Today’s Gems column is a two-fer: I cover a couple useful-but-simple products designed to make little things easier.

ProShutdown 1.1

One of the keyboard shortcuts I use with my desktop Mac several times each day is Control-Eject. Pressing this key combination brings up Mac OS X’s Restart/Sleep/Cancel/Shut Down dialog (you can choose any action in that dialog by pressing R, S, C, or Return/Enter, respectively). On most Mac keyboards, pressing this combination is a no-look action: the Control key is located at the lower-left corner of the keyboard, and the Eject key is located at the upper-right; you just press the two keys at the extreme corners. But on Apple’s newest input offering, the full-size Aluminum keyboard, that’s not the case. The key at the upper-right corner of this keyboard is F19; the Eject button is located just over the Delete key, making it difficult to find without looking at the keyboard.

 

If you’ve got a new Aluminum Keyboard and miss this “opposite-corner keys” shortcut, KennettNet Software Limited’s free ProShutdown 1.1 ( ) is a simple utility that makes your Mac think you’re pressing Control-Eject whenever you press Control+F19—you see the standard Restart/Sleep/Cancel/Shut Down dialog. In addition, Control+Option+Command+F19 issues an immediate Shut Down command, as if you’d held down the Option key while choosing Shut Down from the Apple Menu. (Control+F18 toggles the display of ProShutdown’s systemwide menu, which is where you quit ProShutdown, if desired.)

One minor issue with ProShutdown is that if you’re using Leopard’s Spaces feature, pressing Control+F19 will switch you to the workspace in which you first launched ProShutdown. The solution is to assign ProShutdown to Every Space in Spaces preferences.

ProShutdown 1.1 requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later.

MailCM 1.0.4

If you’re a heavy user of email—especially if you do any kind of IT or user support—you likely spend a good amount of time copying and pasting various bits of email messages. Limit Point Software’s MailCM 1.0.4 ( ; payment requested) is a contextual-menu plugin for Mail that lets you quickly copy any of a number of attributes of an email message. You just right-click (or Control-click) on a message—either in a message list or anywhere in the message itself—and then choose the information you want to copy; an audible beep confirms the action. The information you can grab includes:

• All Headers: the full headers of the email message
• Content: the body of the message
• All Headers and Content: the full headers and body
• Date: the date you received the message (in the format Monday, February 11, 2008)
• Time: the time you received the message (actually the date and time, in the format 2/11/2008, 7:42:25 PM)
• Header Message ID: the official message ID (from the message’s header)
• Mail Message ID: Mail’s internal ID for the message
• Source: the message’s raw source (how it’s transmitted before being interpreted by your email client)
• Reply To: the Reply-To field of the message
• Sender: the From field of the message
• Subject: the message subject
• Recipient Name: the name of the first recipient of the message
• Recipient Address: the email address of the first recipient
• Summary: A summary of the message that includes the sender, subject, date, time, first recipient, and body

If you select multiple messages in a message list and then use MailCM, it will usually copy, to the Clipboard, the information from all messages formatted as a list. The exceptions here are All Headers, All Headers and Content, and Source; for these, you get the info from only the first selected message.

MailCM’s preferences—which are located in System Preferences rather than in Mail’s own preferences window—let you choose whether the above options appear in a submenu of Mail’s contextual menus or in the main menu. You can also to disable those particular menu items you never use.

I find MailCM to be more convenient than having to select and copy various bits of info, and much more convenient than having to view a message’s source or long headers to copy info that’s not visible in Mail by default. On the other hand, it’s unfortunate that the Recipient Name and Address options copy only the first recipient, rather than all recipients. And I wish you could disable MailCM’s audible confirmation.

MailCM 1.0.4 requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later.