Like smart playlists in iTunes, smart albums in iPhoto provide a way for you to better organize your photos. Whether it's a list of your most recent photos or photos with a specified aperture range, there are countless smart albums you could create to fit your needs. Here are a few of my favorite.

Recently added: I always like having my most recent photos with me, and this is the smart album that gives them to me.

• Match the following condition.
• Date is in the last "90 days" (or whatever date range you prefer).

The smart family album: Say there are three family members in a family -- Tobias Fünke (dad), Lindsay Fünke (mom) and Maebe Fünke (daughter) -- and you want pictures of all of them in one place.

• Match any of the following conditions.
• Face is "Tobias."
• Face is "Lindsay."
• Face is "Maebe."

The camera-specific smart album: We've recently added a new member to the camera family, the Canon EOS 40D. But, like many a household, ours is one with several different cameras, and sometimes it's nice to see where each photo originated from.

• Match the following condition.
• Camera Model is "Canon EOS40D"

A smart album for videos: Some digital cameras these days can also function as "good enough" alternatives for camcorders. Here's a smart album that collects all of your videos imported from your digital cameras.

• Match the following condition.
• Photo is "Movie."

The best of the best: Your highest rated photos in one place

• Match the following condition.
• My rating is greater than "*" (or however many stars you desire)

Readers, tell us about some of the iPhoto smart albums that you've created.

While of my colleagues are tremendously excited about Norah Jones and iTunes LP, I've got to say I was far happier to discover the new iTunes 9 iPhone application management screens that Brett touched on yesterday (Sorry, Dave!). Located in the Applications tab for each iPhone and iPod touch device, the manager lets you organize your applications on a screen-by-screen basis from the comfort of your desktop. Unfortunately, the organizer remains fairly primitive.You can...

• ...check or uncheck apps that you want to sync or not sync.
• ...drag apps around individual pages to reorder them
• ...drag apps between screens to reparent them.
• ...change page order by dragging them within the page column.

And that's pretty much it. There's no way to sort your screens alphabetically or by category. There's no way to copy or share layouts between devices. There's no undo support if you change your mind about any changes. That having been said, there are some iTunes 9 tricks that may help you better organize your applications. Here are TUAW's top four.

Use Command-Click to group apps. Command-clicking an application icon adds it to (or if already added, removes it from) the currently selected group. You can move groups all at once between pages.

Use empty pages. If you have the pages to spare, use the empty pages that iTunes makes available to you to help organize applications by "theme". For example, you can drag an empty page into, say, the page 2 position and then start filling that page with games from the other pages. Adding apps to that empty page causes another empty page to appear at the end of the list if there is room. You're limited to eight 11 pages total for your applications.

Use the dock. Your dock provides a home for up to four applications that you use the most. Docked applications appear on every page, offering the quickest access to your most-used apps. Don't feel limited to the apps that the iPhone OS defaults to. It's your dock. Use it the way that best suits you.

Use the home screen. If you have more than four apps that you need quick access to, don't forget that the first screen of apps is always just a Home button click away. Tapping the home button when viewing apps automatically jumps you to the first page. Place your high priority apps on this first page if they fall short of the urgency of the dock items.

The new Application editor is certainly a great step forward from the way things were. Here's hoping that Apple will make it even easier to manage your applications in future iTunes releases.

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]

Right around Macworld-time, Zengobi released Curio 5.4, which included a healthy dose of Evernote integration. I had fallen for Evernote before I really figured out Curio, but lately I've found both to be key elements in my organization arsenal. I especially like Evernote's mobile capabilities and cross-platform sync. At home, I organize nearly all of my projects and related materials in Curio. Now, with Curio 5.4 and Evernote's very thorough API, we get the best of both worlds. All of the notes I take on my iPhone by photographing, recording and typing show up automatically -- and with full search capabilities -- when I sit down at my Mac. I also do a lot of research on the web, and this new integration means I can clip web pages to one place -- Evernote -- and have the information immediately available in Curio.

Evernote's various software clients are free, and premium accounts (allowing for any filetype and much more storage) are available for $5/month or $45/year. Curio is more pricey; the standard version is $99, and the pro version is $149 (there are significant academic discounts available). If you're already a Curio user but not an Evernote user, I'd recommend you sign up for a free Evernote account and start enjoying the benefits of the integration. You can always upgrade to a premium account if you find it indispensable (a fairly common occurrence). If you're an Evernote user considering Curio, use the coupon code EVERNOTE at Zengobi's online store (or Academic Store) to get a 20% discount on a Curio purchase. If you use neither, and don't want to, shouldn't you have given up reading this about a paragraph ago? Nah, thanks for sticking around.

