If your love of Apple's products is evolving into a desire to work for or with them to some degree, informit.com has a nice roundup of the various Apple certifications one can earn, ranging from consulting, system administration and even getting trained to train. The individual articles provide nice summaries, as well as a few gotchas, for each of the certifications, as well as links to Apple's official sites. This is a nice starting point for making that leap from 'living room Mac nerd hobbyist' to 'paid corporate Mac nerd.' Scoring that choice parking spot, however, is an entirely different certification altogether.

NeoOffice, everyone's favorite implementation of OpenOffice in java, has released a v.2 beta of their suite with a new and improved Aqua-friendly interface. This new version is based on a recent version of OpenOffice (2.0.3), which includes apps for word processing, databases, spreadsheets, drawing and presenting. NeoOffice, however, offers advantages over running OpenOffice on Mac OS X because it doesn't need the X11 Unix environment to run. Moreover, NeoOffice can integrate with the Finder and Mail, which was probably one of the winning attributes that warranted the 'Aqua' addition to the name.

The Early Access Program is, in my opinion, a really cool and clever way to bring in some money for the project's hard work (after all, this entire project is made up of volunteers, and somebody's gotta pay the bills). From now until the 14th of August, users can download a copy of 2.0 Aqua for a mere $25. From August 15th through 29th, the price drops to $10. After that, it goes back to free like it's always been. NeoOffice is also selling Early Access subscriptions for $60, which will offer (what else) early access privileges throughout the course of NeoOffice 2.x releases.

I personally haven't tried a copy yet (I already - unfortunately - sunk money into Office 2004), but I'm willing to bet with some of the java benchmarks we've seen on Intel Macs, this suite will run pretty well if you have Intel inside. This sounds like a good a case as any to grab a copy early and help support a great project.

[via MacNN]

If you've ever installed an app that can take advantage of .Mac syncing services and then stopped using it or removed it for one reason or another, you might have noticed that its listing in the .Mac System Preferences pane still lingers. This could be a nuisance to neat-freaks, but it could also cause complications in some cases.

Fortunately, a post at macosxhints has done some digging into the matter and revealed a few clues to cleaning up the mess. It turns out that Panic, makers of Transmit, offer a Terminal tip for removing Transmit from the .Mac sync services list. This inspired the macosxhints poster to do some digging to see about other services, so check out their post if you're looking to do some .Mac sync services spring cleaning.

Dave Caolo posted about MailTags last August, but in case you're unfamiliar: MailTags is a fantastic plugin for Mail.app that allows you to both tag your messages and create iCal todos right from within Mail. MailTags' abilities go far beyond simply adding a few keywords though; you can also set projects, categories and priorities for messages and use all this new metadata to create a far more robust organizational system than simply filing messages in a 'todo' folder. Once MailTags is installed, a whole new set of search and rule criteria (such as due date, project, keyword and more) are baked into Mail.app for running searches or creating Smart Mailboxes and rules. It's a pretty amazing plugin, and I urge you to check out Scott Morrison's Indev site for the full details on everything MailTags is capable of.

While MailTags 1.2.1 issues a host of bugfixes but no serious new features, I found out about it from this Hawk Wings post in which Tin Gaden states that MailTags 1.3 will have a new feature many users have been wishing for: IMAP tag syncing. So if you use Mail.app and MailTags on more than one Mac, you can soon keep your tags, as well as (I'm hoping) projects and priorities all in sync.

With all that said, go take MailTags for a spin. It's donationware, so show Scott some PayPal love for the hard work he's putting into this most excellent of plugins.