iFaces is a notification utility for Apple Mail that lets you know about new email by displaying the Address Book image of the sender on the Desktop.

The Preferences screen allows you to set a number of options including the transparency of the pane and a custom image for emails from people without pictures in your Address Book:

The actual notification pane sits on your Desktop and presents you with a column of faces from your Adddress Book, with new emails added to the bottom of the column as they arrive.

You can move it around to whatever position suits your layout best.

Clicking on an image brings up an information panel that displays the email address of the sender and the subject of the message. You can customise how long that panel remains visible in the app’s Preferences.

I am a great fan of Mail.app’s ability to display the images from Address Book in its Preview pane. Really. It is one of the main reasons why I switched from PCs to Macs and to Apple Mail in the first place. It personalises the time I spend emailing and reminds me that I am dealing with people, not with text. So I like this utility a lot, even though it uses up precious screen real estate.

On the notification “volume scale” I place it half-way between discreet utilities like MailUnreadStatusBar and louder options like MailAppetizer, which splashes the lot, text of the message and all, in front of you.

There are two versions of the app available on the developer’s web site, a stable one and the beta version. I am running the beta one for this test drive without any noticeable problem.

The app is donationware and is available from the developer’s web site.

[Thanks, Joe!]

Tags: Address Book, Apple Mail, mail.app, notification

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This entry was posted on Saturday, 5th November, 2005 at 9:46 am and is filed under Apple Mail, Apple Mail Plug-ins. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.