I must admit that everything I know about Mac has either been directly learned or inspired by Macpowerusers (MPU), a podcast I started listening to about 3 years ago. Recently, MPU had their Episode 100 where they talked, among other things, about academic workflows including Papers. Jeff Taekman (who has a great academic workflow blog) explained how he collects reference materials in Papers.
MPU 100 guests also mentioned other applications they used for academic work such as DevonThink. I had DevonThink installed long ago but I never got around to using it a lot because it was a bit too slow and complex. Now, that I have a faster Mac and my reference files are organized much better (thanks to Papers!) I am going to give DevonThink a second try, one bit at a time. I have also downloaded trials of Tinderbox and Skim – will see where these two will take me.
Finally, MPU has given a link to David’s amazingly effective trick for changing Apple Mail’s Send-From address by a keyboard shortcut. That’s the kind of automation I love! I am sure it will save me a lot of time and attention.
Thank you, Katie Floyd and David Sparks!
Academic workflows on a Mac 
You should perhaps check out MailMate (www.freron.com) which has excellent keyboard shortcuts for changing all the headers (not just From, but also signatures) but more importantly maintains an association between sending addresses and destinations. This last allows it to automatically set the correct send from address. When I write to my wife, it uses my personal address. When I write to a colleague, it uses my academic address.
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Thanks for the tip! Looks great (and also supports MarkDown!) which I really miss in Mail because I often compose longer messages in Byword. Downloaded – checking.
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Hi Aleh! I’m a Sente 6 user and am in the process of switching to Papers 2. But exporting and importing does not bring in all the PDF:s and certainly not the notes. Any tips on how to go about it? I have something like 850 references with annotated PDF:s in Sente, and I haven’t got the time to do it manually…
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