Klimt? Van Gogh? Jackson Pollock? O’Keeffe?

It’s not every day that you get a chance to dress up your Mail.app stamp icon with high art, but deviantART user fruit4dinner gives you the chance.

He (or she) has created four replacement mail stamp icons for mail.app featuring “The Kiss” by Gustav Klimt, “Starry Night” by Vincent Van Gogh, “Poppy” By Georgia O’Keeffe (a modern American artist — Wikipedia ) and “Convergence” by Jackson Pollock:

The icons are only presented as PNG image files on deviantART.

I have converted them into ICNS files, bundled them up and offer them to you here as a zip file. Enjoy!

Of course, if you are looking for something different and High Art doesn’t appeal, you can always look at today’s Simpsons Icon Bonzana-rama post or roll your own icon, following instructions in an earlier Hawk Wings post.

Or snag one from Hawk Wing’s list of 509 (now 513!) replacement icons.

Luckily, Replacing Mail.app’s icon is easy. Apple Mail, apple mail tips, hacks, icons, mail.app, Photoshop, stamp icons, van gogh, klimt, okeeffe, pollock

Eventually, having changed Snow Leopard Mail’s icon to something you like, you might want to change it back to the default image—perhaps you’re tired of the new one, perhaps you need a vanilla Desktop for freelance work, or whatever.

It’s not too hard.

Find mail.app in the Applications folder, highlight it and open up its Inspector pane (⌘-I).

Then follow the first two steps in the first post to unlock and change the permissions. Then all you need to do is highlight the image in the top lefthand corner, and press the Delete key. The image reverts to the previous one.

Remember again to change the permissions back at the end.

Now it’s as if you never made the change:

[John in the comments points out how an earlier version of this post used a sledgehammer to crack a walnut. Thanks!]
Apple Mail, mail.app, icons, stamp, hack, tweak, customize, tips

Snow Leopard is full of little surprises.

Last night, I posted an icon of Canada’s first ever mail stamp as a mail.app icon, and simply assumed that the tried and true way of changing it through the Inspectors still works. It doesn’t.

As Chocky helpfully points out in the comments (thanks!), the permissions of the core apps in Snow Leopard have been tightened so that you can’t by default copy and paste over the image of the icon in Apple Mail’s Inspector pane anymore.

However, all is not lost. I first tried brute force. I copied over the icon in Mail’s application package. That works fine, but is a little involved.

Fortunately, a few, simple additional steps can make the old method work again.

First, close Mail. Find Mail in the Applications folder, and press ⌘-I (Command + i) to bring up the Inspector pane.

Step One: Unlock it by clicking on the padlock in the bottom righthand corner of the pane. You will need to authenticate.

Step Two: Change the permissions listed for “everyone” from “Read only” “to Read & write”.

Step Three: Proceed as normal under the old method. Copy (⌘-C) the image of the icon that you want to use from the top lefthand corner of its Inspector, Select the Mail icon in its Inspector and paste (⌘-V) the new image over.

Step Four: Remember to change the permissions back to what they were.

All done! I’ve tried this three times now, and it’s worked every time. At the end of the process you have the new hand-crafted icon on Snow Leopard’s Mail:

If, on second thoughts, the new icon looks terrible, it’s easy to change it back again. Apple Mail, hacks, mail.app, icons, stamp icon, snow leopard, permissions

Hawk Wings reader Richard Drdul sends an image of a very Old School Canadian postage stamp, drawn up as a Mail stamp icon.

It is, he tells me, Canada’s first ever postage stamp issued in 1851, and was designed by Sir Sandford Fleming, who also invented time zones.

It was also the first official postage stamp in the world to picture an animal.

The postmark reads “Greetings from Upper Canada,” which is what the province of Ontario (where Apple’s Canadian HQ is) used to be called.

You can download the original PNG file or the ICNS file here.

Changing the icon itself is easy. (UPDATE: Unless you are using Snow Leopard, in which case it is not so easy, but can still be done. I’ll post a a Snow Leopard guide tonight.)

I’ve added it to the list of alternative stamp icons for Mail.app, making a total now of 509.

[Thanks, Richard]mail.app, apple mail, icons, stamp icons, hacks

Rolling your own Mail stamp icon is fun. Hawk Wings has covered it before. But now there is a much better Photoshop template that makes the whole process even easier.

The template was created by chekkz and is hosted on her DeviantART page where you can download it.

Then it’s simple as shooting fish in a barrel.

1. Open the PSD file in Photoshop.
2. Everything can be edited, including the text around the postmark. To edit the text, select the text layer in the Inspector, select the text tool on the left, and place the cursor in the existing text. Edit away. The default icon carries the text” Hello from Cupertino CA”.
3. Images in Mail Stamp icons are rotated 10 degrees counterclockwise (if you are wondering). The rotated image is 368 x 412 pixels in size.
4. When you have edited the text and dropped in your image, save it off as a PNG file.
5. Then you need one of the many free utilities that convert PNG files into ICNS format. I use img2icns by Shiny Frog. Drop the PNG file into its interface.
6. You’re done.

The possibilities are endless. You can make something scary that will grab your attention first thing in the morning:

Something sleek and professional might be what you need, a reminder of who is paying you to deal with all these emails:

Or something altogether more soft and cuddly like, say, a snow leopard:

Replacing the default icon is easy. Just follow the steps in a previous Hawk Wings post.

Then you have a nice icon in the Dock which is all yours:

Of course, if you can’t be bothered, you can always pick one from the 508+ icons I’ve collected on the Hawk Wings Mail stamp icons page which is about to expand further when I add the ones that have appeared in the last year.

If your creations are top notch, drop me an email and I’ll put them up on Hawk Wings for everyone to use and enjoy.

Hmmm…. Maybe we should have a competition, and try to get celebrity judges like Merlin Mann, John Gruber and that crowd. Now the blogging cogs are turning again!mail.app, apple mail, icons, stamp icons, hacks, tips, photoshop, Borka Kegslayer

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. mail.app, apple mail, mail stamp, icons, hacks, canada

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).mail.app, apple mail, icons, dock icon, hack, tips, animals, cartoons, tiger, chicken, hawk, monkey, stamp icons