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.)

I’m sorry for the lapse in taste, but I can’t help myself.

This morning at 6.05 am, Hawk Wings served its 5 millionth page to the world.

At least, that’s the total Mint has cranked up since I installed it in July 2006:

So, 3,425 page impressions a day on average, every day for four years. Thanks to everyone who has dropped by, especially to those loyal readers who kept me in their RSS feeds despite repeated long periods of inactivity.

Teary-eyed, as I stand before this milestone, I am grateful to several luminaries in the blogosphere who encouraged me to continue throughout the long stretch when the numbers were not so promising. *sniff*

Thanks too to the aggregators who picked up my posts. Sweet!

Blogging; it’s cheaper than therapy.

P.S. Obviously, this is small beer in the global scheme of things, but it is _my_ beer ;-)

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.

Jumsoft has released a new collection of ten free email stationery templates for mail.app.

Opinions are divided on whether HTML stationery is a good idea, but you will remember from the 2006 WWDC Keynote presentation that Steve Job is a fan. Like he said, “You can drop your own photos in here and move things around. Birthday announcements, dinners, you name it.”

The templates cover a range of possibilities — birthdays, the birth of a boy or girl, party invitations, and so on:

They all contain place-holders for your own photos and text. Creating your own masterpiece is just a few keystrokes away:

The templates are free and easy to install. You can get them from the Downloads section of Apple’s web site.

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.

The first release candidate for Eudora OSE (“Open Source Edition”) has been released , after a gap of several months since the last beta.

Described as “an email client that combines Mozilla’s Thunderbird with code, features, and GUI elements from Qualcomm’s Eudora”, Eudora OSE is the end result of Qualcomm’s decision in October 2006 (Remember that?) to get out of the email market and to open source the code for its email client, once the most popular email app on the Mac platform.

Firing it up for a quick look-see is very nostalgic. First the freestanding mailbox pane appears, and then that unforgettable “bob-bob-a-bob-a-bob” sound of new mail arriving.

Old hands might still cherish a secret flame for Eudora, and find this release an interesting thing to play around with.

It’s not the old Eudora, that’s for sure; feels more like a skinned version of Thunderbird to me.

Somewhere, in recent updates to Safari 5.0 (included in the 10.6.4 update), something went wrong with the way applications pass text to each other.

A post at MacFixIt suggests that the fault lies with WebKit, which is now “using rgb(0,0,0) as the value for the CSS “background-color” property for messages”.

Whatever the cause, emails generated in other apps often arrive in Mail.app with black text on a black background.

Here are some I made earlier: one generated by mailing a to-do from iCal:

Another created by running an applescript over a blog post in Safari:

Suggested workarounds vary in complexity. Some involve dragging iCal appointments to the Desktop and then into Mail, others suggest copying all the blacked-out text, cutting and pasting it into another app like Textedit to turn it into plain text and then pasting it back again.

Unmarked Software, the developer of TextSoap, has even produced a stand-alone Mac OS X Service, FixMailText , as a work around.

In fact, the fix is quite simple. Apple’s technote on the problem points out that all you need to do in most cases is

1. Place the cursor into the body of the email.

2. Press ⇧+⌘+T (Shift + Command + T) to turn it into plain text. Or select “Make Plain Text” from Mail’s Format menu

3. Carry on.

It also suggests a slightly more convoluted workaround for those who need to preserve links embedded in Rich Text:

If you want to preserve links the message might contain:

1. Click in the body of the Mail message
2. Press Command-A to select all
3. Press Command-X to cut
4. Press the Delete key to clear remaining elements
5. Press Option-Shift-Command-V (Paste and Match Style)

This will replace the black-on-black text with text that uses your default Mail font settings.

As others have said, a technote from Apple on the problem is as close as one will get to acknowledgement that something is wrong.

Hopefully a proper fix is not far away.

UPDATE: 6 July 2010 Mail Attachment Iconizer, a mail plugin that is also afflicted with this bug has been updated with a release (2.1.10) that resolves the problem. [ via MacFixIt }apple mail, safari, webkit, mail.app, apple mail bugs, ical, applescript