I recently bought a new Mac, and I decided not to migrate years of cruft over to a pristine Snow Leopard install. I also decided to shed years of stale workflow and adopt a new way of doing things. Enter the power tools: software that augments the power and performance of OS X to do things faster and smarter. I'll examine some general system enhancements and look at a couple of powerful Mac/iPhone app combos that really work well together.

Step one was finding a replacement for my beloved QuickSilver. I had abandoned QS well over a year ago due to performance issues on most of my Macs, but after a nagging pain in my wrist surfaced, I realized I had to find more keyboard shortcuts. Enter LaunchBar, which fills in for 90% of what QuickSilver used to do for me. LaunchBar is one Ctrl-Space (configurable, of course) away from Spotlight searching, Google searching, application launching, math calculations and much, much more. LaunchBar is $25 around $35 per seat, and worth taking 15 minutes to learn the basics. Go ahead, hate me for giving up QS, but try LaunchBar before you hurl the insults.

Next I needed a better way to juggle 3 Gmail accounts. But I also needed a way to track the metric ton of inbox items that flow through those email conduits. The solution was the combination of MailPlane and Things. I had really dedicated my heart to Toodledo, but there's one trick I couldn't replicate on any setup (The Hit List included): when I get an email in MailPlane, I can select some text and press Shift-Ctrl-Opt-Cmd-0 and the Things HUD pops up and autofills the notes section with a link to the email itself. It is awesome. Not perfect, mind you, but a huge thing for me.

Read on for more power tools and tips.

It hasn't even been two weeks since Typinator went 2.0, and now it's on a 35%-off sale at MacZOT for $12.99 (regular price: $19.99). This handy typing and snippet manager is a great tool for helping you work faster with text, and a deal this good is both rare and virtually impossible to beat. If you're looking to try before you buy, head over to ergonis software's Typinator product page to snag a demo, but do it quick: MacZOT's sales are one-day-only affairs. When it's gone, it's gone.

Typing tools that increase your efficiency are all the rage for anyone who has to type more than their name and credit card number on a daily basis, and ergonis just upped the ante with the release of Typinator 2.0. Competing directly with similar tools like TextExpander and TypeIt4Me, this new version of Typinator brings a virtual boatload of new features to the table, including:

• Sets allow convenient organization of abbreviations
• Import and export of abbreviation sets
• Comes with auto-correction sets for English, German and French
• Import from Textpander, TextExpander and TypeIt4Me
• Application-specific set assignment
• Typinator can be disabled in individual applications
• Clipboard insertion within expansions
• Streamlined user interface for improved conformance to Apple's guidelines
• The abbreviation table can be sorted by abbreviation, expansion, options, and conflict status
• Expansion of abbreviations is much faster now, even while typing extremely fast and with thousands of defined abbreviations and auto-corrections
• Significantly reduced memory requirements, especially with large expansions
• and much, much more

As a paid user of TextExpander, this new release of Typinator looks quite tasty indeed. I'm actually just glad the typing tool space is getting more competitive, as I can't write or work on the web without one anymore. A demo is of course available, while a single licenses sells for about $26 (EUR 19.99).