Hawk Wings » icons

Highbrow Mail Stamp Icons: Van Gogh, Klimt, Pollock

Tim Gaden — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 10:58:55 +0000

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, pollockSimilar Posts:

Change Snow Leopard’s Mail Icon Back Again

Tim Gaden — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 10:12:22 +0000

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, tipsSimilar Posts:

Changing Snow Leopard’s Mail Icon

Tim Gaden — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 09:50:59 +0000

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, permissionsSimilar Posts:

Canadian Stamp Icon. Old School!

Tim Gaden — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 11:15:38 +0000

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, hacksSimilar Posts:

Roll your own Mail Stamp icon

Tim Gaden — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 10:01:01 +0000

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.

Open the PSD file in Photoshop.

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”.

Images in Mail Stamp icons are rotated 10 degrees counterclockwise (if you are wondering). The rotated image is 368 x 412 pixels in size.

When you have edited the text and dropped in your image, save it off as a PNG file.

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.

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 KegslayerSimilar Posts:

Up-to-date mail stamp icon for Canada

Tim Gaden — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 12:53:30 +0000

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, canadaSimilar Posts:

40 new cartoon animal mail stamp icons

Tim Gaden — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 11:40:34 +0000

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 iconsSimilar Posts:

New Mail Stamp Icons: Simpsons, Mario Brothers, UK stamps

Tim Gaden — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 13:06:54 +0000

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).mail.app, apple mail, icons, dock icon, hack, tips, charlie brown, linus, snoopy, peanuts, woodstockSimilar Posts:

A feast of interesting macOSXHints Tips

Tim Gaden — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 11:47:00 +0000

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 âŒ˜-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.mail.app, apple mail, address book, tips, macosxhints, icons, spell checking, contacts, mailtags, notes, to-dos, productivitySimilar Posts:

iconical: Correct the date on iCal’s Dock icon

Tim Gaden — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 13:29:26 +0000

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 .ical, not apple mail, not mail.app, icons, productivity, dockSimilar Posts: