A poster on macOSXHints has described a rule designed to block the current plague of image-bearing spam.

It’s an improvement, perhaps, on the image spam catching rule I posted three months ago.

Having read the post and the suggestion in the comments, I’ve tweaked my rule for this a bit.

It now looks like this:

Most of the image spam I get contains a GIF file.

I like the idea of setting the colour to a particular colour so that I can see at a glance which messages the rule has moved. It gives a warm fuzzy feeling and it helps me to scan quickly for false positives.

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It’s probably very uncool to admit this in writing, but I am an undying fan of John Gruber’s Daring Fireball .

Every now and then, he pulls a post out of his hat that sets the standard to which all other Mac bloggers can only aspire. For analysis, for insight and for clarity, he is rarely matched.

This time, he nails the recent MacHeist promotion to the floor. Completely.

Last week (in a post I missed), he set out the economics underlying the promotion.

Deconstructing the publicity material from MacHeist, he noted:

If you didn’t know any better, judging only from MacHeist’s promotional copy and statements such as Ryu’s, you might think that most of the profits from the bundle were going to the developers of the bundled applications. Not so. Most of the proceeds are going to MacHeist, and the more bundles they sell, the more disproportionate MacHeist’s share of the profit will get.

Today, he totals up the final break-down of money going to charity (US$200,000), to MacHeist and to the developers. It’s not pretty reading:

– MacHeist’s percentage share of the total profit: 87.5

– Average percentage share of the total profit for each individual developer: 1.3

MacHeist clears US$463,500; the developers share a total pool of US$66,500, with most getting a flat fee of US$5-6,000.

To see this episode as “one of the biggest successes in the history of Mac shareware” is only part of the story. It was a great deal for users. It was a fantastic deal for MacHeist. But it shafted the developers.

A deal in which two parties have a great time and one party gets (willingly?) exploited isn’t a recipe for a Mac community that flourishes in the long term. It’s just a heist.

Or as John more elegantly puts it:

MacHeist’s organizers and defenders are arguing that no one forced the participating developers to agree to their terms, and that these developers are in fact happy with how the promotion is going, and that the users who’ve purchased the bundle are delighted with the price. But none of these things are in dispute.

What’s in dispute is whether the money is being distributed equitably. Just because someone is satisfied with a bad deal doesn’t mean it isn’t a bad deal.

Developers? Let them eat cake!

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Webmailer is a System Preferences pane that offers a quick and easy way to set a variety of webmail clients as the default handler for composing new messages from mailto: links.

Gmail users already have options to achieve this, but this new utility makes the same feature available for users of a range of web-based services including .Mac, SquirrelMail, AOL, Hotmail, Horde, Roundcube and Yahoo!

After installing the preference pane, all you have to do is select webmailer as the default client and then select one of the preset webmail services:

The readme contains detailed instruction on how to create customised links for other webmail services.

The developer created Webmailer to ease a terrible affliction:

Ever click on a mailto: link, only to scream in frustration as Apple Mail opens yet again? The curse of the webmail user is that there is no way to get around this problem. That is, until now.

Webmailer comes in a Tiger and a Panther version due to the different ways in which default emailers are handed by the two systems.

Get the right one for you from the developer’s web site .

UPDATE: Works with Joyent too! See the comments.

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The menubar notification utility, Mail Unread Menu has been updated.

Notification utilities comes in two basic flavours.

One style, the full-on “splash screen” approach, is best done by Mail.appetizer and GrowlMail .

Both of these interrupt your work to let you know about new mail:

The second style is more discreet. Mail Unread Menu and MailUnreadStatusBar sit in the menubar, counting away as new mail arrives but not disrupting your work.

Myself, I prefer the latter.

The latest update to Mail Unread Menu has a changed application icon and will now correctly set Mail.app to work with bundles if these settings are not already enabled.

It is also smarter about displaying the count in the Inbox, although as you can see in the screenshot it doesn’t tell you which inbox is which if you have it set to display the unread count in “All Mailboxes” in the preferences.

Take the new version and MailUnreadStatusBar for a test run and make up your own mind which one works best for you.

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Jon Crosby has released a new beta of his Actiontastic “Getting Things Done” app (see earlier Hawk Wings reviews here and here).

There are now lots of GTD apps for Mac. This one doesn’t have all the eye-candy of GTD apps like Midnight’s Inbox which you will either love or dislike. Actiontastic also comes with a slick Quicksilver plugin that makes filling your task bucket extra easy.

The updated version features a very useful new addition — it can now sync to a iPod, allowing musical GTDers to take their projects and to-dos with them.

It also has a new tool for processing its inbox.

Hit F3 and a dialog appears which helps you to move quickly through your unfiled tasks, assigning them to projects and contexts with drop-down menus:

Normally, new betas come with a list of bullet-pointed improvements which I try to rewrite into something more interesting. Developer Jon Crosby has taken a different approach:

To get away from the industry-standard bulleted feature list, let’s just walk through a typical flow from idea to action — GTD-style.

His write up of the new beta in action is very fine. I won’t repeat it here. You should read it, even if you use another app.

The public beta is available from his web site and expires on 15 January, by which time I imagine there will be another beta or, if all goes well, a final release.

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AOL has released a beta version of its new Mac client, known as “Cheshire”.

I don’t have an AOL account, so can’t really put it through its paces, but AOL makes some strong claims:

Cheshire is designed to make it easy for users to read and write email, surf the web, listen to AOL Radio and dial up to the Internet. Cheshire includes AOL’s Parental Controls and works seamlessly with Apple’s built-in applications like iChat and iPhoto.

The interface is nice and plain, one hopes by design, but perhaps it only reflects the app’s beta status.

The web browser works fine (even without an AOL account to log into):

It’s possible that an existing email client has influenced the look of the app’s email interface. There’s a hint of it in the mailbox view:

The layout of the new mail window makes the influence unmistakable:

It’s a Universal binary and comes bundled with AOL Radio for Macintosh (some kind of iTunes-esque app?) and AOL’s Pictures plugin for iPhoto. It only runs on Tiger.

It you have an AOL account and a taste for adventure, you can download it from AOL’s Greenhouse web site .

Or if you have an AOL account but like the look and feel of Mail.app and Apple’s other iApps, take a look at AOL’s Service Assistant.

[Via TUAW ]

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