Do you know which Mail.app’s features I use more? Search and mailboxes. The basic functions, yet the most powerful I could ever ask for to get things done with my messages. Pretty much as if someone tells you he loves folders and Spotlight, I can’t live without these two simple things. But good things can always get better. What’s simple can be evolved, refined, made more powerful while still maintaining its original simplicity at the core. Take a look at your running machine, because its operating system is the best example of what I’m talking about.

I’ve already written about a great plugin for Mail I’ve recently discovered, it’s called MsgFiler and it lets me quickly move messages around without leaving my keyboard. And that’s for mailboxes. Now, what about the search function? While smart collections are indeed a great way to easily retrieve messages based on some user-assigned criteria, still I can’t find a better solution than the classic search bar when it comes to find messages. Either by content or original author, it usually takes between 10 and 20 seconds for me to find the information I’m looking for (an email address, a name, a macro) and use it somewhere else. I wish there was another way that combined with the simplicity of ⌘ + F and more advanced features like boolean operators and filters, as I really can’t stand clicking on those buttons in the toolbar. Turns out the in the same moment I was thinking about this stuff a rocket was launching.

It’s called Rocketbox, and brings email searching to a new level.

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I have a huge email library. I tend to keep every important message that I receive and move it to a folder or sub-folder. Indeed, despite all the people that seem to appreciate those applications that let you assign tags to mails in order to browse everything with tags, I still think the folder structure puts every other solution to shame. I just couldn’t think of any other way to store and organize messages right now, but maybe Apple will prove me wrong someday. Anyway, considering that I daily mess with dozens of messages and I’ve got to move each message to a different folder, I was looking for some app that would have made the process easier, faster and almost invisible. Many followers suggested me to try Mail Act-on, but after a brief test I have to say Act-On is aimed at people who have 40 + folders.

It’s surely a feature rich application with a lot of stuff you can play with, but I wanted something simpler, an app that could let me move messages in a few steps without leaving the keyboard.

Meet MsgFiler.

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CoverSutra has been around for a long time. Over it’s several revisions, it’s seen some new features, and a whole lot of bug fixes. With all the revisions it’s gone through, it’s got to be one of the least-buggy applications I have ever used.

Find out why.

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It’s not a secret that many web designers and developers out there are on a Mac platform. Especially in 2009, it seems like many professionals and freelancers have switched from Windows to Mac OS X in order to have better performances, security and, most of all, more time to do stuff. They wanted to save time, they wanted to avoid those virus and malware crappy things Windows has - for this reason many people did the “big” switch and bought a Mac. You can’t blame them: with tools such as Coda, Textmate, Textexpander and the famous Pixelmator, they had every good reason to switch to a Mac computer. Now, besides web development and graphic applications, what about the software that can help managing the financial and invoicing aspect of a freelancing job?

Today I’d like to talk about Billings from Marketcircle, an award winning app for Mac and iPhone which is gonna be your one step solution for anything freelancing related.

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The Action Method is a task-management system provided by the company Behance that’s available to use through the web, an iPhone application, and print products. Since more and more people turn to such products to keep track of their tasks and projects, it’s time to take a look at this system as an alternative to other project management software like Basecamp and Active Collab. (disclaimer: As with all PM systems, the Action Method is robust and complex. This review touches on the surface, so check out the free demo to see all it has to offer.)

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As a part of our recently launched VideoStories series, here’s a video review of MercuryMover, a neat app that brings keyboard shortcuts to your Mac windows. You should check it out.

Just as you should follow Cody on Twitter.

Enjoy!

MercuryMover from Federico Viticci on Vimeo.

The Web 2.0 era saw the consolidation of 3 different kinds of website: social websites (which include communication tools like Twitter and bigger networks like Facebook), collaborational websites (Google Docs, Wave) and online backup solutions. Not exactly a “websites”, when people started browsing more and basically doing more stuff with their computers, the need of a virtual, remote yet secure backup solution seemed pretty much obvious. I mentioned many times what I think it’s the best app to effortlessly store up to 2GB of data for free, Dropbox, and I’ve also written a post about 40 creative uses of Dropbox. That post basically talked about many different ways of using Dropbox not only to store simple backups of files and folders, but how you can use it to synchronize applications libraries and, for example, browser bookmarks across multiple Macs. But wouldn’t it be great to have a built-in, Apple -like solution to do that instead of setting up a lot of little tricks and hacks?

As a second post for the “It could be a Mac app” series today I’ll talk about MobileMe: I’ll take a look at the pros and cons of Apple’s web interface for its sync & backup tool, the actual usability of the webapp and why you should even consider of making a Fluid app out of it.

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The Mac platform is blessed with tons of excellent productivity tools, outliners, and task managers. Despite this, the majority of these apps have been founded on the GTD philosophy, and while that’s not necessarily a bad thing, I’ve always wanted a separate application for managing tasks that specifically relate to school. You could certainly do this in an application like Things or The Hit List, but it can get quite messy since you’d have to create tags for classes, then you have to manage assignments alongside your business stuffs, and you just get bogged down in everything rather than the schoolwork you want to focus on.

Enter Schoolhouse, an application dedicated to providing you with the management tools needed to stay on task and get those assignments turned in on time. It also features an incredibly smart grading tool that can calculate weighted and unweighted grades, which is an amazing time saver compared to doing it by hand on the Ti-83.

Keep on reading to find out what makes this app one of my favorites.

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There’s an interesting paradox floating around the Mac OS X scene: there are a lot of interesting apps to manage tasks and make your to-do workflow easier, but most of these apps are difficult to manage. What a nice situation: getting things done with an application that requires 2 minutes just to set up a new task. And trust me: it’s full of apps like these out there. Now, the situation isn’t that tragic fortunately: it’s also true that there are many excellent apps, both for Mac and yes, the iPhone.

Today I’d like to talk about what’s in my opinion the best to-do management and task organizer app currently available for Mac and iPhone: Things. I’ll explain how I’ve set it up in order to manage MacStories’ activities and scheduled tasks and how I made it work as a team project management app as well.

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