It's crunch time and that big project has to get done. Next thing you know, you're on your favorite website, tinkering with Garageband or tweeting up a storm. We've all been there, but Roobasoft's Concentrate for the Mac is here to help!

Concentrate is designed to help you "work and study more productively by eliminating distractions." The simple application offers a number of options to help you get down to business. With it you can:

• Quit applications that distract you such as games or web browsers.
• Run applications, and only the ones you need for your task.
• Open websites you need to use for work.
• Block websites that you know will distract you (ahem, Facebook)

In addition to helping keep you on task by eliminating distractions, Concentrate takes it a step further to help keep you on the right track.

• Record spoken messages that help to keep you going.
• Play sounds to let you know how far you've gone.
• Alter your iChat/Skype status to keep friends from bugging you.

The application supports Growl notifications and easily allows you to incorporate scripts to control almost anything. Additionally, you can customize different setups for different tasks. For example, I can set up a "Study" task that will block social networking sites and keep me on task with spoken messages while having another task called "Design" that keeps me working within applications like Photoshop or Dreamweaver.

Concentrate sports an elegant interface and an intuitive system to set times and tasks. The developer promises that he has "big plans [for] a few updates to make it even better".

Roobasoft offers a 60-hour free trial and the full applications sells for $29 with a money-back guarantee if you're not happy.

Mat posted a while back about the magic of GeekTool -- it's an app that allows you to run Unix scripts and show logs in a good-looking pane right there on your desktop. Mac OS X Tips recently did a post about how to put your iCal events up there using a script called iCalBuddy, but industrious reader Ben G. has taken this even a step further, and sent along a link to a similar script called twitterbuddy, which -- as you may have guessed -- will send your latest tweets to GeekTool.

As a result, he's got the desktop you see above -- both tweets and iCal events sitting in a transparent pane on top of his desktop background. It will require a little Terminal tripping, but it's pretty easy to do. Just install and set up GeekTool the way you like it, and then make sure the buddy scripts are installed. From there, you can create a New Entry in GeekTool, and run whatever commands you want. It's incredibly flexible, too, because it'll put any Terminal commands you can throw at it right there on your desktop. If you're looking to fill in some of that unused Desktop space, give it a look.

In the last AppleScript post, I mentioned some of the useful ways to create Folder Actions, and showed you how to use one of the built-in scripts to perform a pretty useful action. In this AppleScript post, we'll dive into the built-in scripts in more detail, and I will tell you how each of them works.

Once you create a new folder action (as we did in the last tutorial), you will have a pop-up dialog asking if you would like to attach an Apple-created script. There should be around 13 preinstalled on your Mac. Now let's go through each of them, and see what they will do when attached:

Add-new item alert.scpt - This included script, which we covered in the last post, allows you to get a pop-up dialog upon dropping files in the attached folder. So, if you were to drop file x into the folder, a dialog would display a message that file x was just dropped in there. This script is great for networked folders, as you get a dialog when someone drops something in there.

Close-close sub-folders.scpt - This script will, when a file is dropped in the attached folder, close all opened Finder windows associated with that folder and subfolders. So, if you have that folder opened, or another subfolder within that folder, when you drop a file into it the script will close those opened Finder windows. You can use this script to tidy up your screen.

Convert-PostScript to PDF.scpt - If you have a PostScript file type (i.e. eps or ps files), then you can enable this folder action. When you drop a PostScript file on it there will be two folders created, one called "Original" and the other called "PDF." This folder action will take those PS files and turn them into PDFs for your instant viewing pleasure. You can use it in your workflow to easily convert from PS to PDF.

Read on to learn about even more built-in folder action scripts.

I'm not the world's most patriotic Englishman, and I'm also not keen on allowing icons to fill up my Mac's menu bar unless strictly necessary.

That's why I don't let the Input Menu flag hog space up there; one of the first things I do on a fresh Mac system is remove it (by unchecking the "Show input menu in menu bar" box in the Input Menu tab of the International preferences pane).

That said, there are occasions when I wish I had quick access to the Character Palette - which can normally only be reached via the Input Menu. Grrr.

Which is why I dug around online to find a script that would call up the Character Palette for me, and saved it as an application, and Bob's your uncle. Now I can get to the Character Palette, via Spotlight, by typing "Command+Space CHAR return". Excellent.