The idea of tagging files as an organization and project management method has been around for some time now, and we've mentioned applications in the past (FileSpot, TagBot, Punakea ... ) which touched on some useful applications for the tagging method. A truly seamless, system-wide implementation, however, has been hard to find. Back at WWDC, Gravity applications gave me a taste of a new application which takes the concept to a new level. Tags, finally released yesterday, provides a hotkey-triggered HUD which allows tagging and searching from a wide range of applications, including:

• Finder and Path Finder
• Mail
• Address Book
• iPhoto
• Safari
• Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, etc.)
• Adobe Photoshop
• Xcode
• Rapidweaver
• Omnioutliner
• Pages and Keynote
• Quicktime

The list goes on. Basically, any application which can tell AppleScript what the current context is will work with Tags. Those that don't can also have their items tagged from Finder, which is especially easy if they have a "Reveal in Finder" shortcut.

Tags uses Spotlight metadata instead of the old Spotlight comments method. Files tagged with Tags are immediately indexed in Spotlight, allowing for searches and Smart Folders outside of Tags, as well as integration with other Spotlight-enabled applications. Its keyword storage method is directly compatible with Ironic Software's Deep, and the same method is planned for use in Leap, eventually. Ironic has actually just announced OpenMeta, an open source library for accessing and modifying this kind of metadata (more on that coming soon).

Read on for more on the concepts behind Tags.

It's certainly no secret that I'm a sucker for file and data organization programs, and have collected more than I use. Long ago, I received a copy of DEVONnote as part of a bundle, and have since upgraded to DEVONthink Pro. The program has long been intriguing to me -- auto-classification of files and advanced search relationships are great -- but various aspects of the app have kept me from really diving into it; a lack of pleasing aesthetics not being least on the list. You can call me superficial, but ... no, you'd be right. However, the public betas of DEVONthink 2.0 and DEVONnote 2.0 just came out, looking great and adding a bevy of useful new features.

DEVON Technologies states that the 2.0 versions represent an almost complete rewrite of the database core. With improved search (including advanced Boolean and proximity operators), a universal inbox accessible from multiple databases (DEVONthink versions can have simultaneous databases open) and a complete revamp of the user interface (including Cover Flow and much-improved overall aesthetics), this beta is a huge step forward. For me, the most important change is the file storage method. The applications now use a bundle format and store files "as is" on the drive, accessible by external applications and recoverable if anything happens to the database. Add the support for file templates and a wide range of new filetypes (Word, OpenOffice, iWork, Skim ... ), and DEVONthink just became a whole lot more useful to me.

Check out the release notes for DEVONnote and DEVONthink 2.0 for more details on the changes. The betas are available on their respective pages (DEVONnote | DEVONthink). Upgrade pricing is available for existing customers (customers who purchased DEVONnote or DEVONthink, or cross-graded after July 1st, 2008 are eligible for a free upgrade). DEVONthink comes in three flavors: Personal ($49.95US), Professional ($79.95US) and Professional Office ($149.95). DEVONnote, which is more or less a lightweight (but very useful) version of DEVONthink, is available for $24.95US.

Together (formerly KIT) remains one of my personal favorites in the area of file and note organization. I mentioned it last when the 2.1 release brought an array of oft-requested features. The latest update, version 2.2, adds some welcome additional features and fixes some existing issues. Highlights for the release include:

• Intelligent automatic tagging:

  This one is probably the most intriguing new feature, at least for me. It generates a certain number of tags (defined in preferences) based on tags you used on similar content in the past. It doesn't seem to read tags on items that existed prior to the upgrade or enabling automatic tagging, but it learns as it goes once you start using it. It's a little touch-and-go for me so far, but it's apparent that it's picking up on my habits as I continue to add new items. (See the update from the developer at the end of the article).

• Any or All boolean searches in the tag browser:

  This one was killing me in previous releases, which always treated multiple tag selections as "any," which (for me) defeated the purpose of multiple selections in a tag browser. Problem solved, the choice can be made in the view options of the tag browser.

