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 girls

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, plugins

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):

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, tips

equinux has released a pack of 111 additional HTML stationery templates for Leopard Mail.

The templates comes with a (fairly basic) dedicated browser app which displays them sorted by keyword and allows you to search for particular themes.

Quick Look is integrated into the browser, allowing a quick, more detailed view of each template. It is also possible to launch a new Mail message from the browser.

A Window on the left displays the templates by theme and keyword:

Whatever one’s personal stance on HTML and Mail.app, there is no doubt people will use the new feature a lot. Here they will find templates that are are well-crafted and varied, and do provide clever alternatives to the defaults included in Leopard Mail. Most contain drag and drop image fields.

Here are two examples:

You can buy this stationery pack for 24.95 euros (USD 36) from the equinux web site .

Or you can make your own (see earlier Hawk Wings post ). mail.app, apple mail, templates, stationery, add-ons, html, leopard mail

I 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. mail.app, apple mail, html, templates, oh the horror the horror, tips, hacks

Anthony Baker emails to tell me that the new nightly builds of WebKit (which will be used for Safari 3.0) have fixed the WYSIWYG form editing problem that bedevils users of current Safari versions.

This means, he says, that “you can now hit Gmail and get the same kinds of rich-text editing capability provided to IE, FF and other browsers. You can also access Google Docs.”

And it’s true. Using Safari 2.0.4 (419.3) the formatting bar in Gmail’s basic HTML view doesn’t appear:

But WebKit displays the HTML formatting bar in all its glory (as it also does in Google Docs):

Not only that but some basic formatting keyboard shortcuts work too. So ⌘B and ⌘I toggle bold and italic text, making it easier for die-hard keyboard users to format their emails without fingers leaving the keyboard.

Not all the shortcuts work though. Tab+Enter doesn’t send a message and ⌘U doesn’t produce underlined text.

The latest beta of the much-hyped Desktop client for Gmail, MailPlane which I have been fooling around with for a few days also offers the option to use WebKit behind the scenes to give users this added functionality (but that’s a topic for another longer post.)

WebKit scolds you for daring to use extensions, but that’s a small price to pay for a user in love with Gmail’s HTML features.

[Thanks, Anthony!]mail.app, apple mail, gmail, webkit, safari, html, web forms, formatting, mailplane, google

20/20 hindsight is a marvellous thing. One of the biggest mistakes in my life, in retrospect, was taking Latin instead of typing at school. I didn’t see the Internet coming.

I may well remember that all Gaul is divided into three parts (Mr Thompson, I salute you!), but it takes me a long, long time to tell anyone else about it in an email or document.

Luckily TextExpander saves my bacon hundreds of times a day. After Quicksilver and MailTags, it is the third biggest time- and finger-saving app on my Mac.

With just a few keystrokes, I can (at lightning speed) dump my mail signatures, frequently-needed URLs, often-typed chunks of HTML code, torturously long institutional titles and much more into almost anything I am typing in Mail.app and elsewhere. (Merlin Mann of 43 Folders fame has some actual examples to hand.)

The PR department at SmileOnMyMac kindly emails to tell me about a new ready-made collection of HTML snippets.

When you have imported them, typing “,a” will automatically expand to <a href=""></a>. As you can imagine, this kind of thing saves bucketloads of time every day.

You can get hold of these 60 snippets either by themselves or rolled into an earlier collection of 100+ common typos that TextExpander can recognise and correct on the fly.

TextExpander is not the only way to do this nor the cheapest (shareware — USD 29.95) but for ease of use — res ipsa loquitur!textexpander, textpander, productivity, snippets, saving time, text, HTML, mail.app, apple mail