Love it or hate it, it’s clear that the unveiling of MobileMe in yesterday’s keynote signals big changes ahead for .Mac.

It needs some kind of change. Regular Hawk Wings readers will have seen .Mac come in for a lot of stick (and the occasional bouquet).

I spent this morning (while supervising a Greek exam) reading coverage of the announcement from the big-hitting Apple news sites. Most of them just rehashed the press release from Apple. Fair enough, and a sign perhaps of how little there is to know. It’s hard to have an informed opinion in the absence of any real evidence beyond the hyper-polished demonstration in the keynote, the very attractive screenshots on Apple’s MobileMe teaster page and the Apple MobileMe Screen cast .

Still, a lack of real experience with the yet-to-be-launched service didn’t stop some people speculating.

The tin-foil hat brigade were out in force. I read somewhere that MobileMe is a branding rip-off of the ill-fated and much-despised Windows ME. You be the judge:

Further, it was suggested elsewhere that the move from mac.com to me.com is an part of an intentional “de-mac-ifying” of Apple, an attempt to pitch the service to Windows users. Some fear a loss of tribal identity will follow.

Myself, I am inclined to be cautious. I am going to wait until users get a chance to experience the service for themselves before venturing a view on whether (or not) this will be .Mac’s much-needed shot in the arm.

Amidst the frenzied speculation, two articles stand out from the rest of the pack. First, Dan Moren’s article on MacWorld is a very fine piece.

He provides a history of Apple’s online services, including its early life as iTools. I was still hacking away on a PC in those days, so I read it with interest and profit. You might find it interesting too.

We won’t know the future until July, but we can at least bone up on the past, and so get a better sense of where we are going. Nice one, Dan.

Productivity Bodhisattva (wikipedia ) Merlin Mann also does a fine job of carefully balancing up the pros and cons of the move in his post today. There are things he likes, but he is also willing to put (IMHO) the key question: Great that it looks nice (it does), but “Will stability and reliability of MobileMe greatly improve over .Mac?”

Related posts

• MobileMe is live – more or less.
• SyncTogether: Syncing without .Mac
• Rui Carmo spanks .Mac
• More .Mac grumbles: value, missing features
• Immobile me: An idle thought

I love Apple as much as the next guy. Probably more than the next guy. But today has been another day on which — as the .Mac outage report clinically put it — “100% of members were unable to access mail using an IMAP client.”

You can read some less clincal reactions from .Mac users on Apple Discussions.

Apple are very good at sending nicely produced, well-polished emails about new Apple hardware and software products and new items in the iTunes Store. It obviously spends money and effort in producing them. It cares about these things.

How hard would it be to send an email to .Mac users warning that “scheduled maintenance” is about to take place over an eight or twelve (or whatever) hour window, and that connectivity to .Mac services may be affected?

Fastmail can do it. Joyent can do it. The IT Department at my work can do it.

Of course, it is possible that Apple didn’t know everything would go pear-shaped. Someone tripped over a power cord and all the lights went out.

So, I am stuck in the horns of a dilemma. Is it more troubling that Apple doesn’t care enough to warn users beforehand, or that its mail engineers don’t know what they are doing?

Related posts

• SyncTogether: Syncing without .Mac
• Rui Carmo spanks .Mac
• More .Mac grumbles: value, missing features
• MobileMe is live – more or less.
• .Mac limps from outage to outage (for some)

The shell script security exploit exposed and then fixed in Tiger Mail has been reintroduced into Leopard Mail.

The loophole allows a sender to disguise an executable file (say, a shell script) as an image or some other harmless file. When clicked on, the executable file runs. Don’t remember? See the Hawk Wings post at the time (Feb, 2006).

Now, it’s back. You can test for yourself. The Heise Security web site offers to send you a test email. Give them an email address and after a confirmation, the email arrives:

CLick on the “jpg” to open it, and it runs a shell script, listing your current directory and exiting harmelessly:

Last time, the news prompted a range of responses, some of them rather hysterical. One writer even claimed that it made Mail.app too dangerous to use.

I am happy to follow John Gruber’s lead (again). As he said last time:

“It boils down to this: you can’t safely double-click files from untrusted sources, and you never could. This is no different today on Mac OS X 10.4 than it was a decade ago on Mac OS 8 and 9.”

Puzzling that it’s back, yes. But dangerous? No more than usual.

UPDATE: “FatYank” provides a quick fix in the comments for those who are really worried about this:

The workaround for this is to rename Terminal. When you rename Terminal and double click on the JPG, you get a message stating that Preview cannot open the file.

Or, as Rob points out, you could use Quickview to view attachments first, in which these “fake” file show up as empty.

Thanks!

[Via The Register ]

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I’ve been using Leopard for long enough now to collect five tips that save me time and effort. Let me pass them on to you.

Find emails faster in Leopard Mail

Before Leopard it was possible to find emails in the list view of a mailbox faster by using the Mail Type Select plugin. With this installed, Mail.app jumped to the first message that matched your keystrokes, just as Finder does. So typing “Ros” quickly found the first email in the mailbox from Rosemary.

Now this feature is built into Leopard Mail by default. Try it out. It makes a difference.

Do your sums faster

Now that I am a Dean and need to set and manage budgets, I need to do sums more than ever before. A nice new feature in the Spotlight window, does your sums for you.

Just type in an equation, say, “12 * 34″ and Spotlight goes to Calculator and does the sum for you, giving you the answer in the Spotlight results. Nifty.

Edit iCal to-dos and events faster

In Tiger you could edit events and to-dos from the information pane. Now, iCal’s sidebar has gone to God. To edit an iCal item, you need to double-click it, wait for the details pane and then click again on the edit button on the bottom.

These extra clicks add up over time. Especially if, like me, you live in a fluid world in which tasks and meetings are always changing.

Luckily, there is a short cut to get straight to editing an event or a to-do.

Click once on the iCal item to highlight it. Then press ⌘-e (Command + ‘e’) and you launch into an edit dialog straight away.

Create better iCal events in Mail faster

Hovering the mouse over a name or details of an event in Leopard Mail activates Leopard’s Data Detector and produces a drop box with the option to add it to Address Book or iCal.

That’s pretty smart, but there is something even smarter lurking here.

If you block all a contact’s information before you hover over the name, for example, or details of an event for iCal, the data detector pastes all the information into the new contact’s or event’s notes field.

Get more out of iCal’s Dashboard Widget

The iCal Widget in Leopard has a secret up its sleeve. If you click on it once, it displays the monthly calendar we all knew and loved in Tiger.

Click on it once more, and it pulls your events for the day out into a third pane:

I get this information more easily from MenuCalendarClock, but if I didn’t have it, I’d value it here. UPDATE: Thirty seconds after posting this I found a smarter Dashboard solution.

[Via macOSXHints , TUAW , trial and error and poking around]

Related posts

• Printing to-do lists from Mail.app
• MenuCalendarClock: Slick new to-do management features for Leopard
• Mail2iCal 1.5: Events, to-dos by AppleScript
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• Event Maker 0.4.3: Quick to-dos, events from Mail.app

In a post on his web site , Chris Messina wonders why Apple doesn’t extend its Coverflow technology as a way of “browsing people”.

Formerly a member of the development team for Flock (”The Social Browser”), he once toyed with idea himself.

He has mocked up a vision of how this might look in Address Book:

Image shamefacedly nicked without any kind of permission from Chris’ post

The possibilities, he suggests, are enormous:

Imagine this kind of view showing up in Mail.app, Adium, iChat… where your friends, family and the rest get to update their own user pictures on a whim, and set their status and contact preferences in a way that visually makes sense.

This is a terrific idea. One of the best things about Mail is its human face.

Pulling the photos from contacts in Address Book and displaying them in their emails makes my day more personal. It humanises the time I spend emailing and reminds me that I am really dealing with the people behind the emails, not just with text. In fact, this was one of the reasons why I switched from PCs to Macs a few years ago.

For the same reason, I really like the iFaces notification utility, which still worked under Tiger but sadly may not work anymore. It sat on the Desktop and displayed the faces of people who had written newly arrived and unread emails (see screenshot on the right).

It’s another small way to give email a human face.

Of course, Chris is talking about something far more adventurous than that. I’m only imagining how good it would to have that contact information to hand in the results of a “Spotlight: Xxxx Xxxx” search from the Contextual Menu in Mail.app. Chris’ vision is more informed and his horizon wider.

UPDATE: As Aaron Harnly points out in the comments, you can get a rough and ready experience of what this might be like, by browsing your ~/Library/Application Support/Address Book/Metadata folder with Coverflow in Finder:

You can even use it to play the “face recognition game” Aaron describes. Hours of fun

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Anthony Baker emails to tell me that the new nightly builds of WebKit (which will be used for Safari 3.0) have fixed the WYSIWYG form editing problem that bedevils users of current Safari versions.

This means, he says, that “you can now hit Gmail and get the same kinds of rich-text editing capability provided to IE, FF and other browsers. You can also access Google Docs.”

And it’s true. Using Safari 2.0.4 (419.3) the formatting bar in Gmail’s basic HTML view doesn’t appear:

But WebKit displays the HTML formatting bar in all its glory (as it also does in Google Docs):

Not only that but some basic formatting keyboard shortcuts work too. So ⌘B and ⌘I toggle bold and italic text, making it easier for die-hard keyboard users to format their emails without fingers leaving the keyboard.

Not all the shortcuts work though. Tab+Enter doesn’t send a message and ⌘U doesn’t produce underlined text.

The latest beta of the much-hyped Desktop client for Gmail, MailPlane which I have been fooling around with for a few days also offers the option to use WebKit behind the scenes to give users this added functionality (but that’s a topic for another longer post.)

WebKit scolds you for daring to use extensions, but that’s a small price to pay for a user in love with Gmail’s HTML features.

[Thanks, Anthony!]

Related posts

• Finally, a nice icon for Gmail
• Turning your back on Gmail
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