• Groups and Smart Groups can be nested in folders:

  Depending on your organization method, grouping these items could prove to be a benefit. The previous version added the ability to automatically tag items added to a group or folder with tags set for that folder. With the option to perform that tagging on subfolders, the new group nesting feature allows for a hierarchical tagging system on groups, too.

• You can wrap selected items in a new group
• Tabs can be arranged by dragging
• Tabs can be activated by dragging to them

• Minimum dimensions can be set when importing web pages as PDFs:

  I love the PDF import feature of Together, which lets you save a web page as a PDF, keeping all of the text editable but in a more portable format than a web archive. It had a tendency to squish pages with certain CSS layouts, though. Another problem solved.

• Numerous fixes and features not mentioned in this abbreviated list

See the full release notes for Together 2.2 for a more in-depth list of the new features. Together remains $39USD, and is available at Reinvented Software.

Update: Together developer Steve Harris adds the following information regarding auto-tagging...

"When first enabled, Together builds up a map of the existing documents in your library and their corresponding tags. When documents are imported or saved, Together will analyse their content and tag them based on the tags for similar items.

To do this, Together is using a technology called Latent Semantic Mapping, which is built into Mac OS X, and is used by Mail.app to check for junk mail. As with Mail, it's possible the matches won't always be right, so if you change the tags on a document, Together will learn from that and in future, auto-tagging should be more accurate"

Macenstein posted a strange little tip earlier this week for getting Apple's official apps off of your iPhone (I personally never use the Stocks app, and really don't need it taking up space around the apps I do use). But his method isn't so much a tip as an exploit -- basically, Apple has a secret 10th "page" of Application icons, and Macenstein's method is to put so many apps onto your iPhone that the official ones get squeezed off screen.

It works, though installing 144 apps on your phone might be more trouble than it's worth. And the change isn't even permanent -- restarting or syncing the iPhone will bring the apps back on screen (provided you make room on them -- you could just leave 144 apps up if you wanted, and presumably they'd stay out of the picture).

It's too bad that Apple has never really provided a tool to organize the iPhone's app screen quickly -- stacks have long been suggested as a way to get more icons on there, but it'd be nice to even have an iTunes-based tool to get all those icons in the right places. Until then, you can always fill up all your screens and kick any icons you don't want off of there.

TUAW's going Back to School! We'll be bringing you tips and reviews for students, parents and teachers right up until the bell rings in September. Read on for high school & college-level help.

I covered a few good research tools for students in my last post. Before I dive into some of the excellent writing tools and packages available, we're going to take a look at some methods and applications for putting thoughts, notes and references together in a format that makes the actual writing part much easier.

Whether you're taking notes as you research, collecting documents or actually mapping out the first draft, these tools can be vital for organizing research, overcoming writer's block and making sure that things flow smoothly once writing begins.

Together 2.1 is a major upgrade for this ever-evolving information management application. Steve Harris, author of Together (and Feeder), has listened very carefully to user feedback and is turning up the heat with features that I've personally been waiting anxiously for. I'm a fickle suitor of many apps in this genre, constantly switching amongst the likes of Yojimbo, DEVONthink, Evernote, EagleFiler, SOHO Notes and some of my own concoctions. I've always liked Together's interface ... it just lacked certain functionality in some key areas of my workflow. Version 2.1 makes great strides to fill those gaps.

My current workflow -- one that's lasted long enough for me to call it my system -- is heavily based on Spotlight comment tagging for gathering project-related information. This is rapidly becoming a universally-accepted method and is supported by many applications which can read and write their internal tags to and from Spotlight comments. Together has added both read and write functionality for such tags with a user-definable prefix, as well as the option to import keywords as tags. This means that the system I use in applications like Leap, Mail.app (with Mailtags), FileSpot and directly in Finder (with Spotlight) work hand-in-hand with Together now. You can even define default tags for groups and folders to assign to imported items, and Together can now automatically import files saved by external programs into its Library folders. The new support for external linking to internal items and a complete AppleScript dictionary kick off the highlights of the extensive release notes.