You can get the script from this page on Mac OS X Hints. Click the "Get this script" thingy and it will open in Script Editor. Click Compile, then Run, just to check it does what you want - then Save As... an app, or a script if you prefer.

Saul Rosenbaum sent us the tip on this one, and he points out that we're a little "Quicksilver centric" around here at TUAW. He's right, we do love Quicksilver, but it's not the only launcher on the block. Launchbar is another good one (and actually, I've been playing with Sapiens a lot lately, so look for a post on that one soon, too).

If replacing Finder with Quicksilver isn't your thing, maybe running GTD apps with Launchbar is more up your alley. Saul has a short writeup on how to get Launchbar running a trigger (he uses "TD") that you can throw short notes into to work with the GTD system. It's a simple process-- since Launchbar already supports shell scripts, you can create a script, hook Lauchbar up to it, and pretty soon you're taking down tasks and notes at a moment's notice.

If you are a text, audio and video chatter, chances are you have some combination of iChat, Skype, Adium and a Twitter client running throughout the day. It's also possible that you're a Quicksilver junkie, which means you might appreciate Brett Terpstra's new Quicksilver script that will let you update your status across all these apps and services from the comforts of your Quicksilver window.

To get set up, download the MoodSwing script and then follow Brett's instructions at this page to install the script in the proper location for Quicksilver. There's a simple system for entering the proper status message so that it fits into all the apps you have running, but bear in mind that Brett isn't taking bug reports or offering support; this was more of a fun project that he tossed out there for the masses, so if you know some AppleScript and can improve upon what Brett has already designed, have at it.

Rod Schmidt, developer of PackRat, has issued a call for AppleScripters who are interested in automating his rocking Backpack client. PackRat, to my knowledge, doesn't have AppleScript support yet, but that does seem to be at the top of the request list and would mark another powerful feature PackRat has over Backpack's own web UI: OS integration. I would love to be able to, for example, right-click some selected text in a Cocoa app and click "Send to PackRat," which would then sync up to Backpack all without me ever having to touch an actual webpage.

If you have some AppleScripting skills and are interesting in making PackRat even cooler, be sure to drop Rod a line by heading over to his announcement post or contacting him from his company's site, infiniteNIL.

On the Yojimbo mailing list, Steve Kalkwarf has shared an AppleScript he built that can send Yojimbo items tagged 'ipod' to the notes section of (surprise!) an iPod. Steve gave his permission to redistribute the script so we're hosting it here at TUAW to help keep the load off his servers. It's actually a pretty smart little script: it can break up long Yojimbo items into sequential notes, and it offers a dialog to wipe out previous Yojimbo notes from the iPod in case things get messy.

Grateful users on the list have already asked if there's any way to make this script run automatically once an iPod is mounted. While there is surely some fancy schmancy command one can enter into Terminal to do this (anyone care to share?), I'm sure utilities like Life2Go, an app that syncs all sorts of info to an iPod and can run anything you want when one is connected, can do the trick for those of us who aren't wearing the badge of the code ninja.

I seem to be going gaga over web services lately. After dropping my .Mac personal blog for Vox, Twitter is another new-ish service that has also weaseled its way into my daily activities (they launched this past summer). While there are a few explanations for what Twitter really is and does, I like to think of it as a 'status message for your life.' At Twitter's site you can enter a few words or a sentence or two about what you're up to (much like the status message in your chat app), and receive updates when your friends change their status. But it doesn't have to stay at the site. You can embed your Twitter updates in your blog and use them as your Adium status. Twitter lets you receive updates on your phone or even over IM, and you can use both of those to send your own updates back to Twitter. It might sound silly before you actually try it out, but it can easily become addicting if you let yourself surrender to the fun and sign up.

If you're getting hooked like me, some users have started a Twitter Fan Wiki to round up all the fun tools that are coming out of Twitter's quickly growing community. While there is stuff here for everything from Windows Smartphones to WordPress widgets and even Ruby scripts, there are some great Mac-centric tools that I really like. The first is the Adium plugin I already mentioned, which lets you embed your Twitter message as your available/away status in Adium. If you want to be able to use Twitter for both an away and an available message, be sure to give them different names, like 'Twitter Away / Twitter Available.' The next two are Dashboard widgets, of course. Twitgit allows you to see a list of your friends' status and enter your own, while Twidget is a straight-up box that simply lets you enter a status. Finally, there's Celly, which seems to do nothing more than pull down random Twitter status messages from across the public channel.

