Boris Anthony has posted a very nice screenshot of the new MailTags 1.2 (now in the final stages of beta-testing).

It shows off the new integration with iCal very well. Check it out.

Every day beta-testers come up with new and interesting ways to extend MailTags 1.2 even more, which sends Scott back to the coding dungeon and delays release a little.

But, boy, it will be worth the wait!mailtags, mail.app, apple mail, screenshot, beta, ical, integration, to dos

Jay Tamboli swims against the tide by returning to Mail.app from Gmail .

But he misses the “conversations” feature in Gmail.

Luckily, Mail.app does a very good job of producing threaded Gmail-like conversations. (Even better with MailTags).

In fact, Mail.app is almost too good at this for some people!conversation, gmail, mail.app, Apple Mail, threaded, mailtags

John Siracusa of Ars Technica has written a long and interesting post on Leopard and the future of Finder.

It’s worth reading.

He suggests:

Dissatisfaction with the Mac OS X Finder is endemic in the Mac user community, ranging from mild frustration to deep-seated rage.

Apple recently advertised for a software engineer to join the development team for Finder.

John, who is always interested in Finder, takes this as a sign of things to come and ponders what Finder’s keepers have in store for the future.

Along the way he touches on the history of Finder, muses on Leopard (10.5) and even Ocelot (10.6).

Recent switchers like me, who know of nothing before Panther, will find lots to learn. Old hands will no doubt find much to prompt their memories and provoke them.

[Thanks, Dan !]

A Hawk Wings reader emails to ask:

The mailboxes I have in Mail.app, they’re sorted alphabetically. But I’d like to order them so that personal mailboxes are at the top, and business mailboxes are at the bottom. Do you know if there’s a way to do this?

Good Question.

The Mailbox Drawer lists your Inbox and other “Special Folders” first, then your smart mailboxes and then your local folders.

You can re-order your smart mailboxes by dragging and dropping, but the local folders are always listed in descending alphabetical order.

This is not useful if your most used or most important folders start with letters further down the alphabet.

I know of two ways to change this:

You can add a number to the front of each mailbox that will force them to order in the way that suits your workflow best.

Or you can add spaces to the front of each one, which looks a bit nicer.

The number of spaces that you need will vary. In the image above the top mailbox has three spaces in front of it, the next one two and the last one one. Then the normal alphabetical ordering kicks in.

“Getting Things Done” (GTD) people may be glad to hear that the @ symbol also kicks folders to the top of the list.

These work for me, although I am always glad to hear of other ideas (UPDATE which you can find in the comments).mailbox sorting, workflow, alphabetical, GTD, productivity, Mailbox Drawer, smart mailboxes, tips, mail.app, apple mail

MailSteward, a powerful email archiving app, has been updated.

One hardly need mention that it is now recompiled as a universal binary (what isn’t these days?).

Other improvements in the new release include better display of non-English text, a better export mbox function that imports back into Mail.app correctly, a bugfix for the omission of CC: addresses and other minor bugfixes.

The developer Pubblog.com produces a useful chart that demonstrates the range of MailSteward‘s features (although listing FastMailBase for comparison would be even more helpful):

Click for a larger view (Don’t be shy. I’ve got bandwidth to burn these days)

MailSteward is shareware (USD 29.95) and is available from the developer?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s web site .

FastScripts, an ideal companion to the many Mail.app AppleScripts mentioned on Hawk Wings, has been updated.

FastScripts 2.2.8 is a universal binary. It also contains new options to reveal in Finder any folder selected from the menu and to turn “merged script trees” on and off.

FastScripts also comes in free “Lite” version with slightly limited functionality.

The full version costs USD 15. Both versions are available from Red Sweater .

I’ve been a happy user of StickyBrain , an information manager, as long as I have used a Mac.

When Bare Bones Software launched their new information manager, Yojimbo, last week I decided to give it a go.

I’ve been using it a lot and I like it.

If you are interested in information managers and organising yourself (“productivity”), you can read the full review after the jump.

(more…)