As MailTags forges it way towards an official Version 2.2, Scott Morrison has released the fourth public beta of the plugin.

In addition to a bunch of the usual improvements and bug-fixes (improving the reliability of the Spotlight Importer, tweaking some Preference options and settings, a nice resizable keyword token field which now displays all your tags), this latest release addresses a quirk with the way Gmail implements IMAP. In order to prevent problems, it now saves tags only to the local cache of Gmail accounts in Mail.app.

MailTags looks more polished, as Scott makes it into the most “native” plugin going around. It almost seems built-in to the app, rather than an added extra.

The pop-up dialogs for to-dos and events created on a Leopard Mail Note are now a fetching dark brown colour, which blends in nicely with the yellow lined-paper of the Note itself:

I missed the third public beta, being at the beach, so haven’t yet had a chance to note a change in the way MailTags is constructed.

Some elements are now split off as optional “extras” — plug-ins for the plug-in, so to speak — which promises a more efficient, more flexible, more user-customisable future.

It also provides a easy invitation for third-party developers to create specific MailTags plug-ins for their apps (OmniFocus, Yojimbo, Things, iGTD?).

Its iCal integration features are now a separate “extra” and a new feature, the Quick Message Colour Picker is another. It lets you colour-code the selected email with a single mouse click. A new Extras Preference Tab in the MailTags Pane controls their behaviour.

For example, in the Message Colour extra preferences, you can chose your preferred swatch colours and decide whether or not to delete the message colour when all MailTags info is deleted from an email.

If you don’t want an option to colour emails on the fly, you can just disable the extra in the Preferences:

Another small but useful feature in the new beta is the welcome return of the red icon to mark a tag that hasn’t been uploaded to the IMAP server yet. Mail users on dial-up connections at the beach (and probably elsewhere) will be pleased to see this back.

You can read more about MailTags for Leopard and download the newest, fourth public beta from Scott’s web site , where you will also find a forum for any questions, bug reports or comments. mail.app, apple mail, imap, tagging, productivity, mailtags, public beta, ical, applescript, events

Late last year, I posted about a new plugin for mail.app, miniMail which offers a minimised “iTunes-like” interface for Apple Mail.

Then it was at 1.0.2, now it is at 1.1. And its list of features gets longer and better with each update.

When the plugin is installed, clicking the green bubble in the top left hand corner of Mail results in a mini-interface just like the iTunes option:

It now boasts an impressive array of keyboard shortcuts, mostly the same as mail.app’s own, although it has some of its own:

• Return will open up the individual message in mail
• Spacebar opens up a Preview pane, or “Quickview-esque” view of the message
• Right and Left Arrows move to the previous or next message
• The Command key plus an arrow moves to the first or last message

Here’s a screenshot with the plugin’s Preview Pane on display and the list of supported Mail shortcuts:

It adds its own tab to Mail’s Preference where further options can be set, including displaying the subject and sender on separate lines for greater readability, whether to start Mail with the miniMail interface displayed by default, the font size of the main text and more.

Of course, I am always going to use my Mail beautiful, bold and big (is there a more lovely sight for a Mac user than a fully-tricked out Mail.app doing its thing?), but people who are conscious of screen real estate will love this.

MiniMail is shareware (USD 9) but offers a 30 day free demo. You can get it from the developer’s web site . mail.app, apple mail, itunes, interface hack, plugin, keyboard shortcuts

[Although I use it a lot at work, I don't usually post Word tips on Hawk Wings. This one, though, is too good to pass up.]

If you do a lot of cutting and pasting from one document to another in Word (2004 and 2008) and want your pasting to adopt the style of the new document, you will know what a pain in the butt it is.

Word expects you to go to the Edit menu, choose Paste Special and then select Unformatted Text in the next dialog box and click OK.

I couldn’t count the number of hours I’ve spent doing this. I came to accept it as an Office for Mac user’s fate; something that just had to be endured.

Joe Kissell, senior editor at TidBITS, has the shortcut I wish I had discovered years ago. In a TidBITS post he provides the scripts needed to reduce this convoluted process to a single keystroke.

As he points out, I could have automated this with the macro-recorder in Word 2004. Never thought of that!

But Word 2008 has lost its scripting support for Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) and ,along with that, the ability to record macros.

Instead, in Word 2008 you will need to use AppleScript.

Joe provides the steps for setting up the macro in Word 2004 and the applescript Word 2008 users will need to get the same result.

He even unlocks the mysteries of the way a file called Paste Plain Text\smV.scpt is automatically bound to a keystroke shortcut.

