After watching a work colleague manually adding attachments to a Mail.app message, Martin Michel decided that there must be a better way.

And he made one. He has created Attaché, an AppleScript droplet that quickly creates an new email, with all the attachments dropped on it included and listed.

Just dump it on your Desktop (or wherever you like to keep droplets–in the Dock, perhaps). Select the files you want to send and drop them onto it.

Hey presto – an email with attachments and a list of what’s included:

If my life was full of industrial quantities of attachments, I can see how this would save a lot of time indeed.

It will also please people like Jonathan, who emailed recently with a particular attachments problem:

One thing that frustrates us is that when adding attachments the attachment name is always truncated for longer names. As we have to print a record copy of the email, and all our documents include a date at the end It is impossible to see the proper name of the email attachment. Is their a way to make it add attachment name in plain text, or not truncate?

Mail’s default behaviour is annoying. But the list that this droplet generates solves his problem. Nice!

Martin plans to add further features, zipping of the attachments, default recipients and subjects and more.

Of course, you can always drag files to the Mail icon in the Dock or use the proxy icon (as described in a recent Macworld tip ) which is good enough for me.

Attaché is freeware and available from his web site .mail.app, apple mail, attachments, applescript, droplet, productivity, quickly batch and send, lists

Gina Trapani at Lifehacker has done all Gmail users an enormous favour with her Better Gmail extension for Firefox.

She has taken some of the best Greasemonkey scripts for Gmail and rolled them into a more user-friendly extension that adds (among other things): coloured labels, a mind-bending array of extra keyboard shortcuts, a fixed font option, larger attachment icons, skins and more.

It almost converted me. Almost.

Now the latest version (0.8) adds even more goodies — bottom posting for replies, Google Reader integration, fixed conversation previews, and a Mail.app skin:

Each option can be enabled or not as you like from the extension’s preferences.

Needless to say, with the labels feature and the extra keyboard shortcuts that Better Gmail provides, it is not very difficult to hack up a very efficient “Getting Things Done” (GTD) system, which doesn’t have all the polish of the tailor-made GTDInbox (formerly GTDMail) extension , but not everyone needs that kind of power.

It also makes managing mailing lists the work of a new keystrokes and can filter work emails from personal emails quickly and easily.

I could go on and on.

Marriage is for life, we like to hope. Mail.app and me are forever (obviously), but — golly! — the occasional harmless flirt with Better Gmail is diverting! Try it out for yourself.gmail, mail.app, skins, email, labels, keyboard shortcuts, productivity, GTS, Getting things done, webmail, alluring

Some time ago, while I wasn’t watching, Thomas Aylott updated his clever scripts which make iCal able to pipe its alarms through to Growl.

Previously, when Hawk Wings last blogged it, the process of activating the scripts was rather difficult and involved a lot of digging around in iCal’s guts.

Now Thomas has packaged up the scripts in a disk image along with step-by-step instructions on how to install them:

Four steps and you are done. Then you can enjoy Growl’s alerts instead of the iCal’s big scary messages with the jangly alarm clock.

The disk image is available on Thomas’s web site.ical, growl, notifications, scripts, hacks, tips

Mail Badger offers users the ability to set more than one new mail badge on Mail.app’s Dock icon.

It is cheaper and more flexible than DockStar, although the eye-candy is not quite as well developed.

Mail Badger installs itself as a bundle in your ~/Mail/Bundles folder. (Uninstalling it again is as easy as deleting the Mail Badger.mailbundle file from that folder.)

Once installed, new badges are created in Mail Badger’s preference pane within Mail’s Preferences:

Options are provided for the shape of the new badge (spiky or smooth circle, star or heart, or you can add your own images), its size and colour and for the size of the text on each badge. You can also choose where to place it on Mail’s Stamp icon.

The count for each new badge is controlled by the user-customizable rules that operate very much like the Mail’s native rules. Here is the combination that gives me instant notice of the new mail from my wife in a pink love heart:

Beautiful!

New mail from my boss also strikes my eye at once with a black star badge:

You can probably think of even better uses for the extra mail badges in your own context.

You can also use Mail Badger as an easy way of changing the existing single “spiky circle” mail badge, giving it a different shape, size or colour.

Mail Badger is donation-ware and available from the developer’s web site .mail.app, apple mail, notification, dock, badges, roll your own, tips, plugins

François La Roche emails a nice little tip for quickly quitting an open app that was news to me.

As everybody know, you can cycle through your open apps by hitting ⌘-Tab. What you might not know (I didn’t), is the ⌘-Tab feature has another trick up its sleeve.

You can also close open apps by keeping the
⌘ key pressed and then hitting the “Q” key while cycling over the application you want to close:

François reports that it seems to works with all apps, although not if the app needs to do something before closing like saving a file.

Thanks, François!not apple mail, not mail.app, productivity, tips, quit, apple, macosx

After taking a little break from Hawk Wings due to a rush of Real Life, I now find myself in the eye of the storm.

So I am going to post some stuff.

Thanks to all the people who emailed wondering if I had fallen under a bus or been burnt at the stake. It’s nice to be missed. hawkwings, mail.app. apple mail, personal, hibernation