On Apple Discussions Martin Marconcini has discovered a way to bring Mail.app to a screaming halt in three easy steps.

Frustrated by Mail’s tendency to freeze when he dragged anything onto Mail’s Dock icon, he went back and painstakingly restored his Mail installation step-by-step until the glitch re-emerged.

Here’s what he discovered (you can test it for yourself):

One: Set Mail’s New message default in the Composing preference pane to plain text.

Two: Add a signature to your email account in the Signatures Preference pane. Make sure that you select it at the bottom of the signature pane to be added to every new message by default:

Three: Drag an image or anything else onto Mail’s Dock icon.

That’s a big, 100%-repeatable train wreck for me.

It seems like a common configuration; it’s not restricted to dragging ClarisWorks documents onto the Dock icon when the signature contains a particular accented Laotian character. How does such a thing not emerge in internal testing? Perhaps I am too romantic about internal testing.

Anyway, happily, I am in the clear. All my signatures are just a few keystrokes away in TextExpander.

But Martin suggests some workarounds for those plagued by these freezes:

a) Use Rich Text (not an option if you use Blackberry or need plain text)
b) Use Plain Text but remove the signatures (can be a Pain In the A** if you use different business accounts like me with odd disclaimers that are a “must”).
c) Roll back to Safari 3.0.* and either use it or use Camino/Opera/Firefox/Etc. Could be a problem if you rely on Safari stuff like Inquisitor, 1Password, etc.
d) Don’t drag attachments to the dock icon…

On 8 April Apple acknowledged this as “a known issue, which is currently being investigated by engineering”. mail.app, apple mail, rich text, webkit?, plain text, dock, attachments, bug, signatures

OmniGroup are really pounding away at the public beta of OmniFocus. Every day, sometimes more than once a day, they push out a new build with tweaks, bugfixes and improvements.

Today, a new feature appeared that is worth a blog post.

The app now has a comprehensive system of alerts about tasks that due soon.

It offers the option to display these alerts in the Dock, where like Mail.app’s little red bubble, they serve as a constant reminder that fooling around on facebook all day will not result in Getting Things Done.

Right-clicking the Dock icon brings up a summary of the upcoming tasks, listed by context.

Alerts in the menubar provide another option for a visual prompt about outstanding tasks.

Here, a drop-down menu also lists the tasks by context. Clicking on one, opens OmniFocus at the appropriate place in the app’s Context View.

Other aspects are constantly being improved, in particular the Perspective options, which provide pre-sets for filtering your tasks in user-customisable ways.

For example, I can set a Perspective that shows me only tasks related to my day job that are due in the next three days. OmniFocus creates a button for that Perspective which I can then place in the app’s Toolbar for easy access.

Syncing with iCal is more trouble-free than it was two days ago and the Kinkless Importer is much more stable and reliable.

In other OmniFocus news, Ethan Schoonover writes in the comments on another post:

For what it’s worth, we at Omni are all very interested in getting OmniFocus content on the iPhone (The Omni Group is pretty much 99% iPhone users, so we have a dog in this fight). Rest well assured that as soon as we have options for doing this in a way that allows reasonable functionality, we’ll be on it.

Fingers crossed! getting things done, GTD, omnifocus, alerts, notifications, dock, menubar, ical, kinkless, productivity

Iconical is a stand-alone app that keeps iCal’s Dock icon up-to-date, whether it is open or not. An updated version, released today, brings new features including one for Leopard users.

Leopard users now enjoy an iCal Dock icon that keeps the correct date even when it is closed (did you notice?), but some people are still using Tiger, I suppose. For them, iconical offers several options in its preferences for keeping iCal’s icon current and a choice of colours:

You can set the Dock to refresh, chose whether iCal should open when the icon is updated or not, and now with the new release, schedule when iconical should run.

It is fun to have an ical icon that is green or blue, it is actually useful to be able to find out what day it is by looking in the Dock instead of moving the mouse to click on the time display in the Menubar.

Leopard users are not left out of the party.

The new release gives Leopard users the option to chance the colour of the icon. A smaller preference pane appears with the choice of red, blue or green. You can see the effect in these before and after shots:

iconical is donation-ware. You can read about it on the developer’s web site , but you will need to download it from MacUpdate or VersionTracker .ical, not apple mail, not mail.app, icons, productivity, dock

Mail Badger offers users the ability to set more than one new mail badge on Mail.app’s Dock icon.

It is cheaper and more flexible than DockStar, although the eye-candy is not quite as well developed.

Mail Badger installs itself as a bundle in your ~/Mail/Bundles folder. (Uninstalling it again is as easy as deleting the Mail Badger.mailbundle file from that folder.)

Once installed, new badges are created in Mail Badger’s preference pane within Mail’s Preferences:

Options are provided for the shape of the new badge (spiky or smooth circle, star or heart, or you can add your own images), its size and colour and for the size of the text on each badge. You can also choose where to place it on Mail’s Stamp icon.

The count for each new badge is controlled by the user-customizable rules that operate very much like the Mail’s native rules. Here is the combination that gives me instant notice of the new mail from my wife in a pink love heart:

Beautiful!

New mail from my boss also strikes my eye at once with a black star badge:

You can probably think of even better uses for the extra mail badges in your own context.

You can also use Mail Badger as an easy way of changing the existing single “spiky circle” mail badge, giving it a different shape, size or colour.

Mail Badger is donation-ware and available from the developer’s web site .mail.app, apple mail, notification, dock, badges, roll your own, tips, plugins

A new version of Dockstar, a utility that offers super-charged notification badges for Mail.app’s Dock icon, has been released.

Dockstar installs itself as a plugin with options in Mail’s Preferences that let you assign up to five different notification badges. You can choose different badge shapes, set the size of each badge and select the colour you want for each mailbox.

The result is a riot of notification badges, undeniably more colourful and possibly more informative:

The new version adds support for nested mailboxes and the ability to set the counter for unread, flagged, junk, or total messages:

It also offers the option to play a sound when each the count increases for each badge and comes with a screensaver and Dashboard widget.

DockStar is shareware (USD 8). A demo version is available from the developer’s web site .

[Thanks, Tyler]mail.app, apple mail, notification, badges, Dock, widget, plugins

I haven’t seen a piece of screen art this good since Easter .

A fine piece of satirical screenshotting on current events.

And a little sliver of Mail.app there to add distinction.

[Via Daring Fireball ]rumsfeld, screenshot, Dock, Apple, mail.app, apple mail, humour, satire, news

Jean-Michel took exception to a screenshot of my copy of Mail.app in another post about navigating around Mail with the keyboard.

He asks,

I’m sorry, but how old is that screengrab? it looks completely different to my mail.app, is this some of the hawkwings add-ons?

It is. I have modified the look of my Mail.app with two utilities that are easy to use and give (to my mind) a much nicer work environment. Compare these two interfaces:

First, the lozenges in mine (the front one) are gone, thanks to Mail Stamps. Now they are big, bold and brassy, just how I like them.

Harder to see but still noticeable, I have run UNO , system-wide theming utility for OS X that brings the unified Toolbar/Titlebar and lighter metal look of Mail and iTunes to all your skinnable apps.

I like the look. And, of course, once you get the taste for it, it’s hard to stop.

You can replace Mail.app’s Dock icon with one of the 295 alternatives on the Hawk Wings’ icon list, which also contains instructions on how to do it.

You can also replace the new mail badges that appear over the icon in the Dock with one of a number of alternatives.

Using the tips for hacking the Letterbox plugin, you can start to make changes to the nib files which control the layout of Mail.app’s message list and preview pane.

Lastly, if you are really keen, you could replace the mailbox icons with any number of improbable images that appeal to you. Use the Hawk Wings Hasta la Vista icon set, or make something better yourself.

Needless to say, no one in their right mind would try this without having backed things up first.

Go on. Take out the cleaver and make a Mail.app of your own! mail.app, apple mail, interface, hacks, icons, dock, notification badges, mailbox icons, nib files