Adobe is going to official unveil CS4 on Sept. 23. Specific details - including things such as which products exactly will be included in CS4 and when exactly it will be released - are still not available, and are in fact exactly what will be announced on the 23rd.

If you live in the San Francisco Bay area, you can attend a special joint meeting of the bay area Adobe user groups on Sept. 30 to get your fill of CS4 goodness. Stay tuned here for more details on that.

My user group in the Sacramento area will also be holding a CS4 announcement event the following day - Oct. 1. Again, check back here or take a look at our website for details in the coming weeks.

If you aren't in either of those areas, then I'd urge you to find a local user group. Most user groups around the world will be holding events in the week or so following the 23rd, so don't miss out!

I've never been a fan of the Windows QuickLaunch bar. (For those that don't know, it's that area of the Taskbar just to the right of the Start Menu where you can put shortcuts to the programs you use frequently.) Don't get me wrong - I understand its purpose, and for a lot of people I can see how it would be useful. But my problem is that I'm a tiny bit obsessed with using my keyboard for, well, anything I can. In fact, my #1 least favorite "feature" of Windows Vista is the quick search thingy in the Start menu, because it took away the ability to effectively launch programs with the keyboard. In XP, you could hit the Windows key to bring up the Start menu, and then just hit the first letter of a program. So long as no other programs on the menu started with the same letter, it would just launch. For example, I have Firefox set as my default browser, so it shows up on the menu as "Internet". In XP, I could simply hit the Windows key, then "i", and Firefox would launch. But that stupid quick search on the Start menu got rid of that capability.

So anyway ... where was I? Oh, yeah - the QuickLaunch bar. As I was saying, I used to pretty much avoid using it because, until today, I thought that they only way to launch something from it was with the mouse. But then I read about a cool keyboard shortcut. It turns out that in Vista (and as far as I know, this is a Vista-only thing), you can simply press and hold the Windows key, and the press 1 to launch whatever program is first (the furthest to the left) in the Quicklaunch bar. Windows-2 launches the second program, and so forth.

Obviously, this is limited to only ten items (Windows-0 launches the tenth), but it's still a great shortcut. I've gone in and rearranged the QuickLaunch bar so that the ten programs I use the most will now be much easier to access.

While at TODCon early last month, one of the attendees noticed that I was taking notes during a session with Notepad, and recommended instead that I check out Evernote. So I gave it a shot ... and I can say that I'm honestly not sure if I've ever encountered a piece of software with which I so instantly fell in love.

Evernote takes the fairly simple idea of providing an application for note taking and then puts it on steriods. It's ridiculously easy to use: you click in the "New Note" section and start typing. But here are just a few of the things I love about it:

• All of the notes are in one place - no more desktop cluttered with .txt documents
• Tagging - you can tag each note you add so that you can quickly filter the list. And unlike a lot of applications that use some sort of crazy-complicated system for tagging, Evernote makes it as simple as can be: simply right-click and choose Tag if you need to create a new tag, or drag an existing tag from the menu on the left.
• Web clipper: When you install Evernote, it will install a button in your browser that allows you to "clip" entries from web pages and throw them into your notes. Do you have some info in an email in your GMail account that you keep having to log in to get? No more worries: clip it into Evernote and it'll be right there at your fingertips.
• Full-text search of your notes.
• Text and images. You can add both. 'Nuff said.
• OCR. Believe it or not, but this thing will automagically scan any images you place in notes so you can actually search for words on the images. Wow.

So there are the main features, but wait - I still haven't mentioned the one bit about this that truly makes it worth the money: auto-synchronization with your online account. When you sign up with Evernote, you not only get the desktop application, but you also get an account on their web site. Everytime you add a note, it is automatically uploaded to the site, so you actually have access to your notes both from anywhere. I just found out firsthand how handy this was last week. I was teaching PHP, and wanted to tweak the set-up to include an SMTP server so that we can send email in class. I created a text file explaining the SMTP setup and put it on the image so that I would remember how it's configured. However, there are two separate PHP setups for different computers. So all I needed to do was log on to the site, copy and paste the text document into my Evernote account, and presto - I have a copy of it right here on my laptop, as well as a copy online so when I get on that other image, I'll be able to get the text with no problems.

I've started using Evernote for everything now. Quotes I don't want to forget. Keyboard shortcuts. Bug reports I need to file. Book ideas. Frequent flier numbers. When I travel, I can throw all of my flight/hotel/car info in a note so that I can get to it, whether I'm at my computer or not.

Oh, I mentioned above about how the online synchronization made it worth the money. Well, here's another bit of Evernote awesomeness: it doesn't actually cost anything. That's right, you get all of this power and usefulness for nothing. (There is a premium account that lets you upload a lot more per month, but it's only $5.)

Last week or so, Evernote moved from being a semi-private beta that required invites to a full public beta. So head on over to Evernote's web site, sign up for an account, and install the program today.

Oh, and a great big huge thanks to Deborah for showing me Evernote in the first place.