The marking is all done, the students are spread to the four winds for semester break, school holidays are upon us.

Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;

(Then people long to go on pilgrimages
and pilgrims to seek strange shores
far-off shrines, known in sundry lands;)

In short, we are off to the beach house for the winter break, as Geoffrey Chaucer recommends.

Log fires, walks on the windy beach, books, Shiraz, S’mores, the complete boxed set of West Wing DVDs.

No broadband.

See you again in ten days or so. not mail.app, not apple mail, personal, beach, real life

Someone, who seems to have some personal knowledge of Snow Leopard, claims to have solved the mystery of Snow Leopard’s shrinking mail.app.

In a post that details the various myths doing the rounds on the shrinking apps—no PPC code (false!), smaller binaries (false!), missing language files (false!)—the writer spills the beans:

When you look in Mail.app you see that language files use up most of the disc space. Inside the language folder (e.g. “German.lproj”) are a lot of .nib files (the extension of Interface Builder). Inside normally are two files. One is a very small “keyedobjects.nib” and the other is very big “designable.nib” file… Now the “designable.nib” is gone. It seems like it had no reason other than to give hackers a chance to mess with the application’s UI design.

I guess he is referring to these two files which are inside each (c. 84) folder within every (18) lproj localisation folder, as in this example from the English.lproj GeneralPreferences.nib folder:

Perhaps this is as false an explanation as all the others.

Still, it has enough specifics, specifics that only someone with access to a build of Snow Leopard could know, to lend the story credence. mail.app, apple mail, snow leopard, interface, nib files, apple, mac osx

MacWorld seems to be heaving with articles of interest to Mail.app users today.

Kelly Turner kicks things off with a confession about her bulging inbox, its 35,000 emails and the level of self-deception involved in telling herself that her system was working:

…I often lost track of messages that still needed to be dealt with. As new messages arrived and older ones disappeared from my screen, I seldom thought to scroll down to see what was still unread. And although I’d developed elaborate coping mechanisms (using colors and flags and searches to identify messages) simply having an ocean of e-mail in front of me made the process of answering and checking e-mail seem like a Herculean task.

This forms a nice segue to the first part of Joe Kissel’s three-part “email renovation” series. He begins with a series of tips on reducing the amount of traffic that comes into your inbox in the first place—dealing with spam, all those hilarious joke-a-minute emails that your friends and family insist on circulating, learning what belongs in Mail.app and what belongs in iChat and more.

Part Two is on “Meet your new filing system”. I’ll be amazed if it doesn’t mention Mail Act-on and MailTags , the two premier organisational plugins for Mail.app.

If you can’t wait for Joe’s next installment you can browse through past posts of mine (one, two, three) on getting things done with Mail Act-on and MailTags. Or read them now and see how much better Joe’s tips are when he posts them!

Joe also takes the chance to put up some links to articles he wrote in February 2007 on “clearing away the clutter” in your inbox. Anything by Joe is worth the time spent reading it. These are no exception.

Finally, Joe has written a piece on coming to grips with notes and to-dos in Leopard Mail. He offers some smart tips on moving your calenders and to-dos to an IMAP account. However, be sure to read the comments as well and see what problems people are having with getting iCal to behave.mail.app, apple mail, productivity, ical, getting things done, gtd, inbox zero, email, life balance

UPDATE: A post today claims to explain it all.

According to a post on AppleInsider , the apps in Snow Leopard are going to be dramatically smaller and more efficient.

This weight-loss regime is prompted by the need to slim Mac OS X down for the growing number of mobile devices, so RoughlyDrafted (the source of the AppleInsider report) suggests.

As the graphic below demonstrates, the new apps are significantly smaller; Mail.app alone loses 196MB, over 68% of its current size:

Who would have thought that Mail.app had so much weight to lose?

