K’s Weblog

Well here we are, the 10th edition of the Mac Lab Update for Global Geek Podcast #65!

This week’s first tool is a Dashboard Widget called Delivery Status that will allow you to track packages from over a dozen different companies. This quick and dirty widget allows you to quickly hunt down that pesky new Wii, iPhone or eBay package that you’ve been waiting for without having to remember which website you need to find to look it up.

Some of the packages it can track are:
- US Postal Service & CanadaPost
- Posten in Sweeden & Norway
- FEDEX
- Apple
- Nintendo
and several others…

Not all services are are available in all countries, but it’s a really good start. There’s even compatibility with Growl to notify you when a package’s status changes.

Download Delivery Status from Mike Piontek’s website.

Second on the block this week is a set of scripts for Apple’s Mail and Address Book apps. The scripts were written by Andreas Amann and are a collection of AppleScripts that are used in conjuntion with the standard OS X mail application to add many new features, and enhance some existing ones.

The API available to AppleScript and Cocoa developers for most of the built-in apple applications provides a myriad opportunities for elements of the applications to be scripted, or to combine them together.

Some of the scripts provided by “Mail Scripts” are:

- Add addresses: Not just the sender, but any email address contained in the header of the message (to, from, cc etc…) (Integrates with Address Book to store contact information)

- Create new Mail rules based on the selected message. this saves lots of tedious data-entry

- Schedule Mail Delivery for a later time/date. This allows you to write and pre-send a message, and then let the Mail application deliver it to its target at the appointed time. (integrates with iCal for scheduling)

There are several other scripts as well. If you’re a regular Apple Mail user, and find it lacking any of these capabilities, download Mail Scripts.

Third up this week is SketchBox, developed by Germany’s OMZ:Software. Sketchbox is a desktop-sticky application for the Mac which allows you to either draw or type notes to yourself. The sticky notes have two separate layers, a drawing canvas and a text input box.

The stickies can be deployed on your desktop, and will each occupy a space like a separate window, and can be managed while the main window is closed. The application will also allow the stickies to have alarms set on them, but they’re set in a timer format. You set the number of days, hours & minutes until the alarm goes off, instead of setting a specific time. At the appointed time, a cell-phone like ring will remind you of the task at hand.

Finally, Sketchbox provides support for tablet devices, allowing you to sketch to your heart’s content without even reaching for a keyboard. It’s in this context that the pull-slider interface for the alarms makes the most sense.

I’ve never really been a fan of Stickies type applications, and in some ways there’s quite a bit of polish missing from SketchBox. I’d love to see this type of functionality implemented as a dashboard widget instead. Still, the freehand drawing ability is pretty cool and I recommend at least taking a look at Sketchbox.

Last up this week is some tips for making use of a great built-in OS X feature called Aliases. This is a blog post from MyFirstMac.com which outlines some “killer-app” possibilities for what most consider at first blush to be a pretty innocuous feature of an OS.

The tips range from simple productivity gains for automatically reconnecting Network Drives, to workarounds for FrontRow’s limitation of not finding content outside of your Movies folder.

There’s a discussion started after this post with a few bonus tips as well, definitely worth a look for any Mac-Switcher’s out there, or those who just want to learn all they can about their mac.

Go and check this post out!

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