With these tools in your belt, you should be able to spend a lot less time when letting people know what you're spending your time on. Isn't redundant technology grand?

iTunes 7 ushered in some great new video metadata, but editing this information, especially when in batches, can sometimes be a pain. For example: iTunes can differentiate between "movies" and "tv shows," (just check your Sources list on the left) but trying to select 14 episodes of an Aqua Teen Hunger Force season and pressing cmd-i doesn't yield any way to make a broad-sweeping change to "tv show."

If you're in the same boat as me (and I sure hope you are, or this is a useless post), a script from the venerable Doug (you know, AppleScripts for iTunes Doug?) called Set Video Kind of Selected can bring some automation to this process. In fact, as you can see, in allows you to edit not only the Video Kind, but the Show Name, Season Number and the starting episode number of the batch you've selected. This is a killer script for those of you who have some major iTunes video library cleanup work to do.

As usual, this script is provided free, but Doug solicits donations for all the rocking work he does with his now over 400-strong library of iTunes AppleScript.

We reported a method for tagging iTunes tracks and creating on-the-fly playlists way back in January. However, it involved using Quicksilver and a couple of home-grown scripts, but we can dig it if some of y'all aren't down with a tool as broad-reaching as Quicksilver. Fortunately for the rest of you, a web designer and developer named Steven Campbell has written up a basic method for tagging iTunes tracks and creating playlists based on those tags. It more or less involves revealing the comments column in the song list for easy access, and using a simple system of comma-separated words to get your iTunes tagging on. This can work wonders for Smart Playlists, and Steven offers a few examples in his post.

For those still interested in the aforementioned Quicksilver scripts and tools, the author has issued a bit of an upgrade and a new script since we first reported them. First of all, the scripts now live at their own domain name, TuneTag.com. The scripts still allow you to tag the song you're listening to on the fly and create on-the-fly playlists from those tags, but the author also added a new script that lets you select any number of tracks in iTunes and tag them all in one fell swoop. As a Quicksilver fan I'm already in love with the power of these scripts, but either method should work well for bringing the web 2.0 tagging craze to iTunes.

I know Adium can insert links from some browsers by itself, but I just found a script at the Adium Xtras site which offers much more fine-grained control over inserting a link from any browser, with the page name's descriptive title linked nice and clean, instead of the long ugly URL you get from copy/pasting. As you can see, specific commands are included for all the major browsers (and even some not-so-major ones), as well as a catch-all Default Browser command. The ones I can test seem to work pretty well, though I'll admit I don't have any copies of iCab or Netscape lying around. Enjoy.

CamiScript, the script menu plugin for Camino, has been updated to version 4.0. This isn't quite a landmark release that enables Camino to fly around your room or tell you the future (besides, some day, the latter will be Google's job), but this new version does bring one big handy new feature: the ability to disable/enable the Extras menu.

CamiScript is free and can be had from nadamac; oddly, PimpMyCamino hasn't updated yet.

If you're living in a Boot Camp world and have a need for changing your startup disk from time to time, enterprising TUAW reader David B. has written a couple of AppleScript apps with your name on them. Boot (Camp) Sargent beta 0.1 is actually two scripts: the first to set your startup disk to Windows (*shudder*), while the other resets to Mac OS X. In this fast-paced, multiple OS world we live in, little apps that save a few clicks can make all the difference.

Boot (Camp) Sargent is available at the first Google Pages site that I've ever seen used to promote or offer anything like this. Extra points for the tag line, "because holding down the Option key during startup is too hard", since I've actually heard people say that on the job in the past.

It's nice to see more developers making use of the Apple Remote that comes with so many Macs these days, and Sofa Remote is a great example. This handy app from CASE Apps (whose tagline is 'Applications that should have been in the box' - nice) uses the power of AppleScript to allow you to control your Mac with your Apple Remote, providing a Front Row-esque file browsers as well as an application switcher. However, since this is all just AppleScript, Sofa Remote is very user-extensible, and CASE Apps has provided a script download page for users to exchange their scripts, as well as an RSS feed for the ultimate in notification convenience.

A demo of Sofa Remote is available that works for 30 minutes each time you start it up, while a 'lifetime license' costs $9.99 USD.