December 30, 2008
Mac Efficiency Software Tools and Plugins That I Use
by Alastair Halliday
We’re always looking for ways to spend less time doing mundane tasks on our computers and spend more time actually doing quality client work. I’ve listed a few of the top pieces of software that I use to increase efficiency, that are part of my daily workflow. This may also make a good list if you want a few more office expenses before the end of the year. Please don’t be fooled by some of these products that come with a “free” price tag. Some items that are marked as free I would happily pay $60 to $150 for, and most of the products that do cost money come with a free trial period. Don’t be afraid to download them and try them out. We don’t get paid by ANY of these companies to talk about them - but I would understand if you got that impression from reading some of my reviews.
Letterbox
Price: Free
Description: Vertical columns for Mac Mail
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Letterbox is a Mac Mail plugin that structures your email in vertical columns instead of Mac Mail’s standard horizontal viewing. I’ll flat out call this a Mac Mail “fix.” Since all Mac displays have a wide aspect ratio - and most non-Mac displays come with a wide aspect ratio - the vertical stacking of columns in Mail works best. Easy to browse subjects (you get more on a page) and easy to read emails (they are now in a nice long single column which is much more user friendly for reading content on a computer).
MailTags
Price: $29.95
Description: Tag emails by keywords or project
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30 bucks never went so far and I don’t know why I didn’t purchase this a year ago when my friend and usability expert Mihira showed it to me. MailTags is simply tagging that is integrated into Mac Mail. You can tag emails that come in either by keyword or by project and then do a search in Mail for those tags or projects just like you do for subject or content. You can also set up smart folders in Mail to include those keyword or project-tagged emails. This has really helped me organize projects. I tag emails by project now so that multiple emails from multiple people that may come from multiple domains can be searched by project to quickly group emails. Obviously Mark and I have tons of emails that span multiple clients and multiple projects. Doing a search for “Mark” in my email doesn’t help at all, but searching by project makes a huge difference. The same goes for ongoing clients. We have a couple of clients that we have worked on dozens of projects for, so searching by client name doesn’t help, but searching by project is great. It also helps to tag emails when providing quotes to potential clients, or entering into sales discussions. Perhaps you have legal discussions with different lawyers or clients (hopefully you don’t have too many of those) - it becomes extremely easy to retrieve those conversations down the road when properly tagged. MailTags is a huge missing link to Mac Mail.
Aperture
Price: $199
Description: Photo organizing and editing
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Aperture is Apple’s image sorting, filing, and adjusting software for “pros”. As a part of my ongoing campaign to have as little as possible to do with Adobe, I thought I would check out what Apple has to offer on the software side. I LOVE Aperture. I used to use Adobe Bridge in combination with Adobe Camera Raw and Adobe Photoshop to tag, adjust, and edit my library of thousands of raw photos. It was extremely sluggish, extremely counterintuitive, and, like all Adobe software, designed by monkeys for monkeys. I will admit, there is a bit of a learning curve to getting to understand photo organization in Aperture, but with a few Google searches and a few questions posted on the Aperture Forum you should be set to start building your library. Aperture’s tagging (keywording) process, adjustment process, and, especially, exporting process is extremely easy. You can also find plugins for direct export to Facebook and many other social media sites. There’s too much to write about concerning Aperture in a small post, so I will just have to leave it there.
Linotype FontExplorer X
Price: Free
Description: Pro Font Management
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FEX plays more like a love story than a piece of software for me. I spent years first throwing money at, and then shaking my fist at, the uselessness of pro font management software like Suitcase. After one evening with a very tight deadline and my entire system being brought down endlessly (I literally could not open any of my Adobe software because of the font software conflict), I finally decided to wage war against Extensis and find a solution, any solution, to pro font management. After an extensive search for the Extensis killer, I checked out FEX, knowing it would be rubbish given its “free” status. I was wrong. I almost wept for joy every second I used FEX for the first couple of weeks. Now, like a good piece of font management software should do, it purrs in the background, managing my thousands of fonts so smoothly that I don’t even notice it. FEX has a great user interface that fits right into the iTunes/Apple folder and smart folder language. Its font display options are unmatched. Its auto-activate font system works well beyond the expensive Extensis option. It is stable. Did you hear that?! IT IS STABLE!!!! I can’t emphasize how important this piece of software is in my life and how it absolutely killed any of my font management issues. Why is it free? Well, they make money through the purchase of fonts in their font library. No, they don’t exclude other fonts. Any font can be managed by FEX, but, like iTunes, they have a store built right into the software where you can browse and purchase fonts. I have been more than happy to purchase fonts from them in order to support their great creation, but even if you are not, go ahead and use their software for free.
TextExpander
Price: $29.95
Description: Shortcut macros for text
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TextExpander helps you quickly type (paste, really) common text into any piece of software. Sounds unimpressive? It’s a simple solution to some very annoying problems. You can set up a large number of shortcuts and then the text that should be printed when you type those shortcuts. When I want to write my business address in ANY window on my computer, either in a chat box, email, anywhere, I just type “aad” and my formatted address populates the field. I use this application for things like client’s FTP usernames and passwords, lorem ipsum, repeated instructions like directions to your house for dinner guests, etc. It is free up to a certain number of entries, so give it a shot.
