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.

Blue Rock has limited availability Thanksgiving week Monday 11/23-Friday 11/27

Enter common phrases into Daylite date fields and they will automatically convert to the proper date!  If you are like me, you can type words faster than you can type dates, what with all those slashes and hyphens slowing you down.  Of course, you can always click the calendar icon next to the date fields and pick your date, but that can be slow too.

A better way: type words instead of dates.  Try typing this into a Daylite date field:  tomorrow
Tab into the next field and notice that the Daylite date field converts to show tomorrow’s date.  Here are some others that I use constantly, especially the days of the week when entering due dates for Appointments and Tasks:

• monday
• tuesday
• wednesday
• thursday
• friday
• saturday
• sunday
• today
• tomorrow
• yesterday
• last week
• next week
• last month
• next month
• last year
• next year

Want to give other users in your database quick access to a Project, or let them know about a new Contact?  You can chat or email them a link to the object! I love using the Contextual Menu [right click on the object] and choose Copy Hyperlink.  Then I just chat or email the link to other users in my Daylite database and with a simple click on the link, they are taken directly to that item in the database. If you do not have your Contextual Menu preferences set up to include the Copy Hyperlink option, you can just single click on the object, go up to Edit and choose Copy Hyperlink.

EXTRA TIP: clicking the hyperlink opens the item in edit mode. To just Go To the item in the database , hold down the option key while you click the hyperlink.

Please keep in mind that this hyperlink function only works for users that are logged into your Daylite database.

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

 Attention road warriors! With OS 10.6, you can set the system to automatically change the timezone when you travel.  This can cause confusion, as the timezone in Daylite does not automatically change.  Marketcircle has released a plugin that notices when the system timezone has changed and asks you to restart Daylite.  Download the plugin here.  Once you have downloaded it, unzip it [if it is not already unzipped] and place it in this location: hard drive/users/youruserdirectory/Application Support/Daylite/Plugins.  Then restart Daylite.

 Did you know that you can take a screenshot on your iPhone? I found that I use this over and over throughout the day.  How to:  push the Home button and the top button simultaneously.  The resulting image will be in your Photos/Camera Roll.