Ah, summertime; the kids are out of school, the pace drops back from 'overdrive' to 'merely hectic,' and you finally have the opportunity to tackle the giant looming crisis that is your personal state of disorganization. Perhaps I'm projecting a little bit. Anyway, if you're looking for a bit of guidance on how your Mac can help you get organized -- and, of course, if you are a Microsoft Office 2008 owner -- the Mac BU has something for you.

Organization expert Peter Walsh (possessor of a charming Australian accent, and author of the slightly-less-charmingly titled Does This Clutter Make My Butt Look Fat) is the host of a video tips presentation over at the Mactopia site. Walsh runs through a couple of suggestions for reducing the chaos in the three key areas of Family, Finance & Health, mostly on the straightforward side (keep a family calendar in Entourage, track your website logins in a secured Excel spreadsheet). Walsh encourages us to envision the end state of the life we want instead of the many steps that may be required to arrive there.

Unfortunately, the delivery mechanism for these helpful tips is a bit less than helpful. The presentation requires the Silverlight plugin, which lots of folks avoid on principle. You can neither download nor rewind the segments; it would seem that for anything intended to help you reduce chaos and clutter, providing the tips in podcastable and mobile-friendly formats would be a nice gesture towards the overscheduled.

On top of that, the tips seem a bit forced into Office's capabilities rather than organically built. While there are more optimal Mac or iPhone single-purpose apps for these tasks (or even multitaskers like Bento), it's true that Office is installed on a lot of Macs and a lot of Mac users could probably leverage it to achieve some organizational goals.

With all that in mind, if you feel like you could use a light organizational boost and you enjoy making spreadsheets of your car maintenance appointments, check it out.

Update: One thing I meant to mention but forgot: Entourage is a bit of an odd choice for a familial calendar, as it doesn't offer native sharing outside of an Exchange environment (an unlikely setup for parents & kids). Adding BusySync makes it much more flexible, but you're just as well off using iCal in that situation.

[h/t The Loop]

Update: As the commenters have noted -- this service is currently only available for US customers. I truly apologize for my US-centric slant.

Last month, Netflix finally started to roll out its Watch Instantly service to Mac users. You needed to opt-in to use the feature, but it was available for those who wanted to access it. Today, Watch Instantly is available for Mac users without having to opt-in -- as long as you meet the minimum system requirements (Intel Mac running OS X 10.4.8 or higher, and at least one GB of RAM).

Watch Instantly is a great way to catch up on a movie, TV show or documentary without having to wait for the movie to come in the mail. You don't get the extra features or super surround sound, but it's fast, the quality is good and it is free to use. If you have a Netflix Unlimited plan, you can watch as many movies a month as you want. If you have a limited plan, the number of films you can stream is also limited.

You can access Watch Instantly from the tab on the main Netflix page and browse through the selection of movies and TV shows. You still need to install the Microsoft Silverlight plugin, if you don't already have it installed. Watch Instantly works in Firefox 2 or higher and Safari 3 and up.

Thanks to everyone who sent this in!

The above video is a visual comparison of OS X's InkWell to Microsoft's handwriting recognition built into Vista. By using a Silverlight application he's able to send the pen strokes from a Mac to a remote Windows server. So he basically tries to write the same thing with each system.The author of the video seems to prefer Vista's offering, especially when writing in cursive, but grants that others may feel differently. He's also summarized his impressions. In any case, it's interesting to see the two systems side by side. Have any of you used both systems? Do you think this is a fair test? If you install Silverlight you can do the demo yourself here.

[via jkOnTheRun]

We've blogged about Silverlight on TUAW before, and now Silverlight 1.0 is available. Silverlight is Microsoft's answer to Adobe's juggernaut, Flash. This cross platform browser plugin (it works with Firefox and Safari on the Mac) was built from the ground up with RIA's (that's Rich Internet Applications, or fancy webpages in non-geek speak) in mind. Silverlight can also stream high resolution video (up to 720p), and promises to offer the same experience on both Macs and PCs.

Keep in mind that this is a Microsoft product, so in order to create Silverlight apps you have to code in .Net, but I'm more interested in using Silverlight apps (Netflix, I'm looking at you).

Silverlight is free, and works with OS X 10.4.8 and above.

Silverlight is set to auto-update, so if you want to turn that off keep reading.

There are a few companies who, through their products and services, have earned a special place in my heart. Apple is one (obviously), as well as Amazon, New Balance, Nintendo, and Netflix. Netflix, in case you haven't heard of them, makes money via a subscription model. You pay a monthly fee and that gives you access to their monstrous DVD catalog. Pick a DVD and they'll mail it out to you in a nifty envelope that also serves as a the return envelope.

Alright, so now we all know what Netflix is, why the heck am I blogging about it on TUAW? You might recall that Netflix has recently started streaming movies for members via their website. This feature is called 'Watch Now,' and appears on any movie that has been digitized for streaming. Sadly, this very cool feature is only available for PC users. The dev responsible for this feature posted about why Mac users are left out of all the fun.

It basically comes down to the fact that there is no movie studio approved way to wrap these streams in DRM, so the movie studios won't let it happen on the Mac. FairPlay is mentioned, but as we know Apple isn't licensing that. Luckily, the solution might be coming from an unlikely source: Microsoft. Silverlight, Mircosoft's answer to Flash, uses Microsoft's DRM which the studios do approve of. Silverlight is still in beta (for both Macs and PCs) but it does look very promising (and on my Intel Mac it was pretty peppy).

Thanks, Mike.

Over at mac mojo, the Microsoft Mac Business Unit blog, Blair Neumann is expressing his excitement about Silverlight. As we mentioned before, Silverlight is Microsoft's cross-platform, Flash alternative, which is now available in beta form for both Safari and Firefox. Perhaps the most interesting thing about this (as Eddie Hargreaves over at the Apple Blog points out) is that Silverlight will return official Microsoft support for Windows Media streaming to the Mac, "including HD video up to 720p." Since Microsoft stopped development of the Windows Media Player for Mac the primary Windows Media solution on the Mac has been from Flip4Mac (and indeed Microsoft is itself distributing the Flip4Mac plugin). Nonetheless, I still regularly run into problems trying to stream Windows Media videos, so this has to be taken as good news. Unfortunately, however, Microsoft is apparently not going to support PPC Macs in future releases of Silverlight (via Gruber).

Silverlight is a free download from Microsoft.

At this year's NAB, Microsoft has revealed Silverlight (né Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere, WPF/E), its new cross-browser, cross-platform video plug-in. This new plug-in supports Safari and Firefox as well as MSIE and was written using .NET technology.

TUAW reader Neil points out that this means that at least some of the .NET framework must have now been ported over to the Mac. You can read more about the introductory post here on Tim Senath's Microsoft blog and Neil's .Net on Mac analysis here.