Postcards is an utility that lets you roll your own postcards or e-cards and send them easily with Mail.app.

To get started all you need to do is drop an image from your iPhoto library (or from anywhere for that matter) onto the app’s main window.

You can resize and reposition it, add a message in the pane to the right (adjust the font and text size to suit), and then add a stamp to the top of the postcard:

You can add a stamp from the library that comes with the app in the slide-out drawer on the right, or you can double-click on the stamp on the postcard.

You then get the chance to make your own stamp, using the built-in stamp editor:

Even the postmark can be customised.

When the postcard is finished, ⇧-⌘-A opens it up in a new Mail.app message, ready to go.

The developer also provides a zip file of handwriting fonts to add that extra touch of hand-crafted realism.

In an extra nice touch, the app can capture an image from an iSight camera. Since mine is built-in into the top of the screen, I can grab an image of wherever I am and send it.

In minutes you can knock up a postcard to a loved one or a swanky promo for your pet project:

Postcards is shareware (USD 10) and available from the developer’s web site . You can try before you buy, but the postcards are watermarked “unlicenced” until you pay.

[Thanks, Anthony!]

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Eleven new entries to the Hawk Wings Plug-ins and Add-ons List brings the total number of plugins and utilities to tweak and stretch Mail.app, iCal and Address Book to over 140.

1. Address Book Dates (Age, star sign and iCal link for Address Book contacts) was added to the Address Book section.
2. LinkABoo (hyperlinks to Apple Mail messages in other apps) was added to the Added Functionality Section.
3. “Show Emails from…” (a quick way to list in Mail.app all the emails you have received from a particular contact) was added to the Address Book section.
4. MsgFiler (a “quick file” plugin for Mail.app) was added to the Added Functionality section.
5. IMAP-IDLE plugin (provides support in Mail.app for IMAP’s IDLE command) was added to the Added Functionality section.
6. Google Calendar plugin for Address Book (auto-fill Google Calendar events with contact information from your Address Book) was added to http://www.hawkwings.net/plugins.htm#address.
7. Signature Profiler (enables enhanced signature functions in Mail, HTML and image insertion) was added to the Added Functionality Section.
8. Mailsmith to Mail.app export script (a smarter way to get your emails out of Mailsmith into Mail) was added to the Switching section.
9. Portable Mail.app (a version of Mail that will run from a removable drive, flash drive or iPod) was added to the Added Functionality section.
10. Mailing List Burster (an applescript that splits mailing list digests up into individual messages) was added to the Added Functionality section.
11. rooSwitch (separate profiles for settings in Mail, Safari and other iApps) was added to the Added Functionality section.

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Over the weekend I updated the Hawk Wings Add-on and Plug-in List.

Ten new entries were added, making a total of 130+ add-ons, plugins, scripts and helpful apps to make working with Mail.app, iCal and Address Book quicker, smarter and more productive:

1. AddressX (Get Exchange contacts in Address Book) was added to the Address Book section.
2. Next Unread Message (Applescript to move to next unread message) was added to the Added Functionality section.
3. Export Address Book (easy merges of Address Book data with Word, FileMaker) was added to the Address Book section.
4. Note to Self (quick notes to yourself in Mail.app à la Leopard Mail) was added to the Added Functionality section.
5. Email Backup (quick, one-step back up for mail.app, thunderbird and more) was added to the Archiving section.
6. OMiC (plugin wrapper for tnef.sourceforge.net to extract winmail.dat files) was added to the Added Functionality section.
7. Mail to Yojimbo (script to pipe emails from Mail.app to Yojimbo) was added to the Integration with other apps section.
8. Mail Unread Menu (discreet menubar notification for Mail.app) was added to the Notification section.
9. Return Receipts AppleScript (request return receipts from email clients that support them) was added to the Added Functionality section.
10. MailPod (script to copy emails to any iPod) was added to the Added Functionality section.

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Today is ‘iCal Day”, the date displayed by default on the iCal icon.

To celebrate, I offer you a list of great add-ons or utilities that extend iCal’s ability to organise your life, with links to past Hawk Wings reviews:

Widgets

If you like widgets, DoBeDo is a great way to stay on top of your to-dos.

Highly customizable, it displays to-dos, allows you to add them, mark them completed and print them out. It comes with enough skins to please everyone:

Freeware. Get it from the developer’s web site .

Menubar utilities

High Priority gets my vote over MenuCalendarClock, not only because it is a third of the price, but also because it offers more flexible ways of managing your to-dos from the menubar. (Alhough, in fairness, if you shell out the USD 18.95 for MenuCalendarClock, you get a utility that displays events as well).

It allows you to sort your to-dos by Calendar, Due Date, Priority, Status or Title and to toggle the display of priority icons. You can use it as freeware but need to register to create to-dos. Shareware (USD 6). Get it from the developer’s web site .

Integration with Mail.app

I confess. My heart belongs to MailTags .

If it didn’t, or if MailTags’s other features aren’t important to you, nothing better integrates Mail.app and your email with iCal than Event Maker. It quickly creates normal or all-day events and to-dos from a selected message. It’s donation-ware and available from MacUpdate .

Alarms

iCal’s rich suite of alarm options is great, but it’s a pain to create them manually for each event. iCalFix 0.3 offers customizable automatic alarms for iCal, making it easy to get reminded, even if you forget to set an alarm manually. It’s donation-ware and available from Robert’s web site . (See also the shareware solution, iCal-alarmist).

Backup

Many people understand the importance of backing up their email, but don’t extend the same precautions to their iCal data.

Following an unfortunate incident with his mobile phone, Nick at Socklabs has written an AppleScript that will create backups of your iCal and Address Book data into a new folder. It also tars and gzips them and then pushes the backup to a remote host.

Of course, there are plenty more iCal utilities in the Hawk Wings Plugin and Addon List.

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James Eagan has updated his AttachmentScanner plugin to make it a universal binary.

This is a clever little plugin for Mail.app which prevents absent-minded people like me from sending emails without first including the attachments they should contain.

As he explains on his site , the universal version is enormous (7.3MB) because it includes a full universal version of Python.

In addition, the plugin now attempts to use the language set in the Spell Checker rather than the default System language. So, if your System language is set to English but your Spell Checker is set to Spanish, it will use the latter to determine if an attachment is present or not.

You can get the plugin (PPC, universal or source code) from his web site .

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Two new items have been added to the Hawk Wings’ Plugin and Addon List.

Letterbox, which brings the three-paned Outlook or Entourage look to Mail.app’s interface, finds a place in the Added Functionality section.

iSay, an app that records spoken messages which are then packaged up as an attachment to a Mail message, has also been included in the Added Functionality section.

Today Tom Skawski II sent me a list of over 30 typos and stupid mistakes in the text of the Plugin and Addon List. Fixing them was a humbling and salutary experience, which should make the list (now 125+ entries) easier on the eye for readers. Thanks, Tom!

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