Apple prides itself on creating products that are simple and easy to use. A prime example of this philosophy can be seen in Mail, the default email application included with Mac OS X. Mail is not an all-encompassing “collaboration” tool, and it is not “groupware;” it does email (and a little bit of note-taking and RSS feed-reading), and does it exceedingly well.

Getting Started

The first thing you’ll want to do is set up your account. If you use MobileMe, your account is probably already set up for you. If you use another popular email service like Gmail or Yahoo Premium, Mail can automatically set up your account. If not, you will need to know the name of your incoming mail server (something like mail.me.com), your outgoing mail server (something like smtp.me.com), and your username/password combination. After setting up your account, Mail will download all of your email, and spotlight will index it for easy searching.

Stationary

Apple includes several stationary templates that are highly touted, but rarely used. Most of the people I email could care less about how pretty my email is, and many would prefer not to receive HTML email at all, and that is what these stationary templates are. However, from time to time I like to send one out, because, well…because they’re there. My Mom is normally the lucky recipient, and as far as I can tell, she likes them just fine. When you begin typing a name or an address in the “To” field, Mail searches Address Book for matches, and makes suggestions based on what it finds. Select a name, or type in a new one, type in a subject, type your email, and click send. That’s all there is to it.

Smart Mailboxes

Once you’ve downloaded all of your email, it’s very likely that you will be tempted to organize it. Don’t worry, I used to do it, too. That was before the power of full text search and Smart Mailboxes became a reality. Now, what I do, and what I recommend for anything close to “organizing” email, is to create Smart Mailboxes for keeping things of importance in easy reach. For example, I have a Smart Mailbox set up for emails from family, which simply takes all of the contacts in the “Family” group in Address Book and creates a smart group from them. You can find lots of other examples of Smart Mailboxes with a quick Google search, but I recommend starting here.

There are two ways to create a Smart Mailbox. The first, and most effective, way is to simply enter your search criteria in the search box at the top of Mail. As you type, Mail will display the results of your search, and will also give you the option to save the search as a Smart Mailbox. This allows you to preview and refine your search as needed before creating the Smart Mailbox. When you click “Save” you’ll be offered the chance to add criteria to the Smart Mailbox, and save it as whatever name you choose. The second way is to select “Mailbox,” and then “New Smart Mailbox,” and then enter your search criteria in the drop-down sheet.

Rules

Mail has the ability to perform certain actions on email as it arrives, according to predefined rules. These are defined in the “Rules” section in the Mail preferences panel (Mail > Preferences…). There are many options available both as search functions and as actions to take that can further help organize your email.

Notes and To-Do Lists

Leopard Mail includes the ability to take notes and create to-do lists. Creating notes containing to-do lists is really easy, and very handy. Simply create a new note and at the top, create a context for the list — say, phone calls you want to make — and type the name of the note on the first line. I named mine in classic GTD contexts like @Next, @Phone, @Desk, etc.

Next, click the “To Do” button, and the current line will become highlighted and add a check box on the left of it. All to-do’s that you add to any of your notes will also be seen in the “To Do” group under Reminders in the left-hand pane. In your note, clicking on the red arrow icon to the left of each to-do will bring up a pane where you can add a due date, assign a priority, and integrate the task with iCal.

RSS

Finally, Mail can act as a decent RSS reader to keep current on new posts from your favorite sites. While not nearly as powerful as specialized RSS readers like NetNewsWire or Google Reader, it does a decent job of keeping track of a small number of feeds. It treats each incoming feed item the same as an email, allowing you to move them around to different folders. It will also let you create Smart Mailboxes that apply specifically to feeds, like one that groups all unread feeds together in one place. Depending on how many feeds you subscribe too, Mail’s RSS reader might be a great choice for you.

This article is a very brief introduction to a very powerful application. Apple Mail is almost deceptively simple in appearance, hiding a sophisticated information management application that integrates perfectly into the Mac. For more information, including how to sign and encrypt messages, adding additional criteria into spotlight searches, and a ton of other information, check out the included Mail Help, available in the menu bar.

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Calendars have come a long way from the days of a pocket diary, with software able to manage your schedule and information much more reliable and accessible. iCal for OS X is the bundled calendar application, and works surprisingly well. It appears simple on the surface, but packs a wide range of different features and functionality.

This article will walk you through iCal from first opening the app, to having a diary filled with important events, recurring appointments, alarms, attachments, and attendees.

Getting Started

The first step is to open iCal for the first time from your applications folder. You’ll be presented with a window which looks something like this:

Before getting started, you might want to change a few preferences to match the way in which you work. Click iCal > Preferences in the menu bar to review the options available. You’re able to change the days per week, starting day of a week, default alarms for events and a whole range of other options. Once you’re happy with the settings chosen, close the preferences window and we’ll get started adding a few calendars and events.

iCal Views

There are three main viewing modes which can be used within iCal; Day, Week and Month. The month view can be seen above, here’s what to expect when viewing by day or week.

