Dane Harnett has updated his new WideScreenMail plugin, giving it the much-asked for two-line preview à la Entourage.
This was one of the features most requested of Letterbox, the Tiger wide-screen plugin.
Entourage, you will recall, displays mailboxes on the left, and the selected message in a preview pane on the right.
The middle pane offers a listing of the selected mailbox, with each line displaying the sender, subject line and time at which the email arrived:
Now, with WideScreenMail, Mail.app users can have the same layout. The middle column now displays the sender and the subject line in one field and the time of arrival (or whatever other column(s) you select):
And, of course, unlike Entourage, you are seeing Mail’s unified inbox, and don’t need to jump from account to account to answer your email.
Obviously, this reduces by one the number of columns needed in the middle pane and makes for a more efficient use of the available space.
Dane has made the new version of the WideScreenMail plugin available on his web site 
.
Still no further word on Letterbox progress.
So, I installed it, and now Mail will not open main window.
When I open the message view from the Window menu, I get the spinning beachball.
I tried running the uninstall script, and that wont work eighter.
So what to do now?
This is a beautiful, beautiful plugin. Thank you!!
Something I’ve been waiting for! However, the installer action just won’t launch. Manual installation isn’t working either. Ideas?
Adam — if you are trying to install it manually and don’t have any other bundles installed, you might need to enable bundles manually, following the suggestions here:
http://www.hawkwings.net/2007/10/30/leopards-mails-mailapp-and-plugins-trial-and-error/
Unless you have thought of this already, of course!
@Emil — you need to delete the WidescreenMailPlugin.mailbundle from your ~/Library/Mail/Bundles.
The tilde (~) is shorthand for your Home Directory.
Nice design and much easier install than the first version. Not a big fan of double line. I think the single is cleaner and easier to read.
So, how does this compare to something like Letterbox?
Still on Tiger, btw.
Wow…Ok. Now that I realize that this is Leopard-only, once Letterbox comes out for Leopard, which of the two does a better job of utilizing a widescreen display?
We’ll have to wait and see :-)
Aaron is a pretty clever guy. He is, I read
, “a PhD student in the natural language processing group of the Computer Science Department at Columbia University”, so I’d say anything is possible.
I have just posted a sneek peak at the next version of WideMail.
Check it out at http://www.daneharnett.com/widemail/
Cheers
Dane
Love the screenshot Dane. Can’t wait for the release of the new version. Thanks for doing this – being able to use Mail fullscreen like I am has encouraged me to learn to use “Spaces” as well.
I’d so much prefer if the sender, subject and dates were separate columns so sorting is possible on each and then each entry doesn’t also take up 2 lines of space.
Real estate is important to me as well as functionality. Looks like the Widescreen Plugin next release might actually do these things which will be very cool
WideMail v0.1.0 Released
Check out the site!
Thanks for letting me know.
This is indeed a wonderful plugin for Mail. After Leopard came out, I converted back to Mail from Entourage. The thing I missed most was a three-pane view. After WideMail [new name for WideScreen] added two-row options, I was most pleased.
One question remains, however: I noticed in the screen capture above that MailTags is working with WideScreenMail. Is this still possible in the latest version of WideMail? I tried adding MailTags without any success.
Thanks in advance.