All right, let’s just get this out of the way. This pick isn’t a Mac application, it’s another web application.

However, it’s a web application that works flawlessly under Safari, but doesn’t work perfectly under IE. Happy now? I thought so!

The web site is stikkit.com. Basically, it’s an online junk drawer/snippet keeper, just like the thousands of similar programs that have been cropping up on the Mac for the last few years. (And yes, even with every word in there as a link to another organizer/outliner/snippet organizer, I didn’t nearly fit all of them.)

It’s a special edition of Nik’s Picks today with two whole picks! Why? Because, well, these two apps are great tastes that go great together!

Today, we’re going to talk about automating your Mac with Hazel and Proxi. I’m an avid AppleScripter, and I can’t say enough good things about making those tiny repetitive tasks automatic. I have about thirty or so little scripts (scriptlets, I call ‘em) which do one thing that I often want to do or just would rather have automated.

But these scripts are not necessarily easy to write, even with Automator to help out, and there’s a lot of common jobs you may want to get done which simply aren’t possible without some fairly henious AppleScript-fu.

That’s where our two picks come in…

At last count, I had a few hundred RSS feeds in my NewsGator web reader. These represent a few thousand headlines every day, and it’s rare that I’m able to read all of them.

As a result of this, I get very stressed when I start reading. I’ll click on my “news” group (which is the largest group, post-wise, generating 300+ new headlines every day), and cringe as I work through 5-10 pages of headlines. Even with my triage-then-read approach (I “clip” interesting headlines and then revist them when I have more time, part of an effort to keep my RSS influx managed), it takes ages to get through all this, and I can’t help but think it isn’t useful.

This set of Applescripts lets you use OmniOutliner Pro to keep a variety of lists on your computer and easily add items to them from the script running application of your choice. (Including LaunchBar or Quicksilver!) These lists can also be set up to automatically sync to your iPod as iPod notes in order to take ‘em with you on the road.

What kind of lists? Well, anything! A list of presents to buy, movies to rent, books to read, things to do before you die, groceries to pick up, names for your unborn child… The mind boggles!

A lot of people use text files for these kinds of lists. Call me an interface nerd, but I prefer something a little more… robust to maintain my lists. Specifically, I like OmniOutliner. So, I made this little program to give me the ease of use and flexibility of a text file within the wonderful interface of OOP.

Maybe it’s just because I have a 12” PowerBook, but I keep running out of Fkeys. And besides, it’s hard to remember that F10’s this kind of Exposé, and this Fkey is Dashboard… It’s a bother.

So, to keep my Fkeys free and keep ‘em a little more understandable, I remapped them so that one key (F11) controls Exposé, and another key (F11) handles Yahoo Widget Engine’s heads-up display as well as Dashboard.

How? Well, I just added modifier keys. So F11 shows the desktop (my most common Expose command), CMD+F11 shows all windows (my second most often used command) and CMD+OPT+F11 shows all the windows in the current application.