Apple Mail is a pretty decent email app by most standards. And if all you need is basic email functionality you’re probably not going to need any other program. But what if you – like many people these days seem to do – actually live in your email inbox? Email plays an important part in managing projects and tasks, but Mail’s fairly basic organizational features only goes so far in helping you organize it. But before you go off the deep end and install Microsoft Outlook take a close look at a very neat and affordable plugin that can turn Mail into an organizational powerhouse: MailTags.
iCal isn’t exactly a perfect app. It’s fairly limited in its features and its user interface can be a bit awkward at times. But it comes preinstalled on every Mac and any app that offers calendaring functionality integrates with iCal. Events and tasks also sync to your mobile devices and other Macs through MobileMe.
What iCal isn’t very good at, though, is being unobtrusive and readily available at the same time. Sure, you can have it running in the background all the time (which is what I do), but iCal doesn’t offer any way of seeing your calendar(s) at a glance while not getting in the way. You either see the whole big fat iCal window or you don’t.
This is where DateLine comes in. DateLine integrates with iCal and displays your calendars as a horizontal or vertical bar of days. This bar can either be a normal window that behaves like any other application window, it can be a floating window that’s always on top of other windows or it can stick to the Desktop like a Desktop icon. But that’s just a glimpse of DateLine’s real power: its flexibility which lets you configure its appearance exactly to your desire.
One of the fundamental differences between Mac OS and Windows has always been the menu bar. While Windows attaches a menu bar to each regular application window, Mac OS has a single system-wide menu bar at the top of the screen that changes depending on which app is active.
Both paradigms have their pros and cons. The main drawback on Mac OS is that the menu bar is always on the primary screen and there can only be one menu bar at any time. If you have a single screen that doesn’t really matter. But if you have more than one screen, you’ll have to decide which one is going to carry the menu bar and whenever you’re working on the secondary screen and need to access the menu, there’s going to be an awful lot of mouse mileage involved.
Have you ever watched a movie on your Mac and been annoyed by the screen automatically dimming or going to sleep and you having to wiggle the mouse to get it back? Apparently you’re not the only one with this problem, as Lighthead Software came up with a solution: Caffeine.
Every installation of Mac OS X comes with Apple Mail which is actually a pretty decent app for managing email. It integrates with Address Book and iCal, handles POP3, IMAP, Gmail and more and is overall a fairly full-featured and stable app.
So why even consider switching to another app for email when Apple Mail should be more than adequate for most people? There’s more than one answer to this question, but when it comes to Sparrow my answer would be: simplicity and elegance.
