Posts Tagged ‘hacks’

Changing Snow Leopard’s Mail Icon

Monday, October 26th, 2009

GrumpybuzzardSnow Leopard is full of little surprises.

Last night, I posted an icon of Canada’s first ever mail stamp as a mail.app icon, and simply assumed that the tried and true way of changing it through the Inspectors still works. It doesn’t.

As Chocky helpfully points out in the comments (thanks!), the permissions of the core apps in Snow Leopard have been tightened so that you can’t by default copy and paste over the image of the icon in Apple Mail’s Inspector pane anymore.

However, all is not lost. I first tried brute force. I copied over the icon in Mail’s application package. That works fine, but is a little involved.

Changing PermissionsFortunately, a few, simple additional steps can make the old method work again.

First, close Mail. Find Mail in the Applications folder, and press ⌘-I (Command + i) to bring up the Inspector pane.

Step One: Unlock it by clicking on the padlock in the bottom righthand corner of the pane. You will need to authenticate.

Step Two: Change the permissions listed for “everyone” from “Read only” “to Read & write”.

Step Three: Proceed as normal under the old method. Copy (⌘-C) the image of the icon that you want to use from the top lefthand corner of its Inspector, Select the Mail icon in its Inspector and paste (⌘-V) the new image over.

Step Four: Remember to change the permissions back to what they were.

All done! I’ve tried this three times now, and it’s worked every time. At the end of the process you have the new hand-crafted icon on Snow Leopard’s Mail:

Snowleopardmailicon

If, on second thoughts, the new icon looks terrible, it’s easy to change it back again.

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Canadian Stamp Icon. Old School!

Sunday, October 25th, 2009

Canada's First Stamp Icon StandfirstHawk Wings reader Richard Drdul sends an image of a very Old School Canadian postage stamp, drawn up as a Mail stamp icon.

It is, he tells me, Canada’s first ever postage stamp issued in 1851, and was designed by Sir Sandford Fleming, who also invented time zones.

It was also the first official postage stamp in the world to picture an animal.

The postmark reads “Greetings from Upper Canada,” which is what the province of Ontario (where Apple’s Canadian HQ is) used to be called.

You can download the original PNG file or the ICNS file here.

Changing the icon itself is easy. (UPDATE: Unless you are using Snow Leopard, in which case it is not so easy, but can still be done. I’ll post a a Snow Leopard guide tonight.)

I’ve added it to the list of alternative stamp icons for Mail.app, making a total now of 509.

[Thanks, Richard]

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Roll your own Mail Stamp icon

Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009

Grumpybuzzard 120x 120Rolling your own Mail stamp icon is fun. Hawk Wings has covered it before. But now there is a much better Photoshop template that makes the whole process even easier.

The template was created by chekkz and is hosted on her DeviantART page where you can download it.

Then it’s simple as shooting fish in a barrel.

  1. Open the PSD file in Photoshop.
  2. Everything can be edited, including the text around the postmark. To edit the text, select the text layer in the Inspector, select the text tool on the left, and place the cursor in the existing text. Edit away. The default icon carries the text” Hello from Cupertino CA”.
  3. Images in Mail Stamp icons are rotated 10 degrees counterclockwise (if you are wondering). The rotated image is 368 x 412 pixels in size.
  4. When you have edited the text and dropped in your image, save it off as a PNG file.
  5. Then you need one of the many free utilities that convert PNG files into ICNS format. I use img2icns by Shiny Frog. Drop the PNG file into its interface.
  6. You’re done.

The possibilities are endless. You can make something scary that will grab your attention first thing in the morning:

Mail psd Borka

Something sleek and professional might be what you need, a reminder of who is paying you to deal with all these emails:

Mail psd Trinity

Or something altogether more soft and cuddly like, say, a snow leopard:

Mail psd Snow Leopard

Replacing the default icon is easy. Just follow the steps in a previous Hawk Wings post.

Then you have a nice icon in the Dock which is all yours:

Dock Mail Icon

Of course, if you can’t be bothered, you can always pick one from the 508+ icons I’ve collected on the Hawk Wings Mail stamp icons page which is about to expand further when I add the ones that have appeared in the last year.

If your creations are top notch, drop me an email and I’ll put them up on Hawk Wings for everyone to use and enjoy.