Week view shows you a clearer breakdown of each day:

And viewing by day makes a complicated schedule much easier to make sense of:

Dealing With Calendars

Within iCal, you are able to run several ‘Calendars’. These would commonly represent different projects or areas of your life. These are a few of the calendars I have running:

You can have as many or as few as needed, and adding a new calendar is simple. Click the ‘plus’ icon towards the lower left of the iCal window to add a new calendar (or hold Shift whilst pressing it to add a new group/folder). Once added, right click the new calendar and select ‘Get Info’ to bring up an options window:

Here, you can alter the color of the calendar, or ‘publish’ the calendar through MobileMe — this is a more complicated step, which you probably won’t need to explore at first.

Dealing With Events

Once a few calendars are in place, you’ll need to enter your events/appointments. To do so, right click on the appropriate day, then select ‘New Event’. Type a name, then double click the event. This will bring up a window similar to the following:

A number of options are available within the new event window:

• Location: Enter the place where you’ll be meeting
• All-day: If it’s an all day event, select this option to let iCal know
• From/To: You can enter the start and end time (or days, for an all-day event)
• Repeat: This allows you to schedule an event to re-occur at a set interval (every day, week, month, year, or a custom schedule). It works brilliant for birthdays, or regular bill payments etc
• Calendar: Here, select the appropriate calendar for the event
• Alarm: I’ve covered these various options below
• Attendees: Again, these are covered below
• Attachments: You can add files and documents to a calendar event so you have all the information you need at hand

Alarms

There are several different ways to be notified of an event:

All the different notification methods can be set to occur either at the time of the event, or a set period before. The first two cause a reminder to pop up on your screen with the details of the event, or you can perform more complex actions such as automatically sending an email, or running a file/script.

Attendees

iCal has fairly robust built-in support for dealing with attendees. Integration with Address Book means that sending invitations to attend is simple. Emails are sent to request the person’s attendance, to which they can reply in the way which best suits them. iCal will show a question mark next to the invitee’s name until they respond:

To Do Lists

If you have a list of tasks which need completing, but don’t have a set day or time, you can use iCal’s To Do feature. Clicking the ‘Push Pin’ icon in the lower right corner of the window will display the list of current To Do lists. Adding a new one is as simple as right clicking and selecting ‘New To Do’.

In the same way as calendar events, To Dos are assigned to a particular calendar. Priorities of High, Medium and Low can be assigned to automatically rank tasks in their order of importance:

Time Zones

The final feature to be mentioned is that of automatic time zone support. Clicking ‘Enable Time Zone Support’ in the preference window as outlined at the beginning will add the following text to the upper right of the iCal window (obviously varying depending upon your time zone):

Now, when scheduling meetings you are able to note the time zone in which it will occur. iCal will factor in the difference between your current location and automatically ensure that you’re notified about the meeting at the right time.

If you’d like to add an event which is independent of any time zone, you can select the ‘Floating’ option when adding a new entry.

Conclusion

When first opening iCal, it doesn’t seem like a particularly powerful or complicated application. However, as you start to enter calendars, events and to dos, it becomes clear that it can offer a comprehensive solution to managing your schedule.

I hope that this article has provided a good overview of the iCal basics. If you have any questions, please feel free to leave a comment!

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Perhaps too often, we (as in the collective web) focus our attention on the cutting edge features of Quicksilver. Unfortunately that can make for a steep barrier to entry into this amazingly powerful program. So I wanted to take a step back and show a simple trick or two that makes Quicksilver valuable to the new user (either of Quicksilver, or the Apple platform in general).

To those veterans of our favorite launcher, this screencast may not be much for you, and I do apologize for that. I’ll do my best to expose something new and exciting with Quicksilver in the coming week or two. But for those who really don’t know Quicksilver from a hole in the ground, this aims to serve as a useful [visual] primer on getting started with a life-altering application. (I’m serious about the ‘life-altering’ thing.)

Following a simple but useful function of Quicksilver, I’ll cover the Preferences and various sections within that can help enhance your Quicksilver experience. For those who have followed along with my past screencasts, this isn’t another ‘Setup’ – instead this is aimed at explaining the various functions in Preferences, like Rescanning catalogs, finding information about plugins, and things of that nature.

You can grab this screencast in .mov format directly (below), or you can subscribe to our new TAB Screencasts feed here, or via iTunes.

Quicksilver – The Beginner’s Walkthrough (mov)
20 mins / 138 mb

This is a long one (apologies if it gets repetitive, but I wanted to cater to the new-to-Quicksilver crowd). Please feel free to leave questions below in the comments section, and we’ll do our best to answer them promptly.

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