OneThingToday looks like a great task manager to help you focus on what's important today. Once you've used the calendar view to input your tasks, switch to the "Today" view to get a single box (optionally transparent) which floats on top of your workspace, constantly reminding you of what you're working on.

In many ways, this is a more organised version of using stickies to help you focus, letting you plan ahead.

OneThingToday is designed to make managing your tasks as simple as possible, without micromanaging your time.

OneThingToday is designed for people who have multiple simultaneous projects, and can enhance their productivity by focusing on one project each day.

OneThingToday is also designed for people who only have time to tackle one task each day, and who find themselves overwhelmed by all their pending tasks in their limited time.

Website: OneThingToday

- Ricky Buchanan

iWork is Apple's office suite - it fills more or less the same role as Microsoft Office can but it's made by Apple and is integrated with OS X much better. iWork '09 was announced earlier this month at MacWorld and is already available for purchase and trial. The good news is that for the first time iWork '09 is almost fully accessible to VoiceOver Users. It also sports the full 18 "standard" OS X language localisations for the first time, which is great for non-English language users.

iWork is a suite of three applications:

• Pages, a word processor
• Numbers, a spreadsheet
• Keynote, a presentation program (like Powerpoint)

For existing iWork users there are bunches of new features in all three applications, the relevant ones we'll go into in future articles. There's also integration with the beta version of iWork.com to let you share and swap work with others.

You can also download a 30-day trial of iWork from Apple's website. A license costs US$79, although there's currently a cheaper price for a bundle consisting of iWork '09, iLife '09 and Leopard. Check the Apple store for details.

Website: iWork '09

- Ricky Buchanan

The Finder, iTunes, and iPhoto all now let you browse through your materially visually if you wish, instead of looking at lines of text. The address book program Espy is a third party utility we reviewed that does the same for address book entries, and now we have Webbla which does the same for web page bookmarks:

If you like to handle your music and photos with iTunes and iPhoto, Webbla is the right application to handle your bookmarks.

Webbla is an application for Mac OS X Leopard that helps you in organizing your bookmarks visually. It also offers you an easy way to keep track of website updates.

Instead of remembering your bookmarks by title, Webbla gives you a new way to remember them visually. Personalizing your bookmarks with tags or keeping them in different categories will help you to come back to them easily.

As well as OS X's standard Safari browser, Webbla will import bookmarks from Firefox, OmniWeb, Camino, Opera, and other browsers. Webbla also integrates with OS X's Spotlight and Quick Look functions.

Website: Webbla

- Ricky Buchanan

MacBreakZ is an ergonomic assistant which prompts the computer user to take breaks at regular times, depending on how heavily you use the computer. During the breaks, it offers ergonomic tips and also shows appropriate stretching and relaxation exercises.

MacBreakZ comes with a great setup assistant which helps you customise the program for your style of computer use and your particular worries - fatigue, wrist strain, and so on. The latest version offers extra customisation for those using a tablet and stylus type of input device such as the Wacom Bamboo tablet discussed previously:

Tablet input devices behave very differently from mouse or trackball devices, because they produce a constant stream of micro-cursor movements when the stylus is brought close to tablet. A mouse-based algorithm will interpret this as constant movement and thus over-estimate the amount of user activity. The new version contains specific tablet-related questions in the setup assistant that help produce an optimized setup.

I have previously emailed with the author of MacBreakZ about some disability specific concerns and I found he was very approachable and interested in my feedback. I recommend that users with any concerns about the program contact him!

Website: MacBreakZ

- Ricky Buchanan

[amazondisclaim]

We've already seen that you can use OS X's built in text-to-speech just by selecting a key combination to use with it, so why pay money for Narrator? There is one feature that Narrator has that no other text-to-speech software has - easy in-line voice switching. You set a marker and it changes to the selected voice at that point while reading.

Use Narrator to read out a play or story with different voices for each of the parts. It uses speech synthesis to read out marked passages using specified voice attributes. You can choose different voices, rates, pitches, inflections, and volumes for each character in the story. The words are highlighted on-screen, and there are also a couple of silent read-along options for stage directions, or for you to read out your own parts.

Starting with version 2, you can have multiple chapters in each document to help organize the story, use a word replacement dictionary to fine-tune the pronunciation, and can export the story as an AAC sound file or export it to iTunes, so you can listen on an iPod or iPhone, just like your own audiobook! Plus many other appearance and functionality improvements.

In my testing I found that Narrator has some trouble with Infovox iVox voices - the highlighting of words as they are spoken breaks down if it reaches a section set to use an iVox voice and doesn't always get back in synchronisation afterwards, and the "pitch" and "inflection" sliders slide around but don't do anything. To my knowledge, none of the Infovox iVox voices can have their pitch or inflection altered, so the sliders shouldn't be available for these voices. These problems didn't happen with the Apple or Cepstral voices that I tried, but the Cepstral voices are generally of a lower quality than the Infovox iVox voices so I found it disappointing that these didn't work. Perhaps this will be fixed in a future version.

- Ricky Buchanan