Mac Geeks

You’ve already heard about the MacOS X Exposé functionality. This is where you can activate the display of either all open program windows, all windows of the active program or the desktop. You can even activate the screen saver or hibernate mode of the display. All these functions can be activated by function key or by moving the mouse pointer into a so called “active corner”.

During normal work you may enter the active corners accidently from time to time. This is a little annoying but the ingenious Apple engineers have already implemented a cure for this itch. You can add modifier keys to the active corners. To trigger the active corners function you now have to press the modifier key while moving the mouse pointer into the corner. No more accidently activation from now one. You have even assign different modifier keys to different corners. But you can’t overload an active corner with multiple modifier keys

How it works show this little screencast. Although the audio is in german you should get the idea how the modifier keys can be set in the system preferences.

Exposé Advanced from Falko Zurell on Vimeo.

We already reported on the quite popular clipboard history application Jumpcut. Now I found another alternative named Clyppan which is even OpenSource software at the aptgetupdate.de Blog.

Clyppan follows the same conpets as Jumpcut of allowing access to a vast number of previous clipboard entries via key shortcuts.

As Clyppan is OpenSource you can contribute code or adopt the program to your needs if needed.

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At the current stage the all new GTD application “The Hit List” has no direct support for fetching certain emails from Mail.app and make tasks out of them. OmniFocus does it and there is a AppleScript for Things to accomplish this.

I searched the internet a little but didn’t found a script for Mail.app and THL. So I wrote a little mail-to-thl1 for myself:

using terms from application "Mail"
        on perform mail action with messages theMessages for rule theRule
                tell application "Mail"
                        set theMailCount to (count of theMessages)

                        repeat with counter from 1 to theMailCount
                                set msg to item counter of theMessages
                                set theAttachmentCount to (count of mail attachments of msg)
                                set _title to subject of msg
                                set _sender to sender of msg

                                set _messageURL to "message://%3c" & msg's message id & "%3e"

                                tell application "The Hit List"
                                        tell inbox to set theTask to make new task with properties {title:_title & " from " & _sender & " @email", notes:_messageURL}
                                end tell

                        end repeat

                end tell
        end perform mail action with messages
end using terms from

I use a simple Mail.app rule to execute the AppleScript on the arrival of certain eMail. This script then creates a new task for every Mail in the THL inbox and atteches a link to the mail as note to the task.