Plugins

The Hawk Wings Plug-in and Add-on List has been updated.

CalTalk (sharing calendars over Bonjour) was added to the iCal section.

Address Book to CSV Exporter was added to the Address Book section.

Jumpcut (clipboard extender) and Gmail Counter (tracks disk usage in Gmail accounts) were added to the helpful apps / Miscellaneous Section.

Backend

More props to Brady Frey who performed some graceful surgery on the indexes of Hawk Wings’ MySQL tables last week. Thanks.

This is Hawk Wings’ 1,000th post. Huzzah!mail.app, apple mail, ical, address book, plugins, addons, clipboard, gmail, hawkwings, vanity post

Addons

Two new items were added to the Hawk Wings Plugin and Addon List. SBook5 (a smarter Address Book replacement) was added to the Address Book section and BackityMac (one-click backups) was added to the Archiving section.

The list now contains 127 plugins, addons, scripts, widgets and helpful apps that make work with Mail.app (and iCal and Address Book) easier, quicker, more efficient and more enjoyable.

Link Round-up

Inspired by Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero series , I’ve decided every week to reduce my list of things to post about to zero too.

Here are the note-worthy things of the week that could have become posts in their own right, but didn’t:

• The Official .Mac Blog carries some tips on how to use .Mac aliases on your iWeb sites.
• DayLite 3.0, a powerful contact and project management app, has been released, along with an updated DayLite Mail Integration module
• O’Reilly’s Sys Admin blog has discovered a quirk in the way Mail.app handles traffic through a SSH tunnel.
• According to Downloadsquad , Thunderbird isn’t for everyone.
• AusAB, a set of Address Book plugins for Australian has been updated to accommodate changes on the Whereis web site.

plugins, addons, address book, backup, mail.app, apple mail, thunderbird, dotmac, .mac

FreeMacWare.com is running a competition . The idea is that you post a selection of your best five freeware apps linked back to the site and you are in the running for a USD 100 iTunes voucher.

I can’t bring myself to pimp links like that for FreeMacWare (or anyone else), but the idea itself is a good one.

So, here are the five best freeware extras for Mail.app:

1. Mail Scripts . The collection of scripts from Andreas Amann is top-notch. They offer the ability to add all the email addresses in selected emails to your Address Book, to archive messages, to change SMTP servers on the fly, to remove duplicate messages, schedule email delivery and much more.
2. Mail.appetizer. Handsome, in-your-face, instant and informative notification of arriving emails. Lovely.
3. Event Maker. The best freeware solution for integrating Mail and iCal. Give it a Quicksilver trigger or FastScript hotkey, and iCal events, to dos and all-day events are just a key stroke away.
4. FastScripts Lite. This limited version of FastScripts by Daniel Jalkut offers up to ten hotkeys for AppleScripts and other excellent options to make using scripts in Mail and elsewhere more efficient. Nice.
5. MailUnreadStatusBar. If you are into the kinds of productivity tips that Merlin Mann is talking about in his Inbox Zero series at the moment, you will love this little app.

   It is much more discreet than Mail.appetizer, listing and offering mailbox-specific access to new mail without flashing it up in your face and thus interrupting your attempts not to live in your Inbox.

Of course, the best things in life are not always free. For a list of the very best things for Mail.app — freeware, donation-ware or shareware — see the Top ten things every Mail.app user should have.freeware, mail.app, apple mail, top five, addons, plugins, scripts, applescript

Plugins and Addons

Two things were added to the Hawk Wings Plug-in and Add-on List this week.

To Do X (a richly featured To Do list app) was added to the helpful apps / Miscellaneous section.

Dates to iCal (sync birthdays and other dates from Address Book to iCal) was added to the iCal section.

Back-end

I finally nailed the problem with the Live Comments Preview plugin.

It was something I don’t really understand to do with the way my webhost’s Apache server handles requests for gzipped files. Anyway, it is restored now and in more sophisticated form (thanks to Daniel Jalkut. Read his Red Sweater Blog — as I do — for pleasure and profit). You now have the option of turning it on or not.plugins, addons, ical, address book, to do, dates, birthdays

I noticed yesterday that 40% of the plugins and addons on the Hawk Wings Top Ten list — MailTags, Mail Act-on, Mail Stamps, Spell Catcher X — are created by developers living in Canada.

Even if you count MailTags and Mail Act-on as one, that’s still 30% or almost a third.

Obviously Canada is a terrific country (maple syrup, Mounties, lacrosse, etc), but this seems extraordinary to me.

I wonder why. Is it simply the energy created as a result of being overshadowed by a powerful neighbour? Is the market penetration of Macs in Canada greater? Or is it just coincidence?

A puzzle.

So, you’re thinking about buying one of the new Intel Macs announced this week in San Francisco?

I am. There’s a shiny new MacBook Pro with my name on it out there somewhere. Or there will be.

The big question for me is not whether I’ll miss the FW800 port as much as I think I will (probably not), or whether I will kick myself for not waiting for the Rev B (probably), but whether Mail.app with all my favourite things bolted-on will run natively.

So I asked the developers of all the plugins and addons on the Top Ten things every Mail.app user should have list, how ready they were for the Intel Macs. Here’s the good news:

1. MailTags. Scott Morrison says that a universal binary will be available “hopefully” in two weeks. And as Version 1.2 with a killer new feature as well!
2. Mail Act-on. Two weeks will see a universal binary of this plug-in as well.
3. MailAppetizer. This has been a universal binary since July last year. Ready to go.
4. Mail Scripts. This has also been a universal binary since the middle of last year. Andeas Amann says that “the only potential problem might be the “Archive Messages” script since it packages some pre-complied Perl packages as well”. But if any problems exist, they’ll soon be ironed out.
5. Mail Stamps. Version 2.1 was compiled as a universal binary for Intels and PowerPCs. And it worked fine on his developer Intel Mac, Andrew Escobar says.
6. MailUnreadStatusBar. Masaru says that it’s not clear whether this utility will need a recompile or not, “because it isn’t supposed to depend on architecture”. It should work equally well on a PPC or an Intel.
7. JunkMatcher or SpamSieve. Michael Tsai says that at the moment SpamSieve runs in Rosetta with Mail.app and the SpamSieve plug-in running natively. But a recompiled version of SpamSieve is due out in two weeks and will be available as a free upgrade.

   JunkMatcher’s developer Benjamin Han wants to address some issues with his app before recompiling for Intel Macs. Due to time pressures, “it’ll probably be a while”, he says.

8. Take Control of Apple Mail in Tiger. It is my understanding that this excellent ebook will be just as helpful on an Intel Mac as it is now.
9. QuickSilver. Quicksilver and all its plug-ins were recompiled earlier this week.
10. Spell Catcher X. Evan Gross says he will post a recompiled beta of Spell Catcher X next week (when he gets back from MacWorld) that will also contain some new features and few minor bugfixes. The final release will be polished up and available long before most people get their hands on one of the new Macs.

Now there is no excuse for restraint.

You can find a longer list of all recompiled applications that are ready to run natively on VersionTracker’s MacIntel Resource Center.