Growl
Price: Free
Description: Notification software
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Growl is a simple piece of notification software that works with many popular applications and is very customizable. Mail is probably the most obvious piece of software to use it with. Once it is set up, when you get an email the small growl notification box pops up on your screen saying who the email came from, what the subject is and more if you want it to. That way you don’t have to stop everything that you are doing to leave your work application, go to mail, and click on the email that just came in to see if it is just another forwarded email from Uncle Frank or an important client email. Growl works with iTunes, Adium and most other popular pieces of software that it can be useful to get a notification from.
Quicksilver
Price: Free
Description: Alternative to using the Finder
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Quicksilver is hard to explain, but it is most likely the #1 mac efficiency tool. Quicksilver is similar to Spotlight on your Mac, only it can do EVERYTHING. As a result, I don’t use Spotlight. Quicksilver is an alternative to the outdated finder system that both Apple and Microsoft use for organizing and searching content on your computer. You can use Quicksilver in a very basic way, like I do, to quickly find contacts and certain files without manually going into an application or a folder structure. Or you can use it in a very advanced way by executing commands through the searches you do. Quicksilver indexes your entire computer (well, the folders you select it to index in the Quicksilver preferences) and then it rates content depending on importance in order to provide you good search results. Once you find the content, you can hit “tab” to see a list of executing commands you can do with that content ("email it,” “open it,” “delete it,” etc). You can then modify those search results or the points that Quicksilver assigns to content so that you get content that you search frequently and very quickly.
One of the most powerful parts of Quicksilver are the plugins that come with it. There are too many to explain, but one that I use constantly throughout the day is the clipboard history. I have a quick key command set that opens up this nifty plugin. I have set the clipboard history to keep my last 100 items. When I press the quick key a little menu pops up over any application that I am using that shows the last 100 items I copied to my clipboard, and I can then click on one or just hit “return” to select the top one to paste. This is extremely helpful when I am doing things like getting hex numbers for colors in photoshop that I later want to take over to Flash, or copying multiple things from multiple applications that I want to paste elsewhere. You don’t know how liberating it is to no longer be shackled down to a single copy and paste clipboard.
Quicksilver does have a nasty learning curve. That’s why I only use basic commands. But for efficiency nuts and tech geeks, it’s the perfect tool. Goodbye, Finder.
xGestures
Price: $6.50
Description: Executing commands by mouse gesturing
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xGestures is very customizable and very convenient gesture software. When my control tool was a mouse, xGestures was fantastic. I had a single modifier key and tons of commands (gestures) set for things like “copy,” “paste,” “close,” “save,” “new window,” etc. Every time you take your hand off of your mouse and move it to your keyboard for a quick key command you are losing time, and every time you are in a piece of software and use your mouse to go through a menu structure or pallet drop down to execute frequent commands you are wasting time. xGestures is great for eliminating those gaps in your work flow. Admittedly, I have significantly changed my work style since switching to a tablet from a mouse because of the reduced button controls on the tablet stylus, but I LOVED using xGestures when I was a mouse user.
Stickies
Price: Free
Description: Post-It-Notes
Don’t underestimate your local version of Apple’s Stickies. They’re those simple post-it-notes that come with your operating system. I know that there are text note and scrap organizing tools galore out there for the Mac, but Stickies are an incredibly simple way of grabbing information that you know is important and keeping it somewhere that is quickly and easily accessible. This is where I keep a list of ongoing projects and projects that are on deck or potential clients that I am in discussion with. It’s where I keep snippets of terminal code or reviews and suggestions for items I know I am going to want to revisit when I have time that I find on blogs etc. Stickies have their place on your computer; don’t be afraid to use such a low-brow piece of technology.
Adium
Price: Free
Description: chat
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Adium is the Mac multiple-client chat software. Very simply, it is ALL of the chat programs combined into one very nice small package with great chat history logs.
iWork
Price: $79
Description: Replaces MS office
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Mark dragged me kicking and screaming into using Apple iWork. It was only $79 for the entire office package so I thought I would purchase it just to appease him, but it turns out it’s a great package. It replaces the Microsoft office package. Almost all of our document creation and spreadsheets take place in iWork, and it is easily exportable into MS office format. OCCASIONALLY, I will get a document from a client that doesn’t open completely in iWork (usually a .doc with special formatting like tables, etc) but then again, it doesn’t really open in MS Word either. Go figure. iWork is incredible value for the price and now one of the first suggestions I make to new Mac owners.
iBiz
Price: $49.99
Description: Project-based timer and billing
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I use iBiz for tracking time on projects. You track by Client > Project > Event. You can set your hourly rate to each event and it tracks both the event timing and the time logged on the overall project with a record of when you have started and stopped. The timer is easily stopped and started from your finder dock or from your finder menu. You can then set the status of each project to open, on hold, closed, or cancelled. This is nice because I view all clients set to open which shows current clients I am working on, then all clients on “hold” are ones that I have invoices out on. iBiz has a built-in invoicing system too, but I have never used it because I have found custom invoicing to be much easier to produce. I did extensive research and downloaded and tried MANY time tracking applications, and at the end of the day iBiz did the best job of being light-weight and easy to use. I will say, though, that I have yet to find ANY good time tracking software that handles retainers well. I mean, how hard is it really to set up a timer that counts down, people?
iBank
Price: $59.99
Description: Banking
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iBank is a good financial piece of software that can connect to your banks and download transactions. You can set up rules for purchases that categorize them automatically when they come in so that at the end of the year you have an easy job of turning over your business records to your favorite accountant. Again, it is a nice, light-weight and easy to use piece of financial software. It DOES lack in budgeting, but for that just use mint.com.