A few other highlights include:

• Smart groups can now be based on other groups (including other smart groups)
• Recording of the date items are imported
• The option to create visually accurate Web PDFs instead of web archives
• A system-wide import hotkey
• A more useful Shelf that can tag and sort quick notes
• Quick Look in the Shelf
• Performance improvements in multiple areas
• Text highlighting in notes and documents
• Extensive preview options
• Text in imported emails is now selectable

One deciding factor for me in choosing a system is the database vs. file system debate. It's a debate that spurs quasi-theological discussion, but ultimately it's a personal choice and somewhat dependent on your particular needs. I like file system storage as found in Together and EagleFiler because of its automatic integration with the rest of my applications. Files edited in an external application from Together are treated just like regular Finder files (because they are) and will show up in Recent Files menus and your Spotlight index. Yes, Yojimbo and DEVONthink have Spotlight plugins, but they have to go the extra step to write out their metadata. Together is also quite adept at dealing with filetypes it doesn't necessarily understand, letting the system handle default applications and Quick Look handle the previews. And lastly, all of my files are easily accessible outside of Together and not locked into a proprietary database.

Together 2.1 is a free upgrade for current users. A new license will run you $39 and there's a demo available. And if you're thinking of switching from Yojimbo, there's an importer just for you on the downloads page.

Update: If you're in the market, be sure to check out what's new with Evernote, too!

Evernote has plans for your brain. More specifically, a vision for the the augmentation of your memory. Phil Libin, CEO of Evernote and a recent Mac convert (who's been enthusiastically replacing his relatives' PCs with Macs to cut down on tech support calls) filled us in on Evernote's big plans.

Originally, Evernote was a Windows desktop application for taking notes, and it was (and is) top-ranked in its class. Then they decided that a broader array of input options and more accessibility could take Evernote light years beyond the initial plans. This included creating a Mac desktop client and a web application to interface everything. It can take your text notes, web clippings, pictures and more, organizing them with a tagging system and attribute filter. The ultimate goal of Evernote is to be, as Phil puts it, a "universal human memory extension."

The Mac desktop client is being developed from the ground up, not ported from the Windows client. This makes for a true Mac experience and a beautiful interface. Feature parity will eventually be maintained (Windows users currently have a slightly different feature set), but the two clients are being developed separately. Read on after the jump to find out what makes Evernote different from your current system for tracking all the information in your life (and find out how you can get in on it!).

One of the most anticipated applications in recent memory, Delicious Library 2 is finally nearing release. Earlier this week, the guys over at AppleInsider showed off an in-depth sneak peek of the application and its new features and revamped interface.

I have had the opportunity to play with the beta as well, and I must say, I'm impressed. For the last six weeks or so, I have been working on a little something I like to call Project DVD -- wherein I try the various DVD cataloging programs (though most can catalog more than just DVDs) and find the best one to tackle my truly mammoth collection -- and it's great to have DL2 in the mix.

Just from my own experiences, what has impressed me most about the beta -- aside from the various UI changes/eye candy -- is just how much easier it is to add items.

Because I have so many DVDs, it's often faster for me to enter in titles by hand rather than relying on the iSight scanner. No matter how accurate the scanner may or may not be, holding a title up to my laptop is usually going to take longer than just typing in the name (granted, using a USB scanner like Motorola CS104 is a great solution, but at $100 OEM, you really have to weigh the expense to convenience). My biggest problem with Delicious Library (and in fact, almost all of the programs I have tested for Project DVD) has been that adding multiple titles at one time (say, multiple seasons of a TV show) has been either really difficult or impossible.

The all-purpose organization app, Together, has been updated to version 2.0.4. Formerly known as KIT (Keep It Together), the new name came with the 2.0 version and a Leopard-only status.

Together, by way of background information, offers functionality similar to Yojimbo with several major differences, including file system storage, hierarchical folders, and a wider range of supported filetypes. Together handles multiple libraries and deals well with large files and large file collections.

The development of Together is progressing nicely, and 2.0.4 fixes a few low-profile but crucial bugs. I'm especially pleased about the lowering of the sensitivity in the spring-loaded folders when dragging to the import drawer. I just tested the new build and am happy to report that the delay is indeed improved and the drawer is now highly usable. The new build also improves tag handling and fixes some tag-related bugs, among other fixes.

A forum was just opened today as well for user feedback and discussion.

Together can be purchased for $39 from Reinvented Software.

Unfortunately, a few of the Backpack updates - such as reordering items anywhere on the page - haven't made it into PackRat simply because 37signals doesn't allow external applications to do this through their API. Rod urges users to contact 37signals and request this ability, and hopefully in time the company will listen and open up this functionality. Other new Backpack features like search are probably coming with a future PackRat update.

As with the the recent change to PackRat's trial period, a 30-day demo is available, while a license costs a mere $24.95.