One of the unpleasant surprises in Lion (for me) was the new look given to iCal and Address Book. What were they thinking?

Luckily, lots of other people feel the same way, and it didn’t long for hacks to appear which return them to their pristine, pre-Lion state.

Two for iCal, in particular, caught my eye.

First, a tweak to remove the torn page (how twee!) from the top of iCal.

Following the instructions provided makes for a slightly cleaner-looking interface:

If that’s not minimalist enough for you, a second tweak takes the interface all the way back to familiar aluminium:

Both posts provide the images required, clear instructions for the tweak and for returning things to their original state if you change your mind. Nice.

The new look Address Book is harder to unravel, but one tweak offers at least to replace the leather cover with an aluminum one.

James Dempsey has updated his tutorial on how to create your own fancy stationery in mail.app for Snow Leopard.

First posted in 2007, he has updated it to make sure that nothing got broken in the last two years.

He walks through the process of finding, opening and modifying an existing mail.app stationery bundle in eleven easy steps.

Sometimes it helps to have things described in more than one way, so check out the tutorials at The Apple Blog , and the tutorial and templates at Technosanity as well.

And don’t forget the “Related Links” below. The plugin does a good job. Sometimes they are actually related!

Jumsoft has released a new collection of ten free email stationery templates for mail.app.

Opinions are divided on whether HTML stationery is a good idea, but you will remember from the 2006 WWDC Keynote presentation that Steve Job is a fan. Like he said, “You can drop your own photos in here and move things around. Birthday announcements, dinners, you name it.”

The templates cover a range of possibilities — birthdays, the birth of a boy or girl, party invitations, and so on:

They all contain place-holders for your own photos and text. Creating your own masterpiece is just a few keystrokes away:

The templates are free and easy to install. You can get them from the Downloads section of Apple’s web site.

Today nineteen newcomers join the existing list of Simpson replacement mail.app stamp icons.

The existing collection featured all the family, Ruprecht and (bizarre but not displeasing) Scully.

One new collection offers two of each family member, Itchy and Scratchy, Barny (IIRC), a family shot and more:

A nice spread, but only 256 x 256 px. You can find these files on deviantART , thanks to the efforts of guteCharlotte.

Another new collection offers five portraits of the Simpsons family in full 512 px glory:

You can find this collection on ~148′s deviantART page .

As I’ve mentioned before, replacing Mail’s stamp icon is easy.

These two new entries bring the Hawk Wings icon replacement list to 531 alternatives to the default stamp of a Red-tailed Hawk, although some of the earlier entries are probably dead by now and need pruning. apple mail, mail.app, icons, hacks, tips, mail stamps, simpsons

Snow 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.

Fortunately, 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:

If, on second thoughts, the new icon looks terrible, it’s easy to change it back again. Apple Mail, hacks, mail.app, icons, stamp icon, snow leopard, permissions

Hawk 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]mail.app, apple mail, icons, stamp icons, hacks

Rolling 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:

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

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

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!mail.app, apple mail, icons, stamp icons, hacks, tips, photoshop, Borka Kegslayer