Hawk Wings » iChat

What to do after deleting Mail.app by mistake

Tim Gaden — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 11:46:16 +0000

Nick Flood posts a problem in the user forums at HEXUS:

I stupidly deleted mail.app and I now need it. I can’t find the download anywhere on the internet.

Can anyone help me out?

Once upon a time, you had to get hold of Pacifist , a neat little app that extracts applications from packages, disk images and archives.

You could use it to navigate through your original OS X discs to find Mail.app, extract and install it.

But now (and not everyone knows this) there is an easier way.

Tiger allows for the “custom installation” of individual apps without the need for third-party helpers.

Just insert your installation disks and follow the instructions in this Apple technote, “Custom installs in Mac OS X 10.4″ :

This custom reinstall option can also be used with Address Book, iCal, iChat, iTunes and Safari.

Of course, sometimes Mail.app is so buggered up with hacks, scripts, plugins and add-ons that you may want to delete it and re-install on purpose.

An earlier Hawk Wings post (see “The Final Solution: Reinstalling Mail.app“) covers the steps to do that successfully. mail.app, apple mail, custom install, ical, address book, reinstall, ichat, itunes, safariSimilar Posts:

Big Bang Chess: Playing by email with Mail.app

Tim Gaden — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 13:27:22 +0000

Freeverse, the company which makes the iChat transcript manager for Mail.app Chatalog also make a clever little chess app that integrates with Mail, Address Book, iSight and more for the full iApp chess experience.

The game interface is striking.

It presents the two players hovering over a board which comes with “fantasy” and “traditional” pieces:

If you choose the “play by email” option (solo and network play are also available), it sends each move and any comment to a Mail.app message.

Your opponent clicks on the attachment and his or her copy of Big Bang Chess opens to show the new move and to allow the counter move.

The email keeps a reference of all comments through the game:

(Playing with yourself, while fairly common in the blogosphere, makes for a less than riveting game.)

Address Book, iChat and iSight integration offer further ways of enhancing the traditional play-by-email exchange.

Freeverse’s Big Bang Chess is part of a games package that also includes Checkers (a.k.a. Drafts), Reversi, Backgammon and Tic-Tac-Toe (a.k.a. Noughts and Crosses).

The Big Bang Board Games Suite costs USD 24.95. A demo is available from the Freeverse web site.mail.app, apple mail, address book, isight, ichat, chess, play-by-email, games, cleverSimilar Posts:

Mail to go: Portable Mail and Address Book

Tim Gaden — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 11:06:48 +0000

Carlo Gandolfi has developed a way to run Mail and Address Book on a memstick or USB stick, iPod or external drive.

It works as a shell script which opens the local copy of Mail using preferences stored in the external application bundle. The Portable Address Book works in the same way.

If you have a USB stick big enough, you can also store your Mail folder, com.apple.mail.plist and caches on it.

This means that take your Mail and contacts with you and get working on any Mac that has local copies of Mail and Address Book installed.

And there’s more….

However, Portable Safari, Portable Mail, Portable iCal, Portable Address Book and Portable iChat require a USD .99 donation before you can download them. Others like Portable Adium, Portable AbiWord and more are free. See the details and the scripts that makes it work on osxportableapps Sourceforge page .

The Free Open Source Mac User Group has made even more applications portable. Their stuff is free.mail.app, apple mail, address book, ichat, ical, safari, portable apps, memstick, USB stickSimilar Posts:

Long delays with Mail.app replies

Tim Gaden — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 13:11:30 +0000

A poster on macOSXHints has posted a tip to reduce the long delays in producing a reply window that sometimes occur in Mail.

He suggests that it caused by settings in the Keychain and provides a work-around to fix it.

I had this problem earlier in the year. In my case, it wasn’t caused by Keychain settings, but by my .Mac account.

I won’t repeat it all here, but you can read the whole saga in “Apple Mail phones home too” where you will also find the fix.

In short, Mail was trying to connect through port 80 to verify my iChat certificate. My work firewall blocks port 80. Hence the delay.

Interesting that Mail phones home in an unannounced but benign way, don’t you think? mail.app, apple mail, dotmac, .Mac, iChat, certificate, keychain, bugsSimilar Posts:

Leopard and Mail 3.0 rumours

Tim Gaden — Fri, 04 Aug 2006 22:15:15 +0000

It’s the season to sacrifice all discretion and fact-checking reserve to the excitement of unrestrained rumour-mongering.

Jason O’Grady at Powerpage helps the process along with a list of “leaked” 10.5 features , which may or may nor be true, but are interesting to read either way.

He offers details of Spotlight 2.0, Dashboard 2.0, Safari 3.0, iChat 4.0, Automator 2.0, QuickTime 7.2, Mail 3.0, iCal 3.0, Address Book 5.0.

For Mail, his source suggests:

- New server protocols
- Widescreen version
- Different views, drop down
- Gmail-like thread system
- Ability to send proper HTML email
- Able to import pages documents as email
- iChat integration and new collaboration integration
- iCal calendar integration

Who knows?mail.app, apple mail, leopard, apple, widescreen, gmail, ichat, icalSimilar Posts:

Rui Carmo spanks .Mac

Tim Gaden — Mon, 10 Jul 2006 12:36:11 +0000

For the third time in as many weeks, someone whose opinion is worth listening to has given .Mac a proper spanking.

At Tao of Mac, Rui Carmo takes the hatchet to Apple’s online service, and he doesn’t leave much standing after he is finished going through its features one-by-one.

Like previous recent critics (first wave and second wave), Rui is bewildered both by .Mac’s poor value for money and its lack of innovation:

My main point is that .Mac isn’t the benefit it’s touted to be, and that I can come up with a number of enhancements and added features that would make it worthwhile for me to keep my .Mac subscription and push Apple’s online services ahead of the pack where it regards mobility.

It’s not satisfying the geeky end of the Mac user market. It’s not doing too well at the other end either:

On the other hand, if Apple thinks their target market for .Mac is the I-don’t-want-to-understand-computers folk, they may be falling quite short of the mark – because it doesn’t work consistently right even for those people (if you’ve never had issues with .Mac, you’re very lucky).

Rui’s writing is dense and value-packed. I sometimes come away with my head spinning but I’m always glad I took the trouble. Try it yourself. mail.app, apple mail, .Mac, dotmac, idisk, sync, ichat, apple, usability, innovation, ouch!
Similar Posts:

Griffin’s Proxi and Mail.app

Tim Gaden — Wed, 12 Apr 2006 12:40:43 +0000

This morning on TUAW I read about Griffin’s Proxi, which has been released as a public beta.

Griffin is using it as a utility for working with its various hardware products like the PowerMate and Radio Shark.

But the reach of the app is much wider. Proxi is in fact a kind of FastScripts / HotKeys / Growl / Quicksilver mash-up. It performs some of the functions of all those utilities, without totally replacing any of them.

Proxi comes with pre-built scripts and “blueprints” to interact with a number of apps—iChat, Mail.app, iTunes and Skype—as well as general AppleScript and application launcher abilities.

Because this is Hawk Wings, we are interested mainly in Mail.app. After the jump you will find some screenshots and two quick suggestions on how it works with Mail in useful ways.

For Mail it offers a notification system to replace utilities like iAlert, GrowlMail or MailAppetizer.

The editor offers you lots of options constructing for the format of the notification for yourself:

Click on image for a larger view

It offers pre-made fields like subject, name, account and so forth that you can drag and drop onto the screen where you want them. You also have full control over the text, colour, layout and font. A notification template can be constructed in a few minutes:

Proxi also offers a hotkeys option that can launch AppleScripts. Here it is launching the “Change SMTP Servers” script , one of Andreas Amann’s Mail Scripts , that I have to run every morning:

There is a lot more to say about Proxi. Particularly nice are the iTunes notifications.

Because you are able to control the size of the graphic in the notification of new tracks, you can get a nice big flash from the album graphic.

There is also a pre-packaged applescript for displaying the CPU load and memory usage of your apps at a single keystroke and another to append material to the clipboard.

Griffin maintains a wiki with many more tips and tricks. There is also a blog, which among other things carries a post on how to make your own Proxi plugins (if you know a bit of Cocoa).

It is still in beta, but the opportunities seem to be enormous. Download it and play with it yourself.mail.app, apple mail, itunes, ichat, notification, applescript, proxi, griffin, application launcher, hotkeysSimilar Posts:

Yojimbo tip: Searchable iChat transcripts

Tim Gaden — Wed, 12 Apr 2006 12:39:26 +0000

Yojimbo, the new(ish) Information manager from Bare Bones has a mailing list . It’s not very active. I’ve only seen two emails from it in two weeks.

One of those emails was the kind of tip that you never think of yourself, but which seems so obvious when someone else describes it.

At the end of an iChat session, if you select the Print dialog in iChat and choose, “Save PDF in Yojimbo” you will get a nice PDF of the chat in Yojimbo, the texts of which is fully searchable. Nifty!

[Nice tip, Ted.]yojimbo, ichat, transcripts, chats, pdf, productivity, tipsSimilar Posts:

Leopard Mail, “like Entourage (but better)”

Tim Gaden — Tue, 04 Apr 2006 22:59:24 +0000

UPDATE: Be careful — April Fool’s joke ahead. Completely sucked me in, being reposted at a later date from an original thread on MacNN . Don’t let it get you…

According to a post on the osx86project forum by someone who claims to be “in the know”, Leopard Mail will be quite a different beast:

Mail, Address Book, iCal, iSight, and iChat will become one integrated application, much like Entourage (but better). Included is a customizable Auto Responder and voice activated dialing via numbers or Address Book names. You will be able to automatically send email & initiate iSight meetings, etc. that are linked/pegged to specific calendar events.

Never have I so fervently hoped a rumour wrong.

The information comes as part of a long list of features that the poster suggests will be part of OS 10.5.

He says “don’t quote me”, so you had better not.

Or is it just a troll? See Scott Morrison’s remarks in the comments.nightmare, mail.app, apple mail, ical, address book, entourage, leopard, 10.5, iChat Similar Posts:

First Worm for Mac OS X?

Tim Gaden — Sat, 18 Feb 2006 13:46:09 +0000

Symantec has announced what may be the first virus written to target Mac OS X.

Called OSX.Leap.A, the worm-like virus spreads itself as an iChat file attachment.

But is it a real worm or just a clever script, a genuine threat or a false alarm like others in the past?

Leander Kahney on Cult of Mac considers the options , offering the conclusion that “it may be mostly harmless now, but will likely lead to much nastier versions in the future.”Symantec, ichat, worm, virus, mac osx, OSX.leap.A, false alarm, Leander Kahney Similar Posts: