One of my favorite things on my Mac is TextExpander, a PreferencePane that's come up here before and which lets you use text shortcuts for pasting larger blocks of text and graphics wherever your cursor is without batting an eye. Well, SmileOnMyMac has recently released a 2.0 of TE, that adds several useful features, including one that really got my attention:

Now that Steve has announced there's an iPhone/iPod Touch SDK coming in February, what's at the top of your application wish list?

My music buying habits have slowed considerably since my college days, when I'd rush down to the music store every Tuesday and spend every penny I hadn’t guzzled through a beer bong the previous weekend, but I still managed to amass a rather prodigious CD collection. When I got a Mac and an iPod, this turned into a rather prodigious iTunes library, and quickly became a major thorn in my side.

Having suffered through a couple hard drive crashes, upgrades, and subsequent backing and re-backing up lately, I've really been feeling the weight of that 100+ GB media millstone around my neck. I felt so great when I ripped that last CD and put all those unsightly jewel cases into storage, thinking it would simplify my life. Instead, it just created bigger headaches.

I know, I know, there are a bazillion ways I can slice and dice my iTunes library, storing it on different drives, shunting the videos off to a server, pimping out my machines with terabyte drives, etc, but it begs the question: do I really need all that crap in my life?

[Disclosure: I'm a volunteer contributor on the development of the OmniFocus app]

You could be forgiven for being exhausted by my harangues about the importance of putting actions into their own special place outside of email, web sites, or other action-bearing media ("Email is just a series of tubes," Senator Ted Stevens, might one day say).

In fact, liberating actions from the email in which they arrived and putting them into a system that you trust is arguably the most important tenet of Inbox Zero. But it's also advice that leaves a lot of people scratching their heads: "OK, big shot, so where do I put this new task, and how exactly is it supposed to get there?"

Well, I'm happy to say that recent sneaky peaks of OmniFocus now have a pretty neat way to help with this problem. It's called "Clippings," and if you're familiar with the similar feature in OmniOutliner, you can imagine how it might work in the context of a task-tracking app and the complementary apps whose contents you want to direct to it.

Alongside the recently-added Perspectives, this is a feature that is making me very happy right now.

• Macworld: Feature: I will be smarter about how I handle e-mail - Tips on more secure email, handily graded by "Security" and "Hassle."
• Coding Horror: A Visual Explanation of SQL Joins - This makes so much more sense to me when explained with Venn diagrams. I want Venn diagrams for everything.
• TTB #25 - 09/16/07 at The Teen Tech Buzz - In which I am interviewed by my teen pals, Aaron and Austen (each of whom are younger than several coffee mugs that I regularly use)
• Macworld: Mac OS X Hints: Hand-code Smart Folders - "So this hint is intended to share some info about how to modify the 'code' in the saved search to get what you want." I wish I could hand-code something to make Spotlight's UI work better for me. (Did I say that out loud?)
• The Office Collar: Mind Your Own Business - Geekologie - Maybe I spend too much time in the internet's less savory neighborhoods, but this really has the feel of "pony play" [PNSFW] to me. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing. Offices can get pretty boring. Here, have a carrot, Ol' Paint.
• 41 Reasons Why Your Blog Probably Sucks - I'd make #42 "'Writing' naught but Digg-y list posts whose headline starts with a numeral and is followed by a plural noun." Heck, I'd probably go ahead and just add that one reason eight more times -- I mean, you know: so you can make it a nice, round, super-useful "50." Yes, that might help countless blogs not to "probably suck."