QuickCal

If you use iCal on your Mac, this one's for you.  QuickCal is a little app that handles one of those petty annoyances that I have with iCal.  How often have you been doing something on your Mac and you need to enter an appointment on your calendar? You stop whatever you are doing, go to the iCalendar, find the date, open the Add Meeting box, and type in all the details.

QuickCal does all this (and more) in a flash.  Let's say you need to make a calendar entry while you are reading an invitation in your mail.  You can either hit the QuickCal Hot Key (which is user-settable but the default is Shift-Command-C) or click the QuickCal icon in the Dock. A popup window appears and you type your appointment in simple english.

As you type in the black box, the white box below the entry line opens which fills in the calendar data appropriately - even location!  Hit Return and your entry is automatically posted to your calendar.

What's more, QuickCal has built in reminder alarms (user settable again) which mean you don't have to set them manually. QuickCal can also handle To Do lists by starting or ending with 'todo' or entering some Task by Date entry format. All of this for three bucks!  I love it.

Read more on the developer's website here.

Caffeine

Before I can start my day, I need a little caffeine.  I guess the same could be said for my Mac.  Do you find it irritating when the display wants to dim while you are reading a long webpage or while you are watching a video?  Sure, you can hit the space bar or wiggle the mouse but why should you?  You can go to the Systems Preferences to change your Energy settings for your display but this seems like a hassle for just the one thing you are doing at the moment...  and then you have to change them back.

Well, there is another way.  A developer at Lighthead Software has written a great little utility called Caffeine which does the trick.  The utility installs a little cup of coffee on the right side of your top menu bar.  Click it and the empty cup fills with coffee and your Mac is wide awake for... you choose!  You can set it up in the utility's preferences for either minutes, hours, or indefinitely.  No more dimming screen.  No more Systems Preferences diddling - just a period of your Mac being awake.  Best of all, this little application is free either at the developers website here or you can get it at the Mac App store if you have Snow Leopard 10.6.6 installed (do yourself a favor and get the latest OS X upgrade if you don't have it).

Oh, almost forgot.  Unlike real caffeine, this digital caffeine can be neutralized as the click of the coffee cup. No more jitters. Very cool.

Alfred: At Your Service, Sir.

I came across a free app in the newly launched App Store (you do have the latest version of OS X - 10.6.6 don't you? It gives you access to the App Store).  But I digress.  The application I wanted to write about is called Alfred (as in the butler). Having just watched the first set of episodes of Downton Abbey on Masterpiece Theater, I can definitely see the value in having a butler.  Alfred (the app) can't do everything that Carter, the butler of that series, could do, but this Alfred can do a lot. And best of all, Alfred works for free!  It costs nothing to download the app which is still in beta.  You can get it here.

So what does Alfred do?  Alfred is a combination replacement for Spotlight, a super-speedy little application launcher, and a fast route to searching the web.  No more Command-Tab to move around between applications.  No need to go to the Dock or the Applications folder.  Alfred works through a simple search bar which is brought up by hitting a couple of keys that you can set to whatever you like.  The default is Alt-Spacebar.  When you hit that combination, Alfred's search bar pops up.

Now you can start typing any string you like and Alfred will try his best to help.  Want to launch an application?  Type a couple of letters and Alfred will offer suggestions.  For instance, if I wanted to launch EazyDraw, I might type "ed" and Alfred brings back this result:

Notice that I didn't need to tell Alfred that "ed" meant EazyDraw.  Alfred came back with a nice list of items I could have wanted using the string "ed".  He thought the most likely was TextEdit, which is understandable, but his second choice was EazyDraw.  If I wanted to launch EazyDraw, I could either scroll down to that entry on the list and hit Return or I could use the key combination Apple-2 and the application would launch.  Neat, but this is only the beginning.

If I want to find a file, I can simply type "find" followed by the file name or part of the file name and Alfred brings back a list of options.  Say I want to find my resumes on my hard drive.  I type "find resume" and Alfred brings back a neat list as shown:

And this result comes back almost instantaneously.  How about searching the web?  No problem.  Instead of "find", start your search with "google [search term]". Alfred brings up a fresh window of your browser and has already linked to the Google search page with the results returned.  Alfred comes with a long list of pre-built search options including Google Images, Google Mail, Google Docs, Wikipedia, eBay, and quite a few more. 

If you regularly search other locations that are not in the predefined list, you can easily build a new link with a term that makes sense to you.  For instance, I like to look at images at the Library of Congress.  I set up a custom search using the string "LOC [search term]". Alfred goes to the Library of Congress website and brings back a list of all the images found using that search term.

The developers of Alfred have an extension that they sell for a small fee.  I don't think you need it right away but it may prove to be useful as you go forward.  Give Alfred a look.  Good help is hard to find.