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!gruber, developers, macheist, software, apple, not apple mail, seeing the whole picture

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.mail.app, apple mail, plugins, system preference, webmail, gmail, dotmac, .mac, yahoo, horde, squirrelmail, hotmail, email, mailto:

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.mail.app, apple mail, plugins, notification, menubar, pop-up, splash

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.GTD, getting things done, productivity, not apple mail, workflow, task management, quicksilver, ipod, syncing

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 ]aol, email, mail.app, apple mail, web browser, mac client

Even though there are a truckload of backup solutions for Apple Mail, ranging from Apple’s own Backup software to dedicated apps like Email Backup and many more, the statistics are damning.

During the keynote at WWDC this year, we learnt that only 25% of Mac users perform backups and only 4% of them do it in a fail-safe automated way.

So another option is always welcome.

Doug Blatti has written an applescript that will backup your Mail folder and Address Book quickly, neatly and conveniently.

All you have to do is launch it. It will prompt you to close Mail and Address Book if they are open and go about its business:

It took about 9 minutes to create a zipped up backup of my Mail and Address Book. The zip file ends up at 620.5MB, just right for burning off onto a CD-Rom with some room to spare. (See further, “How the delete key is your best friend”).

That’s great. There’s only one problem. You.

Remember Apple’s high hopes that Time Machine in Leopard will drastically increase the number of people who do backups? As I’ve suggested before, they are kidding themselves:

Will it work? I don’t think so. The current ability to automate backups with Backup 3.0 and the plethora of third-party automated backup options haven’t brought large numbers of users to the party. This won’t either. It’s not the technical ability that’s missing; it’s the personal habit.

The best solution is to automate it with iCal, so that you are set free to develop more interesting and enjoyable personal habits.

It’s easy. Create an all-day event in iCal and under the alarm option, set it to “Open file”. Navigate to wherever you saved MailBackup.app and select it.

Set it to run at a time when you don’t usually use Mail.

I’m setting it to 9 am because I am having great success with the theory that you shouldn’t open your email until an hour or two after you start work (see more on this in “Emailing to live, not living to email”).

That’s the time to stay in control of your own agenda and actually get some stuff done.

Burn the backup file to a CD-Rom and store it somewhere safe. (Did you hear the one about the guy who kept his backup CD in his laptop case? One day his bag was stolen and…)

Now you are free to enjoy your bad habits worry-free. Your emails and contact details are safe.

NB: This script does not backup your Apple Mail preferences file, com.apple.mail.plist, which lives in your ~/Library/Preferences folder. Is it important? Ask Tim Bray .

You can find some more backup apps in the Hawk Wings Plug-in and Add-on List and in the Related posts section below.mail.app, apple mail, backup, ical, applescript, data security, automation, address book

Derek Jones has written a long and most excellent post on how to whip your Mail.app into shape as a lean, mean machine for getting jobs done with efficiency and speed.

His Mail.app was failing the pinch test. One day he suddenly noticed that he had 9,000 emails in his inbox and he didn’t really know why.

He did know how he wanted it to be though:

I desperately needed to finally write some Rules, use some Smart Mailboxes, or something. I wanted my inbox to be empty when I had read and either filed or deleted the Offending Intrusion. I wanted to assign importance or tag an email in some way that would help me organize where I spent my attention instead of feeling like I needed to act immediately on an email as soon as I read it. While I’m at it, why not finally switch to IMAP so I can sync my email between my G5 and Macbook? Every other aspect of my computing is built around synchronicity, why is my email left out?

He walks readers through his new fitness regime: how to archive old emails in an organised way, how to switch to IMAP so that all your email is available and synchronised between multiple Macs, and how to develop a “tag-and-go” system for email using Mail Act-on and MailTags (why not can compare his system to the way I do it, then work from them both to make a system that matches your needs?).

I love posts like this because they offer the opportunity to measure your own system against something more objective, a system that works for someone else. You always learn something new. It’s long, but it’s worth it, and it will put some muscle into your Mail.app.

[Thanks, Leslie]mail.app, apple mail, GTD, getting things done, plugins, productivity, tips, inbox zero