Apple’s Productivity Suite

Apple’s Productivity Suite
Many people often say that using a Mac will boost your productivity. It’s not just a load hot air. Using a Mac will indeed make you more aware of your work, and less of your computer – if used properly.
By placing a lot of unimportant detail and notifications out of view, you are then more focused on the task at hand. Besides that, Apple has written several great applications that go so well with each other, it’s unbelievable. These apps deal with your email, schedule and contacts; they’re known as Mail, iCal and Address Book and they all work hand in hand to provide you with the most seamless user experience you can find in any operating system.

Mail
If you haven’t used Mail before, don’t be afraid to dip your feet in. Mail is so intuitive and very simple to use. After setting up, it logs into your mail account and downloads all your mail to your Mac. There are several advantages to this. First, you can have offline access to your mail. Second, you are able to use Apple’s Quick Look technology to preview your attachments without launching Microsoft Word or any other associated applications.

On the left, you have a list of accounts that Mail is currently managing. Smart Mailboxes that have been created by using specific search terms and any RSS feeds will also be displayed here.

Mail’s Setup Assistant makes it incredibly easy to add your IMAP or POP email account.
Here’s a quick run through of how to set up a Gmail account in Mail.
1. Before starting, make sure to enable IMAP from your Gmail settings. For step by step instructions, please read: [http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=77695]
2. Launch Mail. If you’re doing this for the first time, the Setup Assistant will run automatically. If not, select Preferences from the File menu.
3. In the ‘Accounts’ tab, click on the plus sign on the bottom left hand corner.
4. The Setup Assistant will now guide you to add a new email account.
Simple enter your email address and the password then hit ‘Continue’.

The Setup Assistant is smart enough to automatically detect your email provider and account type in the case of Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo accounts.

If you use a Google Apps account and have a customized email address, the following page will be presented to you, where you are able to fill in your account details.

Admittedly, depending on the speed of your internet connection and the amount of emails you have, it will take some time to download and store all of your mail and their attachments.
The operating system will not show unimportant details but if you’d like to be aware of the downloading progress, open up the Activity Viewer from the Window menu or hit Command + 0.

What gives Mail the advantage over other desktop mail clients is the well thought out integration between iCal and Address Book.
Mail analyzes the email content for addresses, names and phone numbers as well as dates and times. Any data that is detected will be surrounded by broken lines when you hover the cursor over them.

Right click on an address or telephone number to automatically create a new contact or add them to an existing contact

If an email contains dates, times and keywords like “tomorrow”, “next Tuesday”, Mail will detect them and allow you to create an iCal event without launching iCal.
Look what happens when I receive an email inviting me for a game of squash:

Mail detected the keyword “8pm” from the email and that allowed me to add that in my iCal schedule. All of the field were filled automatically by Mail.

And finally, here’s the event in iCal.

iCal
If you’ve dealt with to-do applications or time-management software in the past, you’ll be amazed at how easy iCal is to use.
This is iCal’s main window and interface. On the left, the sidebar lists all the different calendars you have for personal use, work, projects and subscriptions. To add new calendars, click on the ‘add’ (+) button on the bottom left corner.

You can easily toggle the calendars to display only the ones you want to see at any given time by checking the box next to it.
You can also switch between Day, Week and Month views (in order of increasing detail).

Quick Tip
To delete an event, select it and press the ‘delete’
button on your keyboard.

If you currently use Gmail and Google’s Calendar service, you can effortlessly integrate iCal into the mix (OS X 10.5 and higher), allowing you to edit your Google Calendars directly on your desktop. Here’s how:

1. Launch iCal and enter its Preferences by clicking on the iCal menu -> Preferences, or you could hit Command + comma
2. Click on the Accounts tab
3. Click on the Add button on the lower left corner
4. Enter your Gmail address and the password
5. Click ‘Create’ and you’re done!

If you are a Google Apps user and have a customized email address, you can still use iCal.

1. Enter your customized Google Mail username and password, as shown below

2. This is the additional step. Type in your full email address as the username, fill in the password and make sure that the server address is set to “google.com”

3. iCal will verify your credentials and if it is successful, your Google Calendars will be displayed.

For further instructions or help with troubleshooting, visit [http://www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=99358#ical]

Mail, iCal and Address book are all integrated and intertwined with each
other. Why does this matter? Well, it makes creating and sharing events with your friends and family a breeze.
Let’s go through a simple example. Say, I’d like to organize a picnic with some of my close friends. All I need to do is double-click on a suitable date. iCal will then let me fill in the details of the event:

Now say, I want to email my friends to let them know about it -- iCal will do it for me automatically if I add them as invitees.

Click on ‘Send’ and each invitee will receive an email just like this:

Actually, that example had several prerequisites, one of them includes setting up Address Book.

Address Book
If you own an iPhone, Address Book shouldn’t be new to you. Every time you connect your iPhone, your contacts and their details are automatically synced.

Address Book is your personalized contact manager. You can use it to store phone numbers, email addresses, IM handles, birthdays, home addresses, and then assign a picture to be used for their caller ID on your iPhone.
To select the fields you want to use, enter its Preference and click on the Template tab. From there, you are able to customize the entire template -- add, arrange and preset those fields to your liking.

On the leftmost column, Address Book displays any contact groups you have. To create a contact group, press the ‘Add’ button below the column.
Name your newly-created group and start dragging contacts in.

Having ‘groups’ is a really easy way to manage your contacts. You can also use
‘groups’ as a mailing list. When composing a group email, just type in the name of your group in the Recipient field and Mail will automatically add every contact from that group.

Quick Tip
You can set a contact as your own.
Add a new contact, fill in the appropriate fields. When you’re
done, click on the glowing blue ‘Edit’ button. Then, click on the
Card menu -> Make this my card

So those are just a few things you should know about Mail, iCal and Address Book. They’re work very well together, really simple to use and can easily integrate into your daily life.

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