4. Smarten Up Your Email

Anyone who spends a lot of time replying to the same old emails might be excited about Leopard’s addition of personalized templates to Apple Mail. Templates allow you to save predefined responses, eliminating the pain of, say, retyping the same set of driving directions to your annual office party. For a small fee, MailTemplates ($14.95) will add a similar ability to Mail in Tiger, although without the graphic-intensive layouts that Leopard promises. Download and run the MailTemplate installer, then log out and back in to being using the app.

MailTemplates adds a contextual menu to Mail (as well as to most other applications), and an application called MailTemplateEditor to the /Applications folder. To create a template, launch the editor and click the green pencil icon. Use the checkboxes to designate each template as a new message or a reply, and enter the text for the template in the appropriate fields. You can assign placeholders for the clipboard contents, reply addresses, and other dynamic values using the Insert Special Object drop-down menu.

To use your new templates, right-click a message within Mail, and select the appropriate template from the New Message With Template or Reply With Templates menu.

Plain-text templates may not be as pretty as Leopard’s image-heavy stationary, but they will save you a lot of typing.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

5. Share Files and Folders

If you already have a .Mac account, Leopard promises to make selected files from any of your Macs available online. Microsoft’s FolderShare offers a similar (although less elegant) function in its ability to sync files or folders across multiple computers, regardless whether the machines are Macs or PCs. In both cases, selected files and folders are available to you from any computer anytime.

To setup FolderShare, download the Mac version of its desktop client (free beta) to each machine that you want to sync files to. When you run the software on the first Mac, it will help you create an account on FolderShare’s servers. When setting up FolderShare on subsequent Macs, select “I’ve already created an account” and enter your login details (email address and password).

To begin syncing a folder, make sure that each of your Macs is online and running the FolderShare client. Then click the FolderShare icon (in the menubar) from one of the machines, and select My FolderShare. Your FolderShare account will open in Safari. Click the Sync My Folders button, select your first machine, and choose a file or folder to sync. Repeat the process on each Mac. As long as the FolderShare client is left running, changes will be synced automatically across all Macs sharing that folder.

Setup takes a bit longer than we’d like, but FolderShare’s ability to sync files across multiple computers is worth it in the end.