Hawk Wings » HTML

Make your own Stationery for mail.app

Tim Gaden — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 07:42:09 +0000

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!Similar Posts:

10 new free Mail.app stationery templates

Tim Gaden — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 00:43:59 +0000

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.Similar Posts:

Quickly add URLs to Apple Mail Signatures

Tim Gaden — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 10:24:14 +0000

As everyone knows, it has long been possible to add a very fancy signature to your mail.app emails, using the excellent tutorial provided by Melvin Rivera.

It’s complicated, involving some digging around under the hood. It also requires a measure of HTML and CSS coding ability.

However, when the process is over the result is impressive (provided that you don’t hold a faith position on plain text in Internet communication):

Now a poster on macOSXHints has discovered an easier way. It is possible to add hyperlinks to your signatures in Mail’s Preferences without the pain involved in the first option.

All you need to do is type text into the signature field, highlight it and press Command-K (⌘-K). Up pops a dialog into which you place the URL, and you’re done. In a minute you have a hyperlinked signature, not as polished as Melvin’s, but easier on the eye than a sig full of long URLs:

Rob Griffiths comments that the tip didn’t work for him in 10.5, but it’s working fine for me in 10.6.1 (mail.app 4.1).

Of course, Command-K (⌘-K) also works in the body of any (rich text) email you are composing.

[Via macOSXHints ]Similar Posts:

Microsoft Outlook to remain HTML non-compliant

Tim Gaden — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 10:43:03 +0000

Microsoft has confirmed that its premier email client, Outlook, will remain non-compliant with web standards in the next version of MS Office due out in 2010.

The statement comes in response to a campaign launched by the Email Standards Project , asking Microsoft to provide Outlook with text rendering that complies with web standards (like almost every other major email client on the market — see a list of them ), and to reverse the decision made in Office 2007 to use Word’s text engine rather than an HTML-compliant editor to compose emails.

MS Word does not provide support for key elements of CSS design tags like float, margin, padding, background-image and many more. You can quickly get a sense of the problem by looking at this image of an email displayed by Outlook 2000 and 2007:

In a post on the Outlook Team Blog , the Corporate Vice President of Microsoft’s Office Communications and Forms Team William Kennedy says that,

…while we don’t yet have a broadly-available beta version of Microsoft Office 2010, we can confirm that Outlook 2010 does use Word 2010 for composing and displaying e-mail, just as it did in Office 2007. We’ve made the decision to continue to use Word for creating e-mail messages because we believe it’s the best e-mail authoring experience around, with rich tools that our Word customers have enjoyed for over 25 years. Our customers enjoy using a familiar and powerful tool for creating e-mail, just as they do for creating documents.

Of course, a lack of web standards is not the only problem Outlook causes for Mail.app users, perhaps not even the main one.

The Campaign to fix Outlook is not giving up. You can read more about it on its web site or, if you twitter, make your compliant known that way.mail.app, apple mail, web standards, html, outlook, microsoft, officeSimilar Posts:

More Mail Stationery, for sale and for free

Tim Gaden — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 10:46:06 +0000

Jumsoft has released a pack of additional mail stationery templates for Leopard Mail.

The pack contains 50 “high-quality and exclusive design options for every occasion”, covering Family, Congratulations, Invitations, Emotions, Vacations and Seasons themes.

An additional group are described as “Neutral”, or multi-purpose.

You can view small thumbnails of all the templates on the Jumsoft web site, but some examples of the “Neutral” category are displayed below:

The pack costs USD 39 and is available from Jumsoft’s web site .

Value-conscious readers will want to compare this pack of 50 with the pack of 111 templates from equinix (reviewed in an earlier Hawk Wings post). The equinix pack retails for 24.95 euros (c. USD 40), twice as many template choices for almost the same price.

Of course, really value-conscious readers will want to make their own (see earlier Hawk Wings post ) or look at the increasing number of stationery templates offered for free.

Novcon.net has started a collection of free stationery templates, which now contains sixteen examples. Users can rate the ones they like best. The current winner is an attractive “parchment” template.

The Novcon site also contains instructions on how to install the stationery.

Templates in the Jumsoft pack and on the Novcon.net site are now listed in the Templates section of the comprehensive Hawk Wings Plug-in and Add-on List.templates, stationery, html, leopard mail, mail.app, apple mail, pluginsSimilar Posts:

TextExpander: 20% Discount for Hawk Wings readers

Tim Gaden — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 13:37:15 +0000

The good people at Smile on my mac, who make TextExpander, have made a kind offer.

The company are providing a special discount of 20% for Hawk Wings readers, which brings the price of the app down from its usual price tag of USD 29.95 to USD 23.96.

Further, they are willing to extend the discount to the TextExpander Family Pack, for up to five users in one household, bringing the price of that bundle down to USD 35.96 (usually USD 44.95)

To get the special, just click on this link: http://www.smileonmymac.com/hawkwings/

The offer expires at the end of the month, 31 July 2008.

What do you get for your money?

Above all, you get your life back, as the snippet manager and typing expander saves me (and my fingers) ten or fifteen minutes a day. Getting that back for a one-off charge of USD 23.96 is a bargain indeed.

See these Hawk Wings posts for more TextExpander goodness:

1. How to boilerplate frequent email replies
2. HTML snippet file for TextExpander
3. Clever TextExpander clipboard snippet trick
4. TextExpander auto-corrections list
5. TextExpander: Update, Tips and TricksTextExpander, snippet manager, typing, time-saving, productivity, mail.app, apple mail, html, appleSimilar Posts:

Christmas Stationery for Leopard Mail

Tim Gaden — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 10:41:22 +0000

Just in time for all those festive season emails comes a Christmas Stationery template for Leopard Mail.

Mail Stationery is new feature of Leopard Mail, which allows you send emails wrapped in pre-made HTML templates (if you are into that sort of thing).

Christmas Stationery is suitably Christmas-like as you can see:

It comes placeholders for three images and lots of snow flakes scattered around the bottom of the text area.

It was developed by the German blogger at tice.de, and is available from his web site in English and German versions. mail.app, apple mail, leopard mail, HTML, stationery, mail stationery, outrageous waste of bandwidth but it is ChristmasSimilar Posts:

Photo Cluster: free stationary for Leopard Mail

Tim Gaden — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 12:32:51 +0000

Someone at the University of Chicago has whipped up a Leopard Mail Stationery template as an exercise in testing the drag-n-drop images wells in the default stationery templates.

It’s nothing revolutionary, but offers a more image rich environment than the standard templates provide.

After installing it (double-click on the downloaded file), you can drag-n-drop away to your heart’s content:

Photo Cluster is freeware and is available from a web page at the University of Chicago.

Along the same lines, those expecting a baby girl and distressed by the lack of a pink Baby Announcement template in Leopard Mail will find relief in the work of Ed Dyer, who has tweaked the existing blue one to offer a pink alternative.

He writes about it on the Apple Discussions and has made the template available for download from his iDisk .eye-candy, mail.app, apple mail, leopard mail, stationery, HTML, templates, baby girlsSimilar Posts:

SignatureProfiler for Leopard Mail

Tim Gaden — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 13:19:27 +0000

Scott Little has updated his excellent SignatureProfiler plugin for Leopard Mail.

Veteran Hawk Wings readers will remember how many nifty tweaks and new options this plugin brings to Mail.app’s signature feature (see this previous Hawk Wings post if you are not a veteran reader).

The new version adds support for Leopard Mail and removes it for Panther Mail. You can get the update (1.4.4) from Scott’s web site . SignatureProfiler is donation-ware.signatures, mail.app, apple mail, leopard mail, html, CSS, Skype, hyperlinks, pluginsSimilar Posts:

Leopard Mail’s clever HTML formatting

Tim Gaden — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 11:42:07 +0000

A poster on macOSXHints points out how much smarter Leopard Mail is at handling content from the web which is pasted into its messages from web browsers.

For example, say you want to share someone’s overall top artists from Last.fm:

Block the content you want to send, and then drag it to a message in Mail.app, and behold:

Mail does a pretty good job of preserving the HTML formatting, even keeping the links and tool tips alive. It even provides a “widget-like” black boundary and cross for quick removal of the HTML block if you change your mind about sending it.

There are two things to note here. First, this works much better if the message is set to Rich Text Format. I live in a Plain Text world, so didn’t notice this at first. But perhaps only fuddy-duddies like me think it is more polite to send a link to the page.

Secondly, it works even better if you apply the “quicker text dragging” hack. Of course, this speeds life up all across Mac OS X, but also in this case.

Cocoa-based apps (Mail.app, Safari, etc) require by default that you hold your mouse down over the selected text for a second before dragging.

You can reduce the built-in delay with a simple Terminal hack. Open Terminal and type (exactly):

defaults write -g NSDragAndDropTextDelay -int 100

This will reduce the delay to a tenth of a second in all your Cocoa-based apps (‘-g’ stands for ‘global’).

It modifies a string in the .GlobalPreferences.plist file in your ~/Library/Preferences folder:

You could edit it manually in Plist Editor, as seen here, if you have an aversion to the Terminal, although you will need to use an app like Leopard Cache Cleaner to reveal Leopard’s “hidden files” first.

You will, of course, need to restart the apps for the change to take effect.mail.app, apple mail, productivity, safari, cocoa, text, html, rich text formatting, tipsSimilar Posts: