A new version of Dockstar, a utility that offers super-charged notification badges for Mail.app’s Dock icon, has been released.

Dockstar installs itself as a plugin with options in Mail’s Preferences that let you assign up to five different notification badges. You can choose different badge shapes, set the size of each badge and select the colour you want for each mailbox.

The result is a riot of notification badges, undeniably more colourful and possibly more informative:

The new version adds support for nested mailboxes and the ability to set the counter for unread, flagged, junk, or total messages:

It also offers the option to play a sound when each the count increases for each badge and comes with a screensaver and Dashboard widget.

DockStar is shareware (USD 8). A demo version is available from the developer’s web site .

[Thanks, Tyler]mail.app, apple mail, notification, badges, Dock, widget, plugins

According to a report with screenshots on AppleInsider, the latest build of Leopard completes the User Interface changes first applied to Mail 2.0 in Tiger.

AppleInsider writer Aiden Malley reports that

The brushed-metal look that first appeared in earnest with Panther has almost completely faded away, according to reports. Well-known holdouts for the style, including Finder, Photo Booth, and Safari, have purportedly abandoned the metallic sheen in favor of the simpler, gradiated style that first appeared in Apple Mail 2.0 and later transferred to Leopard’s version of iChat and the more widely available iTunes 7.

Although the Uno interface hack offers the same unified look across all apps, the Leopard look is slightly darker.

This screenshot shows Spotlight in Tiger with the UNO hack applied in the background, and the new Leopard Spotlight look in the foreground:

Read more at AppleInsider and/or view the screenshots (I am guessing, while you can).mail.app, apple mail, uni, interface, brushed metal, leopard, unified look, mail-like

Craig Harper emails to say that the Ultimate Aussie Blogroll (as seen in the sidebar of his site or in the screenshot here), based on Technorati rankings, now lists Hawk Wings as the fifth highest-ranked Australian blog.

Of course, Technorati may no longer be the power in the land that it once was, and so may have become an unreliable guide, but it’s still nice to think that “a niche in a niche market” (mail.app on Mac OS X) site could rate so well.

It almost makes up for people who feel free to rip off the Hawk Wings Plug-in and Add-on list and run it on their own web site without attribution. (But not any more!)

Or others who are content to rip off just the occasional post and run that as their own.

Needless to say, Hawk Wings would still rank 25,480,321th on Technorati (where it began) without people like you who read, post comments and improve it. So all of this is really a round-about way of saying thanks for coming.

Thanks!

[Thanks too to Craig, Scott and Robert]mail.app, apple mail, technorati, ranking, vanity vanity all is vanity, plagiarism

20/20 hindsight is a marvellous thing. One of the biggest mistakes in my life, in retrospect, was taking Latin instead of typing at school. I didn’t see the Internet coming.

I may well remember that all Gaul is divided into three parts (Mr Thompson, I salute you!), but it takes me a long, long time to tell anyone else about it in an email or document.

Luckily TextExpander saves my bacon hundreds of times a day. After Quicksilver and MailTags, it is the third biggest time- and finger-saving app on my Mac.

With just a few keystrokes, I can (at lightning speed) dump my mail signatures, frequently-needed URLs, often-typed chunks of HTML code, torturously long institutional titles and much more into almost anything I am typing in Mail.app and elsewhere. (Merlin Mann of 43 Folders fame has some actual examples to hand.)

The PR department at SmileOnMyMac kindly emails to tell me about a new ready-made collection of HTML snippets.

When you have imported them, typing “,a” will automatically expand to <a href=""></a>. As you can imagine, this kind of thing saves bucketloads of time every day.

You can get hold of these 60 snippets either by themselves or rolled into an earlier collection of 100+ common typos that TextExpander can recognise and correct on the fly.

TextExpander is not the only way to do this nor the cheapest (shareware — USD 29.95) but for ease of use — res ipsa loquitur!textexpander, textpander, productivity, snippets, saving time, text, HTML, mail.app, apple mail

Four months ago, Nick Kreeger announced the first release of Correo, a new open source email client for Mac — “Mac essence, Gecko powered” — that “blends technology from two popular Mozilla projects, Camino and Thunderbird, to create a polished native Macintosh application”.

The second public beta has just been released. Correo 0.2 adds several nice new features: Keychain support, Address Book integration, the ability to open messages in a separate window, attachment support, better message list support for IMAP accounts and a collapsable message header and attachment view.

Although Nick readily admits it is a work in progress, the interface already shows Camino’s good looks:

Address Book integration is the big leap forward for usability:

Also nice is the “auto-complete feature” in the To: and Cc: fields:

Underneath the polished exterior, it’s all Thunderbird. The account manager and new account dialogs will be instantly familiar to Thunderbird users.

And the rendering is all Gecko too, as the following ironic screenshot of the new “single window” mode illustrates:

Nick hopes to implement features as the app’s development unfolds, including, plugin capability (to allow development of extensions such as PDA synchronization) and a tabbed window interface.

You can download Correo 0.2 from Nick’s web site and keep up-to-date with new builds through his blog .thunderbird, not apple mail, not mail.app, camino, mozilla, gecko, email, address book

The opportunity has come up, due to a miraculous absence of work, church or wider family commitments, to make a break for the beach house. We’re taking it.

I’ll be back in just over a week.

I hope that Hawk Wings readers have a happy, relaxing and joyful Easter. I know that I will:

mail.app, apple mail, inbox zero, bwahahahaha!, productivity, easter, beach, personal

As everyone knows, Mail has an annoying habit of formatting hyperlinks so that they “break” when viewed in many other email clients.

Rachel Blackman has done Mail.app users a favour by creating a Mac OS X service that streamlines the process of solving the problem by using a service like TinyURL to create short, unbreakable hyperlinks.

Rachel’s “Shrink URL” service does the heavy lifting for you. It takes any highlighted URL in any editable Mac OS X text field, queries TinyURL and returns the shrunken URL, ready for emailing.

So, all I have to do after installing the service and restarting is highlight the URL:

Press the service’s shortcut key (⇧⌘T) and, hey presto, the shrunk URL is there:

That’s even slicker than the browser bookmarklet TinyURL provides.

You can get the service from Rachel’s web site and ask your questions or make suggestions on her forums .

She has also made the source code available and says that “anyone who finds the shrinkURL code useful for other things is welcome to it.”mail.app, apple mail, delsp=yes, broken hyperlinks, services, tinyurl, plugins