The poster at Aaron’s UI Design Blog is seriously steamed up about Mail’s inability to display email in a “wide-screen” format with an Outlook-like preview pane.

Lifting a quotation from an Ars Technica review of Tiger, he thinks that Mail.app’s inability to do this is characteristic of an email client that is “hideously ugly,” and “inflexible, inconsistent, and again, a little strange.”

If Mail did provide those options, he says, “I would be able to see many more email headers than I can now, and provide myself with a more enjoyable reading experience.”

He creates a mock-up of a wide-screen view and takes the opportunity to serve out the Apple Mail Team for “Mail’s overdesigned UI”.

Who knows?

At one stage the Apple Mail Team was thinking about an Outlook-like wide-screen view, but there is no sign of a native implementation in the Leopard Mail previews.

In the meantime, of course, Aaron needs to get hold of Aaron Harnly’s excellent Letterbox plugin , which does exactly what he wants. (These are two different Aarons, I think.)

Related posts

• Wide-screen hack for Yojimbo
• Wide screen plugin for Leopard Mail released
• Three-pane Mail.app hack that works
• The “Hasta la Vista” icon replacement set
• Retro Mail: Undoing the new Tiger look

Pierre Igot at Betalogue has some of the sharpest eyes in the blogging world. He repeatedly sees flaws in interface design that I overlook. Whether it is problems with the way Mail handles the format=flowed feature or threading, he’s got it nailed.

He’s done it again with iCal, pointing out something that I must have looked at a hundred times and never “seen”.

Pierre notes iCal’s inability to modify its language when the the value in question is not plural (as in this screenshot of an iCal alarm). He wonders whether anyone at Apple uses iCal and has noticed that it needs to be fixed.

Of course, it’s not earth-shattering. Still, Apple is a company that takes pride in the polish of its apps, so it rankles as Pierre point out:

Yeah, I know, it’s a detail. It’s not a bug. It doesn’t cause iCal to crash. It doesn’t cause iCal to fail to sound the alarm one hour before the event. So the problem is not high on anyone’s to-do list. But surely it is still somewhere on someone’s to-do list? And one day it will be fixed, right?

Now it will niggle at me too.

Related posts

• User interface flaws in iCal
• Apple’s iCal Team is hiring
• 10.5.1 is out: Mail and iCal fixes
• What’s wrong with Apple’s Enterprise Strategy
• Weekly Update

Oliver, another Ars Technica reader, has taken Mithras’ MailWideScreen bundle and tweaked it some more, following the advice of Malacoda.

He added alternating background colours for the rows in Message Viewer, vertical lines and small scrollbars.

He has posted screenshots of the result in the Ars Technica thread .

These tweaks are done by editing the nib files in Mail.app’s Resources Package with an app called Interface Builder, which is part of the Mac OS X Developer Tools.

These tools are not installed by default, but you can find them on your installation discs, where they live in a folder called “Xcode Tools”. After installation you will find them in a folder called “Developer” in the root directory (this may not be the right word, but a hangover from pre-Mac days) of your harddrive.

If you have them installed, you can navigate to the MessageViewerContents.nib file in your Contents/Resources/English.lproj/ folder of Mail.app’s package, click on it and it will open in Interface Builder.

At this point, I should confess that I have absolutely no idea what I am doing in Interface Builder, so if you want to read on and fool around with the way Mail looks (as I did), it’s at your own risk.

I recommend backing up Mail.app at the very least, or creating a duplicate of Mail.app and dragging it to the Desktop for safe keeping. Closing Mail first seems like a prudent step too.

It’s easy enough to create Oliver’s extra tweaks. When the nib file opens, click once on the Column view of the main window to select it:

Then bring up the Inspector, pictured above on the left, by pressing Shift-Command-I or Window > Show Inspector. All the options are there. Save your changes, quit and you’re done.

But once you start, it’s hard to stop. There’s lots more MailWideScreen-independent fun to be had. You can slim down the scrollbars whether you use the hack or not:

Or you can give the message viewer a once-over all your own. Here it is with alternating colours and horizontal lines:

I decided to stop before I busted something. But you don’t have to.

UPDATE: The MailWideScreen plugin has a new name: Letterbox

Related posts

• Three-pane Mail.app hack that works
• WideScreenMail plugin gets two-line preview
• Three-pane hack for Panther Mail
• The “Hasta la Vista” icon replacement set
• Icon replacement tutorial for Mail.app

Screenshots have been floating around for a while with mockups of a three-paned Mail.app à la Outlook.

But now there is a hack that actually works.

A member of the Ars Technica Open Forum, Mithras, has posted a hacked binary of Mail.app, which displays the preview screen on the right, giving Mail a “widescreen” form factor.

And it actually works:

Click image for a full-sized view

Mithras’ binary has a different name (MailWidescreen) so you can copy it into your Applications folder without fear of overwriting your default copy (although backing up is always, always wise. UPDATE: Always!). Then just open the one you want each time.

Unfortunately, you cannot yet manually resize the middle column, although Mithras promises a fix for this within the week.

There is however a work-around. The middle pane of the hack takes its size from the depth of the Message List in your normal copy of Mail.

So, if the middle column is too small, open your default copy of Mail.app and increase the depth of the Message List. Then the middle screen in MailWidescreen will be correspondingly wider. Make it wider than you want. Then it will reduce to the width you actually want as you resize the whole window from the bottom right.

You can read the whole thread on the Ars Technica Openforum or cut to the chase and… download the binary.

UPDATE: Mithras works fast. He has now packaged it in the form of a classic Mail.app bundle , which you can drop into your ~/Library/Mail/Bundles folder where MailTags, Mail Act-on, Mail.appetizer and the rest live. And just as easily take it out again. Extra bonus: the middle column can now be manually re-sized as normal.

[Thanks, Nick]

Related posts

• The “Hasta la Vista” icon replacement set
• WideScreenMail plugin gets two-line preview
• Three-pane hack for Panther Mail
• Mail.app with Outlook-style preview pane
• Letterbox (widescreen plugin) for Leopard

Live Blogging TV takes a dim view of the new lozenge-shaped buttons in Tiger Mail.

The proposed method for disposing of the buttons is complicated and unique.

Personally, I would use Mail Stamps — which works a treat with Mail 2.0.7 and is much more cow- and piranha-friendly.

Related posts

• Hawk Wings’ greatest hits: Best posts 2005-6
• Webmail plugins for Mail.app: The current state of play
• USA and UK Mail Stamp Icons
• Two new Mail icons: Carrier pigeons (!)
• Toggle image and attachment display in Mail.app

Mail’s priority flags feature can be hard to find.

And even when you do find them, the defaults are rather odd. The single exclamation mark should mark a higher priority than “normal”.

Last year, Christopher Hewitt posted an alternative set of icons for this on macOSXHints. You can get the tiff files and read the instructions for installing them in Christopher’s tip.

(Thanks to Frieda, who let me know about this tip. It’s not only Mail Stamps Toolbar icons that 10.4.6 has overwritten. It’s overwritten all the images in Mail’s Resources file with the defaults. Frieda found that her smarter icons from Christopher’s tip were gone, and had to reinstall them.)

Related posts

• Three-pane Mail.app hack that works
• The “Hasta la Vista” icon replacement set
• Hacking the look of Mail—badges, icons, mailboxes
• Hacking the hack: MailWideScreen tweaks
• Change Apple Mail’s new mail badges