Tools make jobs short, sweet

A few months ago, I pulled out my trusty kit bag of tricks, sharing many of the small gems that help Mac OS X help me to be more productive. Here are three more tools that have saved me dozens of hours in the past 12 months, accumulating seconds and minutes of regained time.

Yojimbo: Tech thinker David Weinberger has a book due out soon called "Everything Is Miscellaneous" that addresses how our systems of knowledge and organization attempt to provide some measure of order to the world around us. Digital organization, however, makes any miscellaneous item as quickly findable as an item within the world's greatest hierarchy.

Yojimbo exemplifies this behavior, serving as the program equivalent of that drawer in the kitchen, the one that has matches, skewers, maps, tape, rubber bands and coasters. ("Yojimbo," by the way, is the name of the classic Akira Kurosawa film about a masterless samurai, appropriate for information without a guiding central hierarchy.)

The program provides one big junk drawer in which to cram all the varied information that you can't figure out where to put. It has a few predefined types to provide a minimal level of order: Note, Bookmark, Password, Serial Number and Web Archive.

Every Web site I visit seems to have different requirements for what user name and password I can choose. With Yojimbo, I can create that combination at whatever Web site I'm visiting, then switch to Yojimbo to create a Password entry. When I need to retrieve that information, which I've invariably forgotten, I just type in the site's name or another reminder in its global Search All field, and I'm done.

Yojimbo encrypts passwords, and can encrypt entire notes or other items, protecting its storehouse of information. The program can synchronize its data across multiple Macs if you subscribe to Apple's .Mac service, too.

You can print from an application directly to Yojimbo as a PDF, which is searchable and viewable within the program. You can also create Web Archives, which retrieves an entire Web page, images included, and stores the results. Dragging a bookmark from a browser onto a "drop dock" that floats above all programs automatically creates a Web Archive.

Information: barebones.com/products/yojimbo/index.shtml, $39 (individual), $69 (five household computers), 30-day trial.

PDFpen: Adobe's Acrobat Portable Document Format (PDF) has become the standard way to publish and distribute documents that combine layout, formatting, and images, or any two of the those elements. PDF files preserve the original look and feel, down to the point that you can print a PDF and have the resulting output be nearly indistinguishable from the original.

What neither Acrobat Reader, Adobe's free viewing tool, nor Acrobat Professional offers is a straightforward way to edit PDFs, create form areas to drop in content, or extract elements, like strings of text. With Acrobat Professional ($449 stand-alone version) and some patience, you can accomplish all this. But it's easier — and cheaper — to use PDFpen from Smile On My Mac.

PDFpen lets you tweak PDF files that have already been created in another program or within Mac OS X. It works with unlocked PDF files; some files you might receive could be password-protected against modification. In practice, I've seen few.

You can draw on pages with PDFpen, add text annotations, drop in new text, edit existing text, and manipulate page order, as well as merge PDFs or insert or delete pages.

A Pro version lets you create form fields that can be saved in the PDF file, and then filled out in Acrobat Reader on any computer platform.

I frequently use PDFpen with a document I've received via e-mail or downloaded from a Web site, and need to sign and return. Rather than kill part of a tree by printing the document, and then having to find and use a fax machine, I insert a previously scanned image of my signature, add a text field with the current date, save the PDF, and then e-mail that back to the sender. (If I need to fax the document out, I use Maxemail (maxemail.com). You can upload PDF and other files to their site, and fax the contents out for a low per-minute rate.)

Information: www.smileonmymac.com/PDFpen/, regular version $49.95, Pro $94.95, trial stamps documents with company logo.

LaunchBar: Apple has never provided a simple way to choose from installed applications and launch them. A host of programs dating back to System 6 — and even earlier — included or were dedicated to finding and launching programs without using a mouse to navigate to a folder, find the software and double-click its icon. (DiskTop users, re-unite!)

Let me be as short and sweet as the program itself: hit a keystroke you choose, and LaunchBar comes to the foreground as a subtle drop-down field at the top of the screen.

Type a few letters of the program, Address Book contact, song, or other item you're trying to launch or open. If more than one choice appears, use the arrow keys to scroll among them. When you find the right one, hit return.

Information: www.obdev.at/products/launchbar/index.html, $19.95 (individual), $29.95 (five household computers), trial limits unique items and number of launches.

Glenn Fleishman writes the Practical Mac column for Personal Technology and about technology in general for The Seattle Times and other publications. Send questions to gfleishman@seattletimes.com. More columns at www.seattletimes.com/columnists