Preview and take action on your Mail messages without going to Mail! Snow Leopard compatible, Herald is a great plugin for your Mail app.  Herald keeps me from being a slave to my Mail, having a knee-jerk reaction every time the Mail icon indicates a new message. With Herald, you get a semi-transparent pop up notification of the new message and you can take action right from the notification: delete the message, reply, mark as junk, and more.  Or if the message isn’t important, you can simply ignore the popup and keep going with your current workflow, then go to the Mail app at your convenience.

Extra tip: since Herald is a part of Mail, it only works if you DON’T hide the Mail app using the Hide Mail menu item. If you simply let the Mail window go behind your other app windows, or minimize the Mail window, Herald is meant to work.  I’m a big fan of doing command H to hide an app so this requirement took a bit of getting used to.

This fantastic piece of software allows you to define custom abbreviations that expand to your frequently used phrases, long paragraphs, and more!  Here is an example: a client asks me to email a description of how my custom Daylite report design process works.  I have a few standard paragraphs that describe the design process, procedures, pricing, and turnaround time.  I could type it all out every time, or keep a text document that I can copy and paste from, but wow that is a ton of unnecessary work since I get multiple requests for that info every day.

A better way:  use TextExpander.  I defined a snippet in TextExpander so that all I type is reportpricing and the many paragraphs that describe my design process fill right in.

TextExpander is also great for small snippets, especially in your Daylite database. Some of my other snippets include:
typing fu [no pun intended] expands to: follow up
typing rc expands to: return call
typing dt expands to: the current date and time