The macosxhints Rating:

[Score: 9 out of 10]

• Developer: Cold Pizza Software / Product Page
• Price: $8.00 [15 document demo]

One thing that's easier to do on Windows than on the Mac is to create a new document at a given location. For instance, I have a folder for each week's weblog entries on macworld.com. To create a new entry, I would have to activate my text editor, type some content, then do a File: Save, and navigate to the proper weblogs folder to save the new file. On Windows, there's a New Document Here (or something close to that) option available in the contextual menu. There are workarounds available, such as using touch in the Terminal, or creating an Finder plug-in using Automator's New Text File action, but neither are really ideal.

While digging through the Mac Gems archives, I stumbled across Document Palette, which Dan reviewed back in March. This handy background app lets you create a new document in the current Finder folder with the touch of a hot key (Control-Command-Option-N). As shipped, Document Palette can create new plain text, rich text, and HTML documents.

But the real power in Document Palette comes from the fact that it's easily extensible with your own templates. Open the program that you'd like to use for your new document, enter whatever text you'd like, save the document somewhere, and then add it to Document Palette's preferences. This lets you set up a basic templating system, wherein you can create different templates that can be created with the touch of a hot key. For instance, I set up a jEdit template for my Macworld blog entries, and another for posts to my personal site. Both templates are jEdit documents, but have compeltely different starting text. So now, if I want a new blog entry, I hit the Document Palette shorcut, then 'b,' which is the shortcut key I assigned for blog entries. If I hit 'g' instead, I get a new document for my personal site.

This handy little utility, though I just discovered it this weekend, has already saved me quite a bit of Finder navigation time (as well as copy-and-paste time for the setup info I include in each blog entry). As a result, my shareware payment is on its way today...