Check out his article and other newsy posts and tips at TidBITS. word 2004, word 2008, office for mac, pasting, scripts, VBA, tips, productivity, tidbits

Last night I updated Hawk Wings to WordPress 2.3.2.

It didn’t go as smoothly as I had hoped.

Some text got munged up and some other bits and pieces are broken.

I will work it all out in the end, but apologies for the mess in the meantime.personal, apple mail, not apple mail, mail.app, russin’ frussin’ plugins

No matter how cleverly or reliably you set up a system for sharing calendars, it all depends on your partner / spouse / work colleague / children / significant other looking at the calendar from time to time. What if they don’t?

George Starcher has the same problem as I do, and he has the answer. He explains how to create an Automator action that will pull out the events for the upcoming week from individual iCal calendars and email them to your significant other and/or negligent fellow worker.

Moving carefully through his steps in Automator and setting the resulting plug-in to run in iCal takes about five minutes.

Some of this steps are, in fact, unnecessary. You don’t need to create a calendar for the plug-in in iCal first, saving it as an iCal plug-in will create an Automator calendar for you.

The end result is a nice email full of what’s coming up:

Of course, success depends on the theory that the significant other is more likely to read an email than look at a calendar. YMMV. automator, ical, collaboration, sharing, calenders, events, mail.app, apple mail, productivity

Tom Negrino at MacWorldhas written a review of Entourage 2008, part of the newly released Microsoft Office for Mac 2008.

Although it has its fans, the shortcomings of Entourage 2004 were well-known and many were hoping for greater things from Entourage 2008.

MacWorld’s verdict?

There are several other new or improved features relating to e-mail or calendaring, but they apply only to users in corporate environments that connect to a Microsoft Exchange server. Given that it’s been four long years in the making, it’s a missed opportunity that Entourage 2008 hasn’t also added some of the best new features found in Mail, such as automatic detection of physical addresses and dates, or e-mail stationery templates.

Entourage gets points for more complete AppleScript-ability, for compatibility with Mac OS X’s Services and for looking nicer, but when you get down to business — backing up your email and working with other apps — things look less rosy.

Negrino notes Microsoft’s advice that Entourage’s monolithic database be excluded from Time Machine backups and that users employ “alternative backup methods” instead. This is not only a pain in the butt, but cuts across the comprehensive design of Time Machine as a “set and forget”, everything-that-matters-to-you backup system.

Working with iCal is also fraught in Negrino’s view:

When you first synchronize Entourage with Sync Services, it creates an Entourage calendar in iCal, replicating your Entourage events in iCal. If you add or change events in that Entourage calendar in iCal or on a mobile device, those events will be synchronized back to Entourage’s internal calendar. But there’s no way to bring events from other iCal calendars (such as the default Home, Work, or Birthdays calendars) into Entourage’s internal calendar. Put another way, Entourage can publish data to iCal, but can’t subscribe to any of iCal’s other calendars. In effect, Entourage uses iCal as a convenient conduit to synchronize its data to other devices, but doesn’t treat iCal as a full calendaring partner.

After getting to the end of the review, I was surprised by the final sentence:

“Finally, if you’re outside of the corporate realm, and need a mail, calendar, and contact manager with lots of headroom and solid integration with the rest of the Office suite, Entourage provides a wealth of features that are deeper than Apple’s trio.”

Are you? entourage, microsoft, office for mac 2008, mail.app, ical, address book, sync services, time machine, email

CamMail is a stand-alone app that works with mail.app to quickly create and send video and audio clips by email, using AAC and H.264 compression.

The app is universal and works on Mac OS 10.4 or higher. It will only work if Apple Mail is configured to send email.

The interface is well-designed and clean.

Buttons across the top let you record video or audio clips, to register the app and to access its help files and quit the app.

The next row contains buttons to start (and stop) the recording, to change the background colour of the app’s interface, to preview the recording before sending it and, if needs be, to delete the recording as unsendable.

Of course, it is not the most bandwidth-friendly option for communicating. The FAQ on the developer’s web site promises not too much bloat:

Video movies are sized to QVGA (320×240) which provides good detail with low file size when used with H.264 compression. The resulting movies typically require less than 300 KB for every 10 seconds of video.

That seems about right to me. I recorded about three seconds of myself waving (see below) and it came to 94 KB.

It’s simple to use. Click the record button, do your thing, stop it and press the email button. Apple Mail fires up a new message with your video embedded into it, read to send. One quibble: there doesn’t seem to be an option to set which of Mail’s many accounts it should use as the default, but otherwise it does the job nicely:

CamMail is shareware (USD 15), although you can try before you buy. It is available from the developer’s web site .mail.app, apple mail, plugins, video, audio clips