Create Signature

Scan your signature and open in Adobe or Preview. Next, use OS X’s built in screen clipping (shift-command-4) key stroke to clip the signature. Open clipped signature in Preview. Once open in preview, click and hold the little arrow on the select toolbar icon. Choose ‘Instant Alpha.’

Then, click and drag away the white portions around the signature. This step is necessary so that you aren’t pasting a white block/rectangle into your documents. By erasing the back ground, the text or signature line in the document will still show through the signature. Save the signature as a PNG file with the ‘alpha’ box checked.

Create a Snippet

Open TextExpander and create a new snippet with Content: Formatted Text, Pictures from the dropdown.

Click on the plus arrow and choose insert “Picture.” Choose the file you saved for the signature.

Now, whenever you type your shortcut, your signature will be dropped into the document.

Spotlight as a Filter

Spotlight can be accessed from both the command-space keystroke to search the whole hard driver, or through the search box on individual finder windows by hitting command-f (note: if done from a finder window, you must select folder from gray tool bar popup).  Either way, once searching, you can search for more than just text in a filename or inside a document.

In this example, the folder shows all files contained within the folder. In the next screen shot, the same folder has been filtered down to contain just those documents with the label ‘red.’ Finally, using the Spotlight search box, all files have been filtered down files created between 3/1/07 and 8/1/09 AND containing the word “discovery.”

Spotlight as Search Hound

A little language kung fu in your typical command-space search can also yield some great results.  For example, if you are looking for just a contact in address book: (1) hit command-space; (2) type “kind:contact smith” without quotes will bring up a list of all your address book contacts named smith. cursor down to the desired entry, hit return and address book opens.

Similarly, even tasks and events in iCal can be located. Command-space followed by “kind:event deposition” without quotes will call up all iCal events containing the word definition. Now, think about that for a moment. If you get in the habit of using a formal naming convention for events and tasks, you can instantaneously pull up a complete list of all events and tasks for a particular client-matter. Discipline yourself and staff to use Client – Event or Client – Task in the title for events and tasks and you can find them down the road through Spotlight and, of course, through your iCal search function as well.

You can download a complete list of Spotlight search operators from Mac OS X Hints. The Mac OS X Hints post contains an excerpt from David Pogue’s book, The Missing OS X manual which can give you an even more detailed look into how to make this work for you.

1. Date Calculat0r by Bright Light Software. You can calculate the days between two dates, add dates to a particular date, or count backwards. Great for scheduling orders and discovery cut-off dates.

2. Easy Envelopes by Ambrosia. Previously covered here, great little envelope application that hooks into Address Book.

3. Clock. Built into OS X but duplicated four times, to cover the time zones. Handy to have when trying to schedule a phone conference with someone in a different time zone. Clocks arranged East to West coast and local time popped to the side a bit for highlighting purposes.

4. Quickcal by “Smelly. Puppy.” This widget allows you to enter natural language events and todos on your calendar. Awful handy when combined with the Clock set-up above. Simply type “Phone Conference with Super Expert Next Tuesday at 11:00 a.m.” hit return and it adds it onto iCal. (Donations encouraged. Easy Envelopes and Date Calculator are used as lead in freebies to attract you to the company’s other products. Quickcal is a solo project and a little PayPal could go a long way).

Well, that’s it. If you have a favorite widget or widget workflow not shown here, brag about it in the comments!

A TUAW blogger recently posted about a ‘plug-in’ that provides the ‘missing’ thesaurus function on Leopard. Chuckling smugly with the self-satisfied knowledge that Mac OS X already had built in Thesaurus (and Oxford Dictionary, and Wikipedia), I scrolled down to the comments only to learn something new myself.

If you command-click (or right click) on a highlighted word you get a choice to look up the word in Dictionary (which also has tabs for Thesaurus and Wikipedia). But, what I didn’t know was that if you hover the mouse over any given word and hit control-command-d, you get this beautiful, useful pop up as seen below. What’s more, moving the mouse around will alter the content of the pop-up depending on which word the mouse is currently hovering on. It almost always seems the commenters have better suggestions than the blog itself…. *hint*. Big ups to TUAW commenter Michael Sternberg for besting the TUAW staff, and me too.

1. Press Command-Tab until you are on the application you want to switch too.  

2. Without releasing Command, press on Option and then release Command.

3. The window should maximize from the Dock.

The really cool part is that you can access not only ‘standard’ menu items such as print, but also ‘recent’ documents items and ‘history’ items in Safari.