I’ve mentioned it in passing in another post today, but it deserves a post of its own: Aaron Harnly has released MailPluginManager, a clever little plugin manager for Mail.app that can “inspect, enable, disable, install, and remove any plugin”.

Aaron says that he is willing to make the plugin manager available for other developers to include with their plugins, so that, as he hopes, “.mailbundle can become a first-class citizen”.

The plugin does a good job, although for some reason it doesn’t like the look of Mail Act-on:

You can find MailPluginManager in the most recent Letterbox public beta , although you don’t need to use Letterbox to get its benefits. It is a free-standing app.mail.app, apple mail, leopard mail, letterbox, plugins, manager, tips

Aaron Harnly has taken an “all-too-welcome distraction from pressing schoolwork” to update his widescreen plugin Letterbox.

He has released the new version as a public beta.

It comes with a stand-alone plugin manager for Mail.app that can inspect, enable, disable, install and remove any Mail plugin:

The new version also features a preference pane with options to tweak the display, by toggling on and off the horizontal lines and/or different coloured backgrounds for items in the middle pane. The preview pane can be set to display on the right or underneath (an option to display the pane on the left has been switched off until some problems are resolved):

It comes with an auto-updater and Aaron promises that a two-line column for the middle pane (à la WideScreenMail, the other Leopard-friendly wide-screen plugin) is on the way.

It is a public beta so can expect a few minor kinks that still to be ironed out. Pick it up from Aaron’s web site.mail.app, apple mail, leopard mail, widescreen, entourage, outlook, plugin manager, tips, plugins

Pierre Igot takes aim at the behaviour of the Save button in Leopard Mail, with the rigour and vigour which are his trademarks.

In Tiger Mail, he points out, you could click on the button to bring up a “Save As…” dialog that offered a location for saving all the attachments in the message.

In Leopard Mail, however, you need to click-and-hold on the button in order to bring up an enhanced contextual menu with more options for individual attachments.

He calls this a bug rather than an improvement:

The simple and most obvious option, which is a single click on the button, no longer works—which does not make sense, because the button’s visual appearance suggests both a regular button that responds to a single click (like the “Quick Look” button next to it) and a button that brings up a pop-up menu (with the triangle). Besides, the tool tip clearly suggests that the button should respond to a simple click as well.

I’ve had more than one email from users who thought that the button was broken, because it did nothing when they clicked it., so Pierre is not alone.

Head over to Betalogue and read the whole piece. mail.app, apple mail, leopard mail, tiger mail, bugs, attachments, button, counterintuitive or what?

I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again, the lack of options for displaying to-dos in Leopard Mail is disappointing. And frustrating.

A poster in the macOSXHints forums has come up with a good work-around for avoiding that long list of finished tasks.

He has created a Smart Mailbox called “Not Done” which is set up to display all to-dos that are incomplete:

Simple, really. Why didn’t I think of that? mail.app, apple mail, leopard mail, to-dos, tips, productivity, smart mailboxes, workarounds

No posts today. It’s Thanksgiving in the USA, which means that 82% of Hawk Wings readers (or so Google Analytics claims) will be counting their blessings and spending time with their families and/or loved ones.

I’m taking the chance for a day-off too, heeding Steve Jobs’ wise advice as portrayed by Joy of Tech.

My non-blogging friends tell me that there is in fact a whole world out there, which is something to be thankful for. not mail.app, not apple mail, not productivity, not efficiency, not task management, not work

Greg Welch has tweaked his two Mail plugins, MailRecent and MailFollowUp, to make them Leopard-friendly and to introduce general improvements.

MailRecent (see the earlier Hawk Wings review post) is a quick filing plugin that lives in Mail.app’s Contextual menu. If you are not using Mail Act-on it offers a fast way to file messages into your most frequently used mailboxes, without the hassle of dragging them across to the Mailbox list.

The screenshot on the right shows it in action.

The version released today only runs on Leopard, although a Tiger Mail version is still available on Greg’s web site.

It is now “case-insensitive”, that is, it now lists mailboxes in alphabetical order whether they begin with a capital or lower case letter. Finally, he has added an uninstaller to the disk image, for easy removal.

MailRecent is freeware and is available from Greg’s web site .

MailFollowUp provides a clever tweak to the way Mail handles the carbon copying of emails to a group of recipients.

The new version (1.2), like MailRecent, only runs on Leopard. It too gets an uninstaller and has improved the logic of the replies even more. As Greg puts it, MailFollowUp is now “faster, smoother, and eliminates the occasional addition of the original sender to the To header”

Several localisations have also been improved.

MailFollowUp is also freeware and is available from Greg’s web site . mail.app, apple mail, leopard mail, productivity, quick filing, replies, plugins

OmniGroup are really pounding away at the public beta of OmniFocus. Every day, sometimes more than once a day, they push out a new build with tweaks, bugfixes and improvements.

Today, a new feature appeared that is worth a blog post.

The app now has a comprehensive system of alerts about tasks that due soon.

It offers the option to display these alerts in the Dock, where like Mail.app’s little red bubble, they serve as a constant reminder that fooling around on facebook all day will not result in Getting Things Done.

Right-clicking the Dock icon brings up a summary of the upcoming tasks, listed by context.

Alerts in the menubar provide another option for a visual prompt about outstanding tasks.

Here, a drop-down menu also lists the tasks by context. Clicking on one, opens OmniFocus at the appropriate place in the app’s Context View.

Other aspects are constantly being improved, in particular the Perspective options, which provide pre-sets for filtering your tasks in user-customisable ways.

For example, I can set a Perspective that shows me only tasks related to my day job that are due in the next three days. OmniFocus creates a button for that Perspective which I can then place in the app’s Toolbar for easy access.

Syncing with iCal is more trouble-free than it was two days ago and the Kinkless Importer is much more stable and reliable.

In other OmniFocus news, Ethan Schoonover writes in the comments on another post:

For what it’s worth, we at Omni are all very interested in getting OmniFocus content on the iPhone (The Omni Group is pretty much 99% iPhone users, so we have a dog in this fight). Rest well assured that as soon as we have options for doing this in a way that allows reasonable functionality, we’ll be on it.

Fingers crossed! getting things done, GTD, omnifocus, alerts, notifications, dock, menubar, ical, kinkless, productivity