In a post that details the various myths doing the rounds on the shrinking apps—no PPC code (false!), smaller binaries (false!), missing language files (false!)—the writer spills the beans:

When you look in Mail.app you see that language files use up most of the disc space. Inside the language folder (e.g. “German.lproj”) are a lot of .nib files (the extension of Interface Builder). Inside normally are two files. One is a very small “keyedobjects.nib” and the other is very big “designable.nib” file… Now the “designable.nib” is gone. It seems like it had no reason other than to give hackers a chance to mess with the application’s UI design.

I guess he is referring to these two files which are inside each (c. 84) folder within every (18) lproj localisation folder, as in this example from the English.lproj GeneralPreferences.nib folder:

Perhaps this is as false an explanation as all the others.

Still, it has enough specifics, specifics that only someone with access to a build of Snow Leopard could know, to lend the story credence. mail.app, apple mail, snow leopard, interface, nib files, apple, mac osxSimilar Posts:

• Snow Leopard Mail.app to be two thirds smaller!
• Three-pane hack for Panther Mail
• Changing Snow Leopard’s Mail Icon
• Fixing a little annoyance in Snow Leopard’s Mail.app
• Mail 2.0′s three different file types

The job description on Apple’s web site says that Cupertino is “looking for someone eager to take iCal to the next level and increase it’s integration with other applications in Mac OS X.”

It goes on: “iCal is a calendar and scheduling tool for Mac OS X that is one of the premiere applications in OS X, and we have great plans.”

I wonder if those plans include unwinding some of the changes made to the interface in Leopard.

Dennis Sellers at MacsimumNews is not the only person who believes that Leopard iCal is a “a downgrade of the product” because of “the extra clicks needed to enter an event or to, for example, correct an entry”.

MacNN takes it further:

Some are saying that this “downgrade” is the sole reason that they can not upgrade to Leopard, and that Apple should ask its users what they need to change instead of doing what it thinks is best for everyone. The largest complaint is that the information ‘bubble’ is too inconvenient to call up – requiring a double-click – in contrast to the old pane that would update as a new event is selected. Almost all are imploring Apple to either modify the current method or to re-instate the drawer, giving users a choice of how they want to use iCal.

If you were King (or Queen) of the iCal Team for a day, what would you ask the new employee to fix first? ical, apple, cupertino, the ical team, leopard, interfaceSimilar Posts:

• Do-It: Creating iCal Events Quickly
• Quickly edit events and to-dos in Leopard iCal
• iCal Events Widget gets Leopardised, tooltips
• Apple Mail Team engineer who blogs!
• Event Maker: iCal events, to dos from an email

It brings mysterious backend changes which enhance “the performance and the usability” of Gmail, as well as new features for contact management and more.

Two things will strike Hawk Wings readers at once.

First, the new interface breaks the Better Gmail Firefox extension. Its keyboard macros, quick navigation, coloured labels, advanced composing options and more make Gmail a pleasure to use.

Luckily Gina Trapani (a productivity goddess) is quick off the mark, and Better Gmail 2.0 is already available, although with a vastly decreased feature set, as she waits for the developers of each feature to update their code. Still, it already contains the keyboard shortcuts which are the key feature for speeding up your Gmail experience.

Secondly, Safari 3.0 is not fully supported. For example, on a cosmetic note, compare the contact manager layout on Google’s blog (top) with how it looks in Safari 3.0 (below):

Other early adopters of Leopard may agree that it is possible to spend too much time on the bleeding edge of innovation. Luckily, you can opt to use the old interface instead by clicking on “Older Version” next to the Settings.gmail, not apple mail, not mail.app, email, firefox, safari, interface, productivitySimilar Posts:

• Switching to Gmail for the simple life
• Add a “Gmail this” bookmarklet to your web browser
• Gmail’s new interface, shortcuts and Safari
• Better Gmail 2: New features, new skins
• Set Gmail as default email app in Firefox 3.0

AppleInsider writer Aiden Malley reports that

The brushed-metal look that first appeared in earnest with Panther has almost completely faded away, according to reports. Well-known holdouts for the style, including Finder, Photo Booth, and Safari, have purportedly abandoned the metallic sheen in favor of the simpler, gradiated style that first appeared in Apple Mail 2.0 and later transferred to Leopard’s version of iChat and the more widely available iTunes 7.

Although the Uno interface hack offers the same unified look across all apps, the Leopard look is slightly darker.

This screenshot shows Spotlight in Tiger with the UNO hack applied in the background, and the new Leopard Spotlight look in the foreground:

Read more at AppleInsider and/or view the screenshots (I am guessing, while you can).mail.app, apple mail, uni, interface, brushed metal, leopard, unified look, mail-likeSimilar Posts:

• The complete Mail-like makeover
• UNO 1.5: Mail.app’s good looks for every app
• Snow Leopard Mail.app to be two thirds smaller!
• Smarter Searches in Leopard Mail
• The rise and rise of the Mail-like look

I was wondering if anyone knows how to edit the color for the unread mail dock icon? Default is red, but I have been messing around with new icons and mine is grey now and doesn’t really stand out.

His problem is complicated by the fact that he is using something called ShapeShifter , a GUI hack from Unsanity that applies “themes” to the whole Mac OS X interface.

If you are not using ShapeShifter, the answer is simple enough. You will find blow-by-blow instructions in an earlier Hawk Wings post.

You can roll your own badges by editing the existing ones in Photoshop.

Or you can take the easy way out. Hawk Wings now hosts a blue set and a green set of mail badges, as well as a mixed set that was once hosted on ResExcellence (R.I.P.?).

Once you get started hacking away at the look of Mail, it can be hard to stop. See “Hacking Mail’s interface” for more interface hatchet goodness.

UPDATE: As Chris points out in the comments, you can also go completely berserk with Dockstar:

(Or, for that matter, with Docktopus.)mail.app, apple mail, interface, icons, mail badges, hacks, new mailSimilar Posts:

• Hacking the look of Mail—badges, icons, mailboxes
• More Apple Mail replacement icons
• Hacking Mail.app’s interface
• Change Apple Mail’s new mail badges
• Vive la différence! More Mail