With this posting I’ll introduce a few more productivity apps. The theme covering this set of postings is about having certain types of information ready when it’s needed. The snapshot below depicts two of the apps I’m recommending; SketchBox and KeyCue.

Information Clips - SketchBox

I’ve been a fan of Stickies since I first got a Mac. It’s a fact that I’m always managing odd bits of information and stickies did it well. SketchBox, which is currently freeware, is an advance on stickies. What you see on the screen above is the “mothership” which holds and categorizes all the sticky notes you’ve got. If you look closely you’ll see notice that I’ve divided them into a few simple sets; Basic Info (like the number of the conferencing service I use), logins (login information for a few web sites), Action (To Do) and Scratch (temporary information.)

In this way SketchBox is an advance on stickies. Of course, you can hide the big window and just have a stickie floating around, when you want. There are two other neat features. There’s a sketching capability which can also be a camera and take images of parts of the screen. And you can also set alarms - which is useful for events that are too trivial to put in the diary. SketchBox is a no brainer. You should get it unless you’re allergic to Stickies.

There’s a productivity issue here, how to deal with snippets of information - especially temporary ones - that have no obvious place to be filed. SketchBox solves the problem.

Hotkey Reminder - KeyCue

I’ve mentioned the use of hotkeys in just about every posting on productivity. The upside of hotkeys is that they are fast. The downside is that you tend to forget some of them. (I have a method I use to try to minimize that, which I’ll explain in another posting - but the truth is that it’s not perfect). KeyCue is a really well conceived reminder of the hotkeys that are active at any point. You load it and forget about it. If you ever want to know which keys are active, just hold down the Command Key for a second and a display like the one shown on the snapshot above will pop up.

This is both a good way of remembering hotkeys and a handy reference for learning them. KeyCue is shareware.

Clipboard Manager - PTH PasteBoard

You need a clipboard that is slightly better than the native Mac OS X clipboard. theer are quite a few around. the one I use is PTH PasteBoard. It works. How often do I use it? Not often, but enough so I’d never uninstall it. PTH PAsteBoard is Freeware/Shareware.

Passwords and Form Filling - 1Password

I have 1Password primarily for one reason. At some time in the future the Mac will also be threatened with malware. So I’ve bought iPassword so that even if a keylogger were running on the Mac no-one would be able to get at the passwords that I really do want to protect. As it happens 1Password is also useful for form filling and it allows to manage more than one identity. The form filling is not so impressive given that FireFox can do a lot of that anyway, but multiple identities is good for when I prefer to be anonymous (which is not often). 1Password is a security app that costs real money.