Hmmm…. Maybe we should have a competition, and try to get celebrity judges like Merlin Mann, John Gruber and that crowd. Now the blogging cogs are turning again!

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Flagit!: Customised flags for Mail.app

Monday, July 7th, 2008

Flagit IconEver felt that the red flag in Mail.app doesn’t offer you enough flexibility?

Flagit! is a plug-in that offers Mail.app users customisable flags of as many different colours as you like, as well as question and exclamation marks.

It is packaged as a plug-in for SIMBL , an Input Manager that allows application-specific hacks for Cocoa apps (like Mail.app).

It is not heavy on documentation. Pay close attention to the installer screen, because it offers you all the information you will get on how to use its new features:

Flagit Installscreen

Once installed, you can access its features through the “Mark” option in the contextual menu. Highlight the email you want to flag, Control-click (or right-click) on the email and choose the flag you want:

Flagit Contextualmenu

The Customize option opens a preference pane with room to edit the default flags and create as many new ones as you need:

Flagit Custom

It also provides the option to colourise the text of the email that you have flagged. Combined with the option to colourise the backgrounds of emails (which I do through Mail Act-on — Leopard users this way ), it can produce a riot of colour in your inbox.

If I wasn’t very happy about marking emails done or needing attention or waiting for a response with the keywords feature of MailTags , I could imagine using this, and benefitting from the additional visual help of coloured flags.

Flagit! works with Tiger and Leopard and is shareware (USD 8). You can download a 15-day free demo from the developer’s web site .

UPDATE: Users report in the comments that Flagit! doesn’t play nicely with the WideMail plugin. The comments also contain some tips on uninstalling Flagit!

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Up-to-date mail stamp icon for Canada

Tuesday, June 24th, 2008

Canadian MailHawk Wings reader Jesse Schooff emails to send in an updated Canada Mail stamp icon for Mail.app.

He writes:

After being teased one too many times about the “dated” 45-cent Canadian stamp, I’ve made an updated version. A bit of trivia: Canada Post’s current-run stamps have no defined value, so you can keep using them even if the price of postage goes up. Hopefully that will please the sticklers! It still bears the postmark from Markham, Ontario, Apple Canada’s HQ.

It’s a PNG file, which you can download from Hawk Wings. I had to run it through img2icns before it would do its thing.

I’ve added it to the Hawk Wings list of Alternative Mail Stamp Icons.

To round off this post, I’m trying to think of something witty to say about Mounties, beaver tails, lacrosse and the odd concentration of excellent Mac apps that come from Canada, but inspiration fails me.

If you are feeling patriotic, but not Canadian, check out this excellent collection of 30 national flag mail stamp icons on deviantART.

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WideScreenMail plugin gets two-line preview

Wednesday, November 7th, 2007

PluginiconDane Harnett has updated his new WideScreenMail plugin, giving it the much-asked for two-line preview à la Entourage.

This was one of the features most requested of Letterbox, the Tiger wide-screen plugin.

Entourage, you will recall, displays mailboxes on the left, and the selected message in a preview pane on the right.

The middle pane offers a listing of the selected mailbox, with each line displaying the sender, subject line and time at which the email arrived:

Entourage Preview

Now, with WideScreenMail, Mail.app users can have the same layout. The middle column now displays the sender and the subject line in one field and the time of arrival (or whatever other column(s) you select):

Widescreenmailpreview

And, of course, unlike Entourage, you are seeing Mail’s unified inbox, and don’t need to jump from account to account to answer your email.

Obviously, this reduces by one the number of columns needed in the middle pane and makes for a more efficient use of the available space.

Dane has made the new version of the WideScreenMail plugin available on his web site .

Still no further word on Letterbox progress.

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How to edit Leopard Mail’s Stationery

Thursday, November 1st, 2007

HorrifiedI would rather cut my own heart out with a teaspoon than use Leopard Mail’s HTML stationery.

But I know not everyone shares my view.

If you are a lover of this kind of thing, Josh Pigford at The Apple Blog has a long and detailed post on how to edit or create your own stationery for use with Leopard Mail.

He explains where the HTML files are stored within Mail’s package and how to get at them, as well as what files are required if you are working up a new template from scratch.

He even provides some “walkthrough” files to act as a pattern for your own creations.

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