According to AppleInsider some of the efficiency comes from a greater centralisation of resources in Snow Leopard:

Among the technologies believed to be aiding the downsizing are Resolution Independence, which substitutes bitmapped raster graphics with smaller vector graphics files, and Localization, which extracts the plethora of localized language files from each individual application and instills them into a centralized container accessible to each application.

Mail.app users can also look forward to more complete text handling features like auto word correction, smart dash insertion and more. mail.app, apple mail, snow leopard, leopard mail, apple, localization, resolution indendence

Hawk Wings reader Jesse Schooff emails to send in an updated Canada Mail stamp icon for Mail.app.

He writes:

After being teased one too many times about the “dated” 45-cent Canadian stamp, I’ve made an updated version. A bit of trivia: Canada Post’s current-run stamps have no defined value, so you can keep using them even if the price of postage goes up. Hopefully that will please the sticklers! It still bears the postmark from Markham, Ontario, Apple Canada’s HQ.

It’s a PNG file, which you can download from Hawk Wings. I had to run it through img2icns before it would do its thing.

I’ve added it to the Hawk Wings list of Alternative Mail Stamp Icons.

To round off this post, I’m trying to think of something witty to say about Mounties, beaver tails, lacrosse and the odd concentration of excellent Mac apps that come from Canada, but inspiration fails me.

If you are feeling patriotic, but not Canadian, check out this excellent collection of 30 national flag mail stamp icons on deviantART. mail.app, apple mail, mail stamp, icons, hacks, canada

Mac users who want to use Gmail (or some other webmail service) as their default email app rather than Mail.app already have at least three ways of doing it.

With the launch of Firefox 3.0, there is now another way for Firefox users.

All you have to do is enter the following text into Firefox 3.0′s address bar and hit return:

This will register Gmail as the default handler for any mailto: link you click on in Firefox. Of course it doesn’t work for mailto: links in other apps—say, a web archive or note in Yojimbo.

To undo it, just reselect Mail.app as the default in the Applications tab of Firefox’s Preferences.

For a comprehensive solution, you still can’t beat Webmailer which is easy to use and free.

[Via Torben Brams ] gmail, firefox, mailto, default email app, web mail

The recent 10.5.3 update introduced built-in syncing with Gmail Contacts in Address Book.

Despite this, developers of third-party Address Book-Gmail syncing apps are soldiering on. Both SpanningSync and Syncman developers point out that 10.5.3 offers this only for Leopard users and, even then, only for Leopard users with an iPhone or iTouch device.

Jeff Nichols, Syncman developer, has just released a new improved version of his sync app, lending credence to his claim that Wateree (his software firm) is a “small and agile company that can adjust quickly to our customers needs and desires”.

Syncman 1.1 can now be configured to run as a menubar utility and to load automatically when you fire up Mac OS X.

Behind the scenes further tweaks have improved the way Google Talk address are mapped to Jabber addresses in Address Book, and improved treatment of how Address Book’s Last Name field is handled.

But the number one request of users was for scheduled syncing, and Syncman delivers on that too.

The Preferences allow you to set the period of the sync and to customise the level of confirmation you want before it makes any changes:

Confirmation is another nice feature of Syncman, that is lacking in Address Book’s default sync option. As Jeff puts it:

Syncman respects the effort you’ve put into maintaining your Address Book, and therefore gets your confirmation before making any changes that could potentially cause you a whole bunch of headache.

So Syncman offers a confirmation dialog displaying potential changes before it makes them:

SpanningSync has also recently launched a 2.0 beta of its software, which is addition to syncing iCal and Google Calendar, will also sync Address Book data, including photos (Syncman is promised to have this feature soon too). The beta is free (but is a beta, so backup!).

SpanningSync costs either USD 25 for a year’s subscription or USD 65 for a once-off, unlimited licence.

Syncman is shareware and costs USD 15 (€9.95). You can get a 30-day free demo from Wateree’s web site. address book, gmail, google calendar, syncing, menubar, contacts, scheduling, nimble agile developers