SmileOnMyMac Blog

Quite a number of our fellow Mac software developers have teamed up to bring a little joy to Mac users this holiday season, in the form of the MacSanta 20% discount!

Every day, until December 24, five different developers’ wares are featured at 20% off for one day only. SmileOnMyMac is featured today! Besides the daily 20% off specials, you’ll find extended savings of 10% off during the rest of the MacSanta festivities. (One of our “smileworthy” picks, SpamSieve is among them!)

Thanks to Paul Kafasis of Rogue Amoeba for organizing this great gift for fans of Mac software.

SmileOnMyMac’s products can help with the holidays. Use DiscLabel to make CDs, DVDs, and packaging for holiday gifts. Use PDFpen to handle last-minute corrections to your family’s annual letter. Use TextExpander to save time typing your thank you notes. Use PageSender to fax your Christmas list to Santa. Use BrowseBack to provide a visual history of your Web search for the perfect present. Use PhotoPrinto to create stunning photo albums on your ink jet printer.

For the second entry in our new “Smileworthy” category, in which we highlight software we like and use from other software companies, we chose SpamSieve. Like our first entry, LaunchBar, Philip, Greg and I all use this. It is another application we would not want to live without.

SpamSieve will keep your email inbox nearly free of unwanted email. It uses Bayesian filtering to determine if an email is spam. And it is smart! It gets better at filtering the longer you use it. If something spammy gets by SpamSieve, you mark it as spam and SpamSieve learns from that. Likewise, if a “good” email is snagged by SpamSieve, you can mark it as such.

In practice, I get a few spam emails in my inbox everyday, but the vast majority go into the Spam folder automatically. I rarely get a “false positive,” i.e. a good email that is falsely sent to the Spam folder.

Another thing we at SmileOnMyMac can really appreciate: great customer support. All my emails to the developer are answered very promptly–and very helpfully.

We’re inaugurating something new: a category we’re calling “Smileworthy” to feature software we use and really like. Philip, Greg and I often trade recommendations on software from other developers, and we want to share those recommendations with you.

We’ll launch this feature (pun totally intended), with LaunchBar from Objective Development. All three of us use LaunchBar and none of us can imagine using a Mac without it. With LaunchBar, you can instantly access applications, documents and information from most anywhere on your hard drive.

When I think how I used to go to the Finder, open a window, click on the Applications folder, find the application and double-click on it to launch it, my fingers and wrists hurt.

With LaunchBar, you hit Command + Space Bar, type a short abbreviation, hit return, and your application opens. LaunchBar learns abbreviations from your choices. The first time you type the letter “P”, LaunchBar will show you a list of choices that begin with “P”. If you choose PDFpen from that list, LaunchBar will assume you want PDFpen the next time you type “P”.

LaunchBar’s handiness is not limited to applications. You can open documents, look up a contact’s information, run Apple Scripts and more. Much more. In fact, I know I don’t come close to using LaunchBar to its fullest. Objective Development just released version 4.3, and I’m inspired to try out some features I’ve overlooked.

If you use LaunchBar and have any tips, please do share them in the Comments.