A poster on macOSXHints has posted an applescript for Quicksilver which provides a quick list of words, characters and lines in the form of a Growl alert.

After copying the text of the script to Script Editor and saving it off in your ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Actions folder, all you need to do is select some text, activate a “Command window with Selection” and then type “word” (or whatever matches the name you gave to the script when saving),:

The Growl alert is quick and simple:

Of course, this is not the only way to get a word count in Quicksilver.

Spell Catcher X’s statistics service is available within Quicksilver and provides even more information, including how much fog is in your prose:

Spell Catcher X is shareware (USD 39.95) but good enough to be in my Top Ten Things every Mail.app user should have. not apple mail, word count, characters, words, applescript, quicksilver, productivity, tips, growl

One reason for the latest pause on Hawk Wings is the new Zimbra test server at work.

Finally, work’s steam-powered SquirrelMail web interface is set for replacement with Zimbra, ushering in a Brave New World of Blazing Collaborative Productivity.

As a “fairly knowledgeable amateur” the IT Department has given me the job of trying to break it by doing stupid things. I haven’t succeeded yet.

Webmailer offers a way to remove one of the annoyances in using a web-based email service. It lets you set Zimbra (or Joyent’s webmail or Yahoo! or Roundcube or whatever) as the default email client, so that clicking on an email address opens a new message in the web-based interface of your choice.

After installing it, you need to add Zimbra to its list of options.

The string that works for me is:

https://SERVER/zimbra/mail?view=compose&to=[to]

Click a mailto: link and, as if my magic, Zimbra makes you a new message:

Nice.

Also nice are Zimbra’s new filing and tagging keyboard shortcuts, which make leaving Mail.app (temporarily) less of a wrench. By allocating numbers to the most-used tags and folders, it is possible to get close to the Nirvana that only a Mail.app GTD nut truly knows. mail.app, apple mail, GTD, Zimbra, webmail, default email client, productivity

Here’s is a simple tip that was new to me.

There are two ways to add a vCard with your contact information to a Mail.app signature.

An old post on macOSXHints details how to add it as a hyperlink to a remotely-stored vCard file, so that recipients can download it into their Address Books easily.

The end result is nice and clean and saves bandwidth:

If you don’t give two figs about bandwidth, you can simply export your card from Address Book.

Then drag it onto a signature in the Signature pane of Mail’s preferences, and your vCard goes out with every signed email:

Of course, it is possible to share more information than you mean to or more than your recipients want. It might be a good idea to create a special Address Book card for this before exporting it. Address book, mail.app, apple mail, vcard, signature, contact information, tip, hyperlink

ConceptDraw Lab has produced a little Dashboard widget that “partially implements Getting Things Done” by allowing for the quick creation of iCal to-dos without the need to open iCal.

It works by presenting each calendar in iCal as an Inbox, which can be selected from a drop-down menu at the top of the widget.

Entering text then creates to-dos attached to the selected calendar.

In the Next Events view, it displays all events scheduled for today.

Despite my normal charitable outlook, I struggled to see how this would gain a place in someone’s GTD toolbox.

Event Maker remains the tool of choice for creating iCal events and to-dos for those not using MailTags or Quicksilver (one, two Hawk Wings post on Quicksilver and iCal) to do the same job.

For power and ease of use Event Maker is hard to beat.

Perhaps I am becoming a “Productivity snob”. It’s not always about power. For some people this might be just the ticket and serve as an excellent bucket for collecting things to do.

GTD widget for iCal is freeware and available from the developer’s web site .ical, to-do, events, calendars, GTD, getting things done, not apple mail, quicksilver, productivity, widgets, dashboard

Somehow mutt never dies or outlives its usefulness (see earlier Hawk Wings post, “mutt: A thing of beauty is a joy forever“).

At least, that’s the experience of the writer at dot unplanned .

Last week, he had one of those days on which Mail.app just refuses to behave:

Mail is just grinding and grinding and beachballing and gray-timering and I’m getting sick of it. Since most Mac mail apps suck, I usually end up on a primitivist kick, dusting off my old .muttrc and fixing things up a little and going in there to live.

As part of moving back in with mutt, he installed Alberto Bertogli’s X-Label scripts , which create custom headers that can store tags or metadata like MailTags or Gmail’s label feature.

Frank Barknecht likes Alberto’s scripts too. In fact, he has gone as far as adapting the X-Label script for Dave Allen’s “Getting Things Done” work management philosophy, and combining it with Kowey’s GTD/mutt macros to produce an elegant GTD solution with not a GUI in sight.

I take my hat off to these people. You can’t understand a word they write but, Golly, they are getting things done. mail.app, apple mail, mutt, X-Labels, scripts, GTD, getting things done, Mail.app on the Fritz

I am still working out how to manage my new Real Life job better so that Hawk Wings gets more of my time.

Most recently, while I was busy…

1. KIT (“Keep It Together”), a nice personal information manager that almost gives Yojimbo a run for its money, was substantially updated. It now boasts a slicker interface, searchable tags, five star rating (à la iTunes) and more — see the full changelog for all the improvements.
2. OMIC got an update too. This utility which unpacks the dreaded winmail.dat files Outlook users sometimes send (see earlier Hawk Wings review) now has support for installation over Apple Remote Desktop and for RTF text, and is packaged in a smarter installer.
3. MailRecent 1.0.3 now adds any moves or copies using a MailRecent menu to the “Move to … Again” (or “Copy to … Again”) menu items in the Message menu and the corresponding contextual menu. This means that the last “recent” move or copy can be repeated via that menu item or the built-in Mail keyboard shortcut Option-Command-T.

mail.app, apple mail, plugins, PIM, productivity, winmail.dat, outlook, filing, tags

Chris Landon emails with a reasonable request, something you don’t miss or even think about until someone else mentions it.

He points out one thing that Thunderbird and Mail.app can’t do, and that’s coloured mailboxes.

He writes:

Do you know if there’s such a plug-in, etc, for color coding a folder? I have over a hundred folders an it makes it difficult to get to a specific folder, quickly. I could have created more sub-folders than the bunch I already have, but this does not help my situation either.

Here’s an example (I was using Thunderbird at the time and it does not have it either)…

Would it also be difficult to write a plug-in for this?

I don’t know of a plugin that does this, nor do I know how difficult it would be to code, but my hunch is a lot of people would use it. mail.app, apple mail, thunderbird, mozilla, mailboxes, colours, labels, plugin