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.

I’m sorry for the lapse in taste, but I can’t help myself.

This morning at 6.05 am, Hawk Wings served its 5 millionth page to the world.

At least, that’s the total Mint has cranked up since I installed it in July 2006:

So, 3,425 page impressions a day on average, every day for four years. Thanks to everyone who has dropped by, especially to those loyal readers who kept me in their RSS feeds despite repeated long periods of inactivity.

Teary-eyed, as I stand before this milestone, I am grateful to several luminaries in the blogosphere who encouraged me to continue throughout the long stretch when the numbers were not so promising. *sniff*

Thanks too to the aggregators who picked up my posts. Sweet!

Blogging; it’s cheaper than therapy.

P.S. Obviously, this is small beer in the global scheme of things, but it is _my_ beer ;-)

Long-time Hawk Wings readers will remember the iCalViewer app that places a streaming calendar on your Desktop.

I discover that it’s still going strong .

For USD 11 it will stream calendars and upcoming to-dos as nicely under Snow Leopard as it did under Tiger:

It forces you to stay aware of what’s coming up, and spares the trouble of diving into iCal all the time.

iDeskCal is another utility that does something similar. It puts your selected calendars on the Desktop, but the output is more like something GeekTool would produce. Here is an example, with the to-dos hidden:

Like iCalViewer, the app lives in the menubar. Preferences include a General pane in which you can control how it operates and set hotkeys for adding events and to-dos, and hiding and displaying to-dos or the app itself:

A second pane allows you to select which calendars will be displayed:

A Display pane controls the look of the calendar on the Desktop, including its size, position, opacity and colour options:

iDeskCal is slightly more expensive (USD 12.99) than iCalViewer, and is available from the Hash Bang Industries web site. It offers a fully-functional 14-day trial.

Somewhere, in recent updates to Safari 5.0 (included in the 10.6.4 update), something went wrong with the way applications pass text to each other.

A post at MacFixIt suggests that the fault lies with WebKit, which is now “using rgb(0,0,0) as the value for the CSS “background-color” property for messages”.

Whatever the cause, emails generated in other apps often arrive in Mail.app with black text on a black background.

Here are some I made earlier: one generated by mailing a to-do from iCal:

Another created by running an applescript over a blog post in Safari:

Suggested workarounds vary in complexity. Some involve dragging iCal appointments to the Desktop and then into Mail, others suggest copying all the blacked-out text, cutting and pasting it into another app like Textedit to turn it into plain text and then pasting it back again.

Unmarked Software, the developer of TextSoap, has even produced a stand-alone Mac OS X Service, FixMailText , as a work around.

In fact, the fix is quite simple. Apple’s technote on the problem points out that all you need to do in most cases is

1. Place the cursor into the body of the email.

2. Press ⇧+⌘+T (Shift + Command + T) to turn it into plain text. Or select “Make Plain Text” from Mail’s Format menu

3. Carry on.

It also suggests a slightly more convoluted workaround for those who need to preserve links embedded in Rich Text:

If you want to preserve links the message might contain:

1. Click in the body of the Mail message
2. Press Command-A to select all
3. Press Command-X to cut
4. Press the Delete key to clear remaining elements
5. Press Option-Shift-Command-V (Paste and Match Style)

This will replace the black-on-black text with text that uses your default Mail font settings.

As others have said, a technote from Apple on the problem is as close as one will get to acknowledgement that something is wrong.

Hopefully a proper fix is not far away.

UPDATE: 6 July 2010 Mail Attachment Iconizer, a mail plugin that is also afflicted with this bug has been updated with a release (2.1.10) that resolves the problem. [ via MacFixIt }apple mail, safari, webkit, mail.app, apple mail bugs, ical, applescript

James Frye has written a small app that syncs facebook events into iCal, so that you can integrate your facebook invitations with the rest of your calendars in one view.

Packaged up as a stand-alone app, it first authenticates into your facebook account, and then retrieves a list of your events.

Its Preferences allow you to determine whether or not it lists events that you have accepted, declined, are unsure about or have not yet replied to.

You are then presented with a dialog containing the events:

Hit the sync button, and the app creates a new local calendar in iCal called “facebook events”, displaying all your “facebook dates”.

Because it is all listed in one new calendar, it’s easy to delete them again—say, hypothetically, you have a student who has (by mistake?) created a 21st birthday party that lasts for a month. It’s easy to undo the sync again.

James is working on EventSync 2.0 which will display the flyers and images associated with the facebook events as well.

EventSync is donation-ware and can be downloaded from its own web site.facebook, ical, events, syncing, social networking, not apple mail, not mail.app

Entourage is unlikely to be the best loved application on an Apple Mail fanboy’s blog.

But it does have one feature I like, the “My Day” widget that presents the day’s appointments and tasks in nice little interface. As I’ve said before, reluctantly, it’s a good idea.

Today is an app that does the same thing. It brings the day’s events and jobs together in a handy little interface that is also functional.

It copes well with CalDAV as well as “normal” iCal calendars, soups them up out of iCal and displays them nicely.

Moving the mouse over the items pops up a tool tip containing its notes.

Along the bottom of the interface, buttons allow you to add appointments and tasks directly from the app itself, perform other actions or print out the day’s activities in a handy hard copy.

The app’s preferences are fully-featured, and offer options for menubar display of the app, a global keyboard shortcut and whether or not to display it on top of other windows.

You can also stipulate which calendars to display.

A further pane provides the opportunity to set global alert styles for your appointments. So, for example, you could choose to get a fifteen minute email reminder on all your appointments, rather than hacking through iCal’s interface each time to set it individually. This looks like the most attractive time-saving option of the app to me.

An update (1.8) has just been released that promises improved performance and seamless compatibility with Snow Leopard (as it currently stands).

Today is shareware (USD 15) and is available from the developer’s web site .

All the gain of Entourage without the pain!ical, widgets, productivity, entourage, my day, apple

QuickCal is a widget that allows you to enter appointments into iCal using plain language.

Instead of remembering obscure tags or negotiating a series of check-boxes, you just type your upcoming appointment in normal words. The widget parses your text and creates the appointment for you.

There is a Quicksilver plugin that does something similar, but with the continuing uncertainty over Quicksilver’s future development, some people way be looking for another way to do the same thing.

It is simple to use. All you need to do is type:

(It even copes with the fact that I can’t type “tmorrow” properly!).

Options on the back of the widget allow you set a number of defaults — the calendar in which the appointment should be created and a number of default ways to handle reminders:

It seems quite smart. The developer provides a list that shows the variety of “plain language” it can understand:

It can’t do repeating events or strip out the location of the event and put in iCal’s location field. But the developer is cranking out the updates and improvements, so who knows how much smarter it may become?

QuickCal requires Leopard to work its magic. It’s donation-ware and is available from the developer’s web site .

[With thanks to Dave, a Hawk Wings reader, for the tip-off.]ical, productivity, widgets, plain language