Hawk Wings reader Jesse Schooff emails to send in an updated Canada Mail stamp icon for Mail.app.

He writes:

After being teased one too many times about the “dated” 45-cent Canadian stamp, I’ve made an updated version. A bit of trivia: Canada Post’s current-run stamps have no defined value, so you can keep using them even if the price of postage goes up. Hopefully that will please the sticklers! It still bears the postmark from Markham, Ontario, Apple Canada’s HQ.

It’s a PNG file, which you can download from Hawk Wings. I had to run it through img2icns before it would do its thing.

I’ve added it to the Hawk Wings list of Alternative Mail Stamp Icons.

To round off this post, I’m trying to think of something witty to say about Mounties, beaver tails, lacrosse and the odd concentration of excellent Mac apps that come from Canada, but inspiration fails me.

If you are feeling patriotic, but not Canadian, check out this excellent collection of 30 national flag mail stamp icons on deviantART.

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A Japanese graphic artist has created 40 mail stamp icons, featuring various cute animals.

He provides icons for two different coloured icons of an apple, a cat, a chicken, a cow, an elephant, a golden retriever, a hawk, a horse, a monkey hearing no evil, another speaking no evil and one seeing no evil, a husky, a ladybird, a poodle, a rabbit, the weirdest looking sheep I have ever seen, a snail, a snake and a tiger.

The collection also contains two icons of a “black guy”. Here’s a taste of the overall style:

Changing Mail.app’s Dock icon is easy, and fun.

You can get the icons from his web site .

I’ve added them to the Hawk Wings Alternative Mail Stamps Icon list, which which now contains 507 mail stamp icons (assuming all the links still work).

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During my five months off, some nice new alternative mail stamp icons have appeared.

As everyone knows, changing Mail.app’s Dock icon is easy, and fun.

First up, seven icons from the Simpsons TV show (Homer, Marge, Lisa, Bart, Ruprecht, Bobo and a “Simpsonised” Scully):

You can get them from deviantART where westendgirl1984 posted them.

Other nice new icons include a collection of Super Mario Brother icons , a beautifully-made First Class UK postage stamp and a collection of mail stamp icons from the movie Ratatouille

Some of them are image files that need to be run through a converter like img2icns and some are icns files but need to be run through icon.cx’s icns2icon app in order for Finder to recognise them as icons.

I’ve added them to the Hawk Wings Alternative Mail Stamps Icon list, which which now contains 467 mail stamp icons (assuming all the links still work).

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In the past few days, my macOSXHints RSS feed has churned out an astonished number of interesting tips for iCal, Address Book and Mail.app.

Not all of them are equally useful or productivity-boosting, but all of them are interesting, if only because there are sometimes better ways to get these things done.

1. Use Quickview for Mail.app attachments

One tip explains that highlighting an attachment in a Mail message and pressing the spacebar opens Quickview.

Not much more useful than using the Quickview button next to the “Save” button under the headers perhaps, but in the comments, another poster points out that pressing ⌘-Y when viewing a message opens all the message’s attachments in a single Quickview window, with arrows to move from one to the next.

2. Adding notes and to-dos to individual emails

Another post details a way to add notes to an individual email using Leopard Mail’s to-do feature. This is a “hack” for Leopard Mail’s inability to attach notes to individual emails.

I hardly need to tell regular Hawk Wings readers that there is a more excellent way .

3. Apply filters to Address Book contact pictures

This was news to me. If you click the “swirly cube” button next to the camera button in Address Book’s contact image editor, you are rewarded with 35 different filters that you can apply to the picture.

In effect, this brings Photobooth (my kids’ favourite Mac app) to all your Address Book contacts. There is a lot of fun to be had here, especially with the photos of contacts that you don’t much care for.

4. Use Drag ‘n’ Drop to replace icons in an item’s Inspector pane

From time to time I like to chance the icon of my Mail.app. After all there are more than 450 options and changing the icon under Tiger was easy.

Now it is even easier. A macOSXHints tip explains how to change an icon not by opening two Inspectors and cutting and pasting between the icon field in each, but simply by dragging and dropping an icon into the icon field of the target app’s Inspector. That’s much quicker.

5. Unlearn words you learnt by mistake

Mac OS X’s spell checker is a wonderful thing, surpassed only by Spell Checker X, now in the process of private Leopard-friendly beta testing and soon to reappear.

But is is possible to learn a word too quickly, a tipster on macOSXHints points out , adding a misspelt word to your dictionary which the spell checker will never again pick up. Now unlearning it is as simple as right-clicking (or “Command-clicking” in the old language) on the offending word and selecting “Unlearn Spelling” from the contextual menu.

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Iconical is a stand-alone app that keeps iCal’s Dock icon up-to-date, whether it is open or not. An updated version, released today, brings new features including one for Leopard users.

Leopard users now enjoy an iCal Dock icon that keeps the correct date even when it is closed (did you notice?), but some people are still using Tiger, I suppose. For them, iconical offers several options in its preferences for keeping iCal’s icon current and a choice of colours:

You can set the Dock to refresh, chose whether iCal should open when the icon is updated or not, and now with the new release, schedule when iconical should run.

It is fun to have an ical icon that is green or blue, it is actually useful to be able to find out what day it is by looking in the Dock instead of moving the mouse to click on the time display in the Menubar.

Leopard users are not left out of the party.

The new release gives Leopard users the option to chance the colour of the icon. A smaller preference pane appears with the choice of red, blue or green. You can see the effect in these before and after shots:

iconical is donation-ware. You can read about it on the developer’s web site , but you will need to download it from MacUpdate or VersionTracker .

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Hawk Wings reader René Boekhorst sent me a nice collection of mail stamp style icons featuring the characters from the Peanuts.

They are not tilted at 11.7 degrees (more or less) like other Mail.app icons, but they are still sweet.

All your best friends are there — Snoopy, Linus, Schroeder and Lucy. Even people I can’t recall at all get an icon (who is Marcie?).

Here they all are:

Changing Mail.app’s Dock icon is easy.

Get them from Pixel Girl’s web site .

I’ve added them to the Hawk Wings Alternative Mail Stamps Icon list, which which now breaks through the 450+ mail stamp icon barrier.

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