Lion’s mail.app animates its windows. When you open a new message or reply to an existing one, the window “zooms out” to greet you.

I can hardly see this on my 27″ iMac, but it is noticable on my MacBook.

If you dislike this kind of frippery, or would simply rather turn the animation off and get to your messages more quickly, a Terminal command can get you there.

Open up Terminal and type in:

defaults write com.apple.Mail DisableReplyAnimations -bool YES

If you change your mind it’s easy to go back again. Just open up the Terminal again, and type:

defaults write com.apple.Mail DisableReplyAnimations -bool NO

What could be easier?

Via: Cult of Mac (via: MacOSXDaily )

Spotlight searching in Apple Mail is pretty good, but what if it could be even better?

Rocketbox is the plugin that delivers that wish — lightning fast, very smart searching, above and beyond what Spotlight can provide.

This plugin offers the ability to filter searches by several clever criteria that work together quickly to find the needle in a haystack.

The main interface shows how it works. An initial search term is further refined by mailbox, account, time range, and whether or not the email is flagged, has been replied to or forwarded. The results can be sorted by time or relevance:

The search term is highlighted in the results preview, making it faster to see if the particular hit is relevant or not.

The search terms themselves can be specified in a large variety of ways, including by boolean operators and by person:

And it’s fast. The developer, Central Atomics, provides a graphic that gives a good sense of the improvement:

It installs itself as a classic mail.app plugin in the Bundles folder of your Mail Directory. So it’s painless to remove either manually or with the uninstaller provided in the disk image.

An option in the View menu allows you to toggle between Rocketbox and Mail’s own search function (especially important for those who use the custom search features in MailTags ). Grey and white candybar stripes in the search box remind you that Rocketbox is installed and active.

Matt Ronge has detailed his plans for the plugin’s future development, including MailTags integration (yeah!), list view, domain searching and more.

He writes in an email:

Right now I’m doing major work on the engine to make way for these enhancements. Beyond that, I have ideas but nothing I want to make concrete yet (I have one big UI change planned, but can’t comment on that yet).

While he is coy about declaring his hand, he assures me that this next major version will be free for those who have bought version 1.0.

Rocketbox is available from Central Atomics web site where you will also find some nifty searchable FAQs .

It costs USD 14.95. Is it worth it? It depends how much your time is worth. I have a lot of email. After using it for a day, I can already see how much time it will save me.

I am about to revise my ancient post on the Top 10 Things every Mail.app user should have. This will be in it.

(Disclosure: I ought to say that Matt was kind enough to provide me with a license so that I could test out the plugin and write this piece. Thanks.)

Long-time Hawk Wings readers will remember the iCalViewer app that places a streaming calendar on your Desktop.

I discover that it’s still going strong .

For USD 11 it will stream calendars and upcoming to-dos as nicely under Snow Leopard as it did under Tiger:

It forces you to stay aware of what’s coming up, and spares the trouble of diving into iCal all the time.

iDeskCal is another utility that does something similar. It puts your selected calendars on the Desktop, but the output is more like something GeekTool would produce. Here is an example, with the to-dos hidden:

Like iCalViewer, the app lives in the menubar. Preferences include a General pane in which you can control how it operates and set hotkeys for adding events and to-dos, and hiding and displaying to-dos or the app itself:

A second pane allows you to select which calendars will be displayed:

A Display pane controls the look of the calendar on the Desktop, including its size, position, opacity and colour options:

iDeskCal is slightly more expensive (USD 12.99) than iCalViewer, and is available from the Hash Bang Industries web site. It offers a fully-functional 14-day trial.

Safari allows you to specify a news aggregator app of your choice to which it pipes RSS subscriptions, but not an online service like Google Reader. Rob Wilkerson has written an extension for Safari 5.0 that plugs the gap.

Using his AddToGoogle extension, users can click on Safari’s RSS button and find that the feed is sent straight to Google Reader. Sweet!

Installation is a little more tricky than one might think. Two things to watch:

1. Make sure that you have the Develop menu enabled in Safari 5.0. You will find the option to turn it on in the Advanced tab of Safari’s Preferences.
2. Make sure that Safari is listed as the default RSS reader in Safari’s Preferences. If you have mail.app or some other aggregator selected as the default application, that choice will override the extension.

Download the extension and click on it to install it. You will see this slightly alarming warning:

Check that it is installed by opening the Extension tab of Safari’s Preferences:

The latest revision of the extension, released today, provides the option to subscribe to feeds in either Google Reader or directly as a widget on your iGoogle page.

Checking this option offers a choice every time you subscribe to a feed:

AddToGoogle is freeware and available from Rob’s wiki page at Codaset.

Hawk Wings reader Nic Plum has written an AppleScript that helps MailTags and Evernote play nicely together.

The script sends a selected email to your Evernote Inbox as a note, importing any MailTags keywords as Evernote tags in the process.

As a result he works with one set of tags across Mail.app and Evernote, and doesn’t have to double-handle nearly as much.

He has made the script available on sourceforge, and welcomes comments and feedback.

The download includes a comprehensive guide on how to install and use the script.

Mail.app users who don’t use MailTags can still import emails into Evernote and get a productivity boost by tagging them with an AppleScript described in an earlier Hawk Wings post.

mail.app, applescript, evernote, productivity, apple mail, mailtags

QuickSnippets is a new plugin for Google Quick Search Box (QSB) that adds basic snippet management to the utility’s toolbox.

It is easy to use and quite clever.

First get the plugin from the developer’s Github site.

Copy the plugin file to your ~/Library/Application Support/Google/Quick Search Box/PlugIns/ directory, and restart QSB.

Then to add a snippet, all you need to do is activate QSB and type quicks and select the QuickSnippet Regist option:

Enter the trigger and the snippet itself into the dialog box:

I’ve found that cutting and pasting blocks of texts into the snippet box preserves the line breaks when they are activated later.

When you’ve entered all the snippet you want, dumping them into an email message or other document is easy.

Just activate QSB, and type the snippet’s trigger. The snippet appears in the list below:

Select it and hit Enter. All done!

Obviously it’s not TextExpander, but for a lot of people it might be all the snippet management you need.

QuickSnippets is freeware and comes with more copious instructions in English and Japanese. google, google quick search box, plugins, snippets, text, productivity, not apple mail, not mail.app

Hawk Wings reader Himanshu Shukla emails to share two applescripts he has written which integrate the online to-do manangement service Toodledo with Apple Mail and the prince of productivity plugins, MailTags .

His first script simply pipes a selected email from mail.app into your online Toodledo account, where it will wait for you to tag it, give it a context and a project or folder.

The second, more complicated script uses MailTags to tag and add other information to the task before you send it off.

When this script is run, it open up a copy of the email, ready to forward to Toodledo and offers you the chance to map fields from the message’s MailTags pane onto categories that Toodledo understands:

Keywords in Mailtags = Context in Toodledo
Project in Mailtags = Folder in Toodledo
Due-date in Mailtags = Due-date in Toodledo

Priorities:

Very Low (Mailtags) = “-1. Negative” (Toodledo)
Low (Mailtags) = “0. Low” (Toodledo)
Normal (Mailtags) = “1. Medium” (Toodledo)
High (Mailtags) = “2. High” (Toodledo)
Urgent (Mailtags) = “3. Top” (Toodledo)

Clever! You can tag and process the task without leaving Mail’s interface.

Of course, it’s even more clever to trigger the script with a keyboard shortcut, either in Quicksilver or Fastscripts or MailTags’ sister app, Mail Act-on:

You can get the scripts from Himanshu’s web site where they are freeware.

Combined with Toodledo’s own iPhone app or the Action Lists iPhone app , which is a dedicated GTD system using Toodledo as its backend, you can recreate a robust workflow for Getting Things Done that goes with you on the road.gtd, getting things done, applescript, scripts, mail.app, apple mail, plugins, toodledo