Yesterday (or possibly today if you live in the USA) was iCal Day, the one day of the year on which the default iCal icon shows the same date whether it is running or not.

Exciting, eh?

Last year I had an Internet connection on iCal Day and posted five favourite iCal tips and and five favourite add-ons.

This year I missed the great day. But others didn’t.

Erik Kennedy at Ars Technica takes the opportunity to point out what’s wrong with iCal.

The wacky guys at Joy of Tech offer an iCal Day comic and a downable, roll-your-own iCal Day Hat .

If you find yourself at a loose end, why not celebrate the day by hacking around with iCal’s icon?

UPDATE: Or, even better, take a look at iConiCal , a utility that forces iCal to display today’s date in a variety of colours, whether the app is open or not. [Via TUAW ]ical, not apple mail, productivity, funny hats

Few things get the juices flowing faster than the top- vs. bottom-posting debate.

What seems natural to one user is an abomination to another; ideology does war with utility and efficiency; anathemas and personal abuse fly faster than they did at the Council of Chalcedon (451 CE) (Wikpedia ).

It can lead to guilt trips.

I’m pretty relaxed about it personally (although see an earlier attempt to develop a new metaphor in defence of top-posting).

John Gruber is not so relaxed. He calls top-posting “an uncouth and illiterate practice”.

And he has written a script that will over-ride Mail’s default top-posting behaviour.

Select an email in Mail’s message viewer, activate the script and Mail will produce a reply, quoting the text of the email and placing the cursor at the bottom ready for your couth and literate response.

Block a selection of text in the preview pane, and only that text appears in the reply.

It doesn’t work well with signatures generated by Mail itself, placing the cursor after the signature, although as John points out, Textexpander is a smarter, application-independent solution to signatures anyway.

While we are on the topic: You can play around a bit with the placement and format of the reply string in Mail.app:

Due to his new iPhone, John is currently cranking out applescripts for Mail. See also his quick and dirty “Inbox to Archive sweep” script . top posting, bottom posting, anathema, chalcedon, mail.app, apple mail, replying, applescript, productivity

Matteo Discardi has produced a nice little app to perform the “rebuild your database and speed up Mail.app”" trick.

It’s been a while since I rebuilt my own Envelope Index, so Matteo’s app shaved a handsome 1.2 MB off mine. Snappy. Snappy.

If you have somehow missed the way this trick puts a boost back into the performance of Mail, you can read about it in an older Hawk Wings post, which outlines how to do this via the Terminal.

It doesn’t offer the options to automate the clean out that you can find in VacuumMail, another app that does the same thing, but it is a nice, polished alternative. It’s polite too:

Matteo is offering it for free but is not refusing donations from satisfied users. You can get the latest version from his web site where he warns you that it is a beta. Back up your Envelope Index file first, unless you crave the excitement of living on the bleeding edge.mail.app, apple mail, envelope index, SQLite, productivity, speed up

We are moving house today.

The telephone company has cutting-edge, user-focussed customer service, so we can’t get a phone line connected until 12 July, with broadband following after that.

My Treo 680 can do many things, but I don’t how to use it to post on Hawk Wings, so I am just letting you know that nothing will appear for a bit.

Once house buying, selling and moving, and job excitement is over, perhaps I’ll get a clear run at blogging again.personal, not mail.app, not apple mail, real life, treo680