Use Token for faster access to your iWork docs

Editor’s note: The following review is part of Macworld’s GemFest 2012 series. Every weekday from mid June through mid August, the Macworld staff will use the Mac Gems blog to briefly cover a favorite free or low-cost program. Visit the Mac Gems homepage for a list of past Mac Gems.

If you frequently use Apple’s iBooks Author or iWork apps (Pages, Numbers, and Keynote), Token 1.3.1 (Mac App Store link) can make your life slightly easier by giving you faster access to your documents, templates (or themes), and scripts.

Token appears as an unobtrusive system-wide menu bar icon. A Recent submenu gives you one-click access to recent documents from any of the aforementioned apps; you can set how many recent documents appear and how they’re sorted—and you can Command-click any file to show it in the Finder. Unlike the File -> Open Recent submenus in these apps (and the Recent Items submenu of the Apple menu), which list the most recently opened files, Token lists the most recently modified files.

Each app also gets its own submenu with additional commands. For iBooks Author, you can open any built-in or user-created template. For Pages and Numbers, you can create a new document, open any custom template you’ve saved to My Templates (though not built-in templates), or run any application-specific AppleScript. The options for Keynote are similar except that instead of My Templates you can access My Themes. (The developer’s website offers a collection of free AppleScripts and instructions for installing them.)

If you’re still running Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, you can configure any of the three iWork apps to save your work automatically at a user-defined interval (a feature built into 10.7 Lion). This interval wasn’t observed correctly in version 1.3, but the 1.3.1 update fixes that. (Note that the interval is calculated from when you launched each app rather than from the moment of your last save.)

Token won’t dazzle you with its cleverness, but it can save you clicks and make your workflow just a bit more pleasant.

[Senior contributor Joe Kissell is the senior editor of TidBits and the author of the ebook Take Control of iCloud (TidBITS Publishing, 2012).]

Want to stay up to date with the latest Gems? Sign up for the Mac Gems newsletter for a weekly email summary of Gems reviews sent directly to your Inbox. You can also follow Mac Gems on Twitter.