MailTags 2.2 Public Beta 4: Polished flexibility
Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008
As MailTags forges it way towards an official Version 2.2, Scott Morrison has released the fourth public beta of the plugin.
In addition to a bunch of the usual improvements and bug-fixes (improving the reliability of the Spotlight Importer, tweaking some Preference options and settings, a nice resizable keyword token field which now displays all your tags), this latest release addresses a quirk with the way Gmail implements IMAP. In order to prevent problems, it now saves tags only to the local cache of Gmail accounts in Mail.app.
MailTags looks more polished, as Scott makes it into the most “native” plugin going around. It almost seems built-in to the app, rather than an added extra.
The pop-up dialogs for to-dos and events created on a Leopard Mail Note are now a fetching dark brown colour, which blends in nicely with the yellow lined-paper of the Note itself:
I missed the third public beta, being at the beach, so haven’t yet had a chance to note a change in the way MailTags is constructed.
Some elements are now split off as optional “extras” — plug-ins for the plug-in, so to speak — which promises a more efficient, more flexible, more user-customisable future.
It also provides a easy invitation for third-party developers to create specific MailTags plug-ins for their apps (OmniFocus, Yojimbo, Things, iGTD?).
Its iCal integration features are now a separate “extra” and a new feature, the Quick Message Colour Picker is another. It lets you colour-code the selected email with a single mouse click. A new Extras Preference Tab in the MailTags Pane controls their behaviour.
For example, in the Message Colour extra preferences, you can chose your preferred swatch colours and decide whether or not to delete the message colour when all MailTags info is deleted from an email.
If you don’t want an option to colour emails on the fly, you can just disable the extra in the Preferences:
Another small but useful feature in the new beta is the welcome return of the red icon to mark a tag that hasn’t been uploaded to the IMAP server yet. Mail users on dial-up connections at the beach (and probably elsewhere) will be pleased to see this back.
You can read more about MailTags for Leopard and download the newest, fourth public beta from Scott’s web site 
, where you will also find a forum for any questions, bug reports or comments.
No matter how cleverly or reliably you set up a system for sharing calendars, it all depends on your partner / spouse / work colleague / children / significant other looking at the calendar from time to time. What if they don’t?
John Maisey has updated his AppleScript for deleting duplicates in iCal, so that it works with Leopard.
Apple may have taken away iCal’s Information Pane in Leopard, but that doesn’t mean you are forced to use the new pop-up Edit pane.
Scott Morrison has released a second public beta of MailTags for Leopard.
Hmmm… Ever published 
It pulls your events out of iCal and displays them, nicely colour-coded, for today and as many days into the future as you care to set in the preferences on the reverse of the widget.