Filed under: Utilities, Productivity

Mac laptops have those convenient little buttons at the top of the keyboard that let you control some important systems prefs really quickly. When I want to toggle brightness up and down, adjust volume, or pause iTunes, I’m really glad they’re there. But when I’m using an app that actually demands one of the function keys they’re assigned to, I have the ability to completely do without the fiddly little toggling bits. That doesn’t mean I need all of my F-keys back though, so merely activating them through System Preferences doesn’t quite do the trick.

Cue music, enter FunctionFlip. This app — now a Preference Pane as of version 1.2, does what it states it does: it flips your function keys one-by-one. So if you want to free up F1 through F4, but leave F10 and F12 as volume keys, you can go right ahead. It’s the kind of great idea that makes you wonder why Apple hasn’t built it into the system preferences yet.

[via Mac Gems]

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Filed under: World wide web, News, E-mail, Productivity, Google, Search

Steve Rubel wrote an excellent post about taking your Gmail to an extraordinary new level — using it as a searchable database by harnessing its rich filtering capabilities and imbuing it with tags. Rather than just using it as an email inbox, you can hit pay dirt if you stretch it to be your personal data mining system.

Here’s how. First, forget about using the cumbersome label feature altogether. You’ll be using the filters and tags instead. As you will be sending yourself emails to seed your database, you’ll need to set up a filter so these emails are auto archived and marked as read and don’t junk up your inbox.

When you find information you want to add to your database, you’ll email it to yourself (Rubel uses Ubiquity, a Firefox add on) with a special tag you add to the prefix. For example, youremail+mortgage crisis@gmail.com, if say you wanted to have access to a great article on the housing melt down. The email won’t hit your inbox, but you can find it doing a search by its tag.

Then, to make your tags easy to find, use Gmail Quick Links, a Gmail Labs feature which bookmarks common Gmail views. This grants you to create a shortcut to any bookmarkable URL in Gmail. You need to enable this feature in your Gmail settings, found under the Labs tab.

If you live in your Gmail, this might be a great option for you to bookmark and search massive quantities of information all from the comfort of your home on the internet, your inbox.

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