup window to assign
the task a name, due date, calendar, priority, or alarm. When you
close the window, the task is automatically added to both Mail and
iCal, courtesy of Leopard’s task database. When you view the new
to-do item in iCal, it contains a link back to the Mail message, in
case your memory needs jogging. Back

in the Mail Tags section of the preview window, you can enter notes for the task. Checking the Show As Subject box replaces the message’s subject line with the name of the assigned task.