I’ve got an external hard drive attached to my laptop for TimeMachine backups, but every time I need to pick up and go somewhere I need to manually eject the drive or face the dreaded “you didn’t do this like we want you to, and you might have lost data” nag screen.  Instead of digging into a Finder window to eject the drive manually, I now use Semulov to eject specific drives or all attached drives right from my menu bar.  A handy utility that saves a few mouse moves and a lot of eye rolling.

Continuing on with the Mac Bells and Whistles kick – next up is MenuCalendarClock.

I often need to know the current date (and I can never remember).  I know that iCal displays the current date in its dock icon, but I hide my dock, so that requires mouse work.  I know the current date is available if I click on the clock in the menu bar, but again, that requires the mouse.  

MenuCalendarClock is a fairly robust menu bar extension for iCal, but I use it mainly to display (with a small footprint) the current date in my menu bar (see above).  When you click on the icon in the menu bar, you also get a quick mini-month display that’s helpful in quick situations.  If you don’t want the fuss of digging into iCal but need a quick glance at dates, MenuCalendarClock does the job.  The basic version is free – bells and whistles will cost a little bit.

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This will be of no interest to the QuickSilver nerds, but for the rest of us, Spark solves a small annoyance for me.  Unless you want to set up hot corners, there’s no quick way to activate the Screen Saver in Mac OS X (and, by extension, lock your computer).  Spark lets you assign the launch of an app (or any document) to a specific hot key.  Here’s what I did:

• Built a quick “Start Screen Saver” App in Automator (it’s not that scary)
• Use Spark to assign the F6 key to launch the new “Start Screen Saver” app
• Press F6 when I want to lock my screen
• Go get coffee.

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If you’re a slow (or moderately slow) typist like myself, Text Expander is a great utility.  I’m in the middle of a doctoral thesis and I find myself typing the same phrases again and again – like “Stone-Campbell Movement” or “Lord’s Supper” or “Independent Christian Churches and Churches of Christ.”  Text Expander lets me set up a few key strokes, like “SCM,” to trigger a long phrases like “Stone-Campbell Movement.”  So every time I enter a the letters “SCM,” Text Expander types the phrase “Stone-Campbell Movement.”  My fingers are expansively happy.

You can use it for long phrases as well – like email signatures or typical boiler plates – anything you might use on a regular basis.  This is a keyboard-shortcut fiend’s best friend.

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I ran across this a while ago, but was recently reminded at the TUAW blog about Caffeine. If you’re nursing an elderly battery like I am, you’re always looking for ways to save power – and having your screen automatically dim after a few minutes helps out quite a bit.  It’s wonderful…until you start to watch a video and the screen dims due to inactivity.  

Enter Caffeine.  It sits in the menubar (a nice little coffee cup icon) and lets you either immediately override screen dimming or set a short term override countdown (say 20 or 30 minutes).  Now you can watch the video and not have to burrow through the System Preferences to disable Screen Dimming…or forget to turn it back on when you leave to get your own caffeinated beverage and end up with a battery depraved MacBook when you return.

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Jott is one of those great little utilities that makes a 30 minute commute more productive than you think.  Jott lets you dial your phone and dictate a message that gets transcribed and emailed to anyone on a customized contact list or to web-apps like Evernote.  It’s pretty accurate and takes less time than writing something down by hand.  I tend to use it for composing short emails and making short to-do lists on the go.  It’s in public beta, and of course, it’s free.

Stickies are OK, but when you’re looking for integrated notes management via your computer, handheld, or any browser anywhere; Evernote keeps them all together with an elegant interface and plenty of power under the hood.

I usually collect info in a number of ways:

• copy or paste from a document on a computer
• type something while I’m at my computer
• type something short in on my phone
• write things down on any available piece of paper
• leave a quick voice memo through Jott (more on this later)
• take a picture with my camera phone

What I like about Evernote is the ability to dump all of these collection actions into one place so I can easily find them later.  Evernote lets me type something in on my computer, paste something from the web, email a picture from my phone, translate my written notes into searchable text (I’d recommend it for that reason alone), and (with help from Jott) transcribe my voice memos so I can search for them later.  AND it keeps all of these things in a synced database between my computer and the web so I can access that content anywhere there’s an internet connection (including my mobile phone).

I love loved Firefox before it became a third-party extensions nagware experience made possible by a bloated system footprint. If you visit sites that need Firefox to operate properly (I have a few work sites), Camino is a satisfying alternative. It’s built off the same engine as Firefox, but leaves the bloat behind in favor of a more Mac OS X standard interface design. Camino gives you all the standard functionality of Firefox in a streamlined app that’s lightweight and nimble.

Even though I use Fluid for most of my web-apps and Safari for most of my general web browsing, Camino is my go-to browser when Safari gets a little finicky.

If you use a lot of web-apps like I do (Gmail, GoogleDocs, Facebook, GoogleReader, etc.), it’s nice to have those websites function more like a stand-alone application that dwells in your dock rather than inside your browser. Those using Leopard can run a fun little app called Fluid to create stand-alone applications that connect to your favorite web-apps and treat them like local apps. Here’s why I like handling web apps like local apps:

• you can use the command+tab fast switching technique to quickly get to the app when it’s running
• you can hide the app using command+h
• you can assign the app to a space in spaces (which I don’t use, but I know lots of folks enjoy it)
• you can launch the app from the dock
• you can quit the app with a keyboard shortcut (command-q)
• you can have the app automatically launch at startup

I’ve always messed around with web-apps prior to Fluid, but always shied away from using them as local app replacements because of typical web browser clutter. Now I no longer use a local email client, I simply use a Fluid version of Gmail – same goes for GoogleDocs, Facebook, GoogleReader, and Twitter.

Since I’ve been using the Mac OS now for around 20 years (started in Junior High), and since a lot of students and colleagues I know are just now jumping into the Mac pool, I tend to get a lot of questions about what “bells and whistles” they should install on their freshly opened Mac.  I’ve been keeping a scrap list over the last few months, so over the next few days I’ll highlight the Mac bells and whistles I just can’t live without.