Kuswanto at Zeusbox has written a snappy little tutorial on how to hack iCal’s icon so that its colour matches your theme or replacement icon set but still updates with the right date every day.

It involves digging around inside iCal’s application package, extracting the right icon and either modifying it yourself or using someone else’s. Kuswanto is using the blank iCal icon from the Ekisho system icons replacement set .

The creator of the Ekisho set has also created a set of Mail.app stamp icons:

They come tilted and straight, with and without the postmark. You can download them all in a zip file from the designer’s web site.ical, icon, hack, mail.app, apple mail, stamp icon, icons

Chris T asks on Yahoo! Answers:

How do I get mail.app in OS X, to not display attached images automatically, like what it defaultly does for the junk mail, where you have to click “Load Images”, because I get a lot of images spam, and too big images.

Luckily, a plugin called Mail Attachments Iconizer exists precisely to help people who often get too big images.

When it is installed, images and other attachments like PDFs are always displayed as icons.

If you find an image or PDF you would like to view in place, the plugin adds a “View in place” option to the Contextual Menu:

I don’t use it myself as I live in a text-based world, but I know graphic designers who swear by it.

Mail Attachments Iconizer is shareware (USD 6) and is available from the developer’s web site .tips, images, pdfs, icon, display inline, plugins, mail.app, apple mail

Apologies to regular readers for the reduction in the quantity (and possibly quality ;-) of posts in recent times.

I seem to be accruing unavoidable jobs at an alarming rate. Luckily, the end of the semester is only four weeks away, after which normal levels of service threaten to resume.

Secondly, thanks to Jon Carr who emailed me the cleaner, sharper Mail icon now splashed across Hawk Wing’s header. Very kind!personal, mail.app, apple mail, icon, doasisayandnotasido

In the Quicksilver forums today I stumbled across the link that brings you the very latest, more bleeeding-edge version of Quicksilver.

Apparently, setting the “Application Update Type” to “pre-release” in Quicksilver’s Extra Settings doesn’t actually deliver the most recent version.

However, this link does: http://getqs.com/dev/

Quicksilver β50 Bulldog (3787) looks a lot like its precedessors. After thirty minutes of poking around, the only new things I have found are the swish new menubar icon (a Q with a fancy tail) and working previews for the app’s various interfaces in the preferences.

But a large part of the fun with Quicksilver is never knowing what new thing is just around the corner.

Obviously, the pre-pre-release version is not fully polished. So there’s no complaining if it doesn’t all work out as expected. quicksilver, beta, prerelease, icon, previews, productivity, apple

If you have Photoshop and a bit of patience, it is easy to roll your own stamp icon for Mail.app.

Thanks to John Godfrey, you can download an icon template in PSD format from his web site.

The zip file contains instructions on how to insert your desired image into the template. It helps if you rotate it about 11.2 degrees counter-clockwise and resize it to a width of about 85-90 pixels.

When the image is ready, you can use a freeware utility like img2icns to convert it into an icon file.

Img2icns has just been updated. The new version (0.3) is a universal binary, handles .tiff files better and is smarter about saving the finished product.

Obviously, you can have an enormous amount of fun playing around with this:

Here, after ten minutes work, are a Cult of Mac icon, a productivity-enhancing Merlin Mann talisman, a Daring Fireball logo and a Leopard stamp, just itching for 10.5 to be released.

The template itself has a small graphical bug in it. The space between the lines in the postmark is not fully transparent. It’s not fatal, but I can’t fix it without wrecking the rest of the image (Photoshop genius that I am). Perhaps you can.

Once your .icns file is ready, you can follow the instructions in an earlier Hawk Wings post to replace Mail.app’s default icon.

So get to it. Post me your coolest work and win the coveted “Hawk Wings Icon of the Week” award.mail.app, apple mail, icon, dock, tips, stamp icons, make your own

I’ve added two things to the Hawk Wings’ Plugin and Addon List:

1. High Priority (menubar management of iCal ToDos) was added to the iCal section.
2. MySync (.Mac syncing without a .Mac account) was added to the Miscellaneous or helpful apps section.

That makes 110 entries.

I also added the “Hot mail” icon to the list of different mail.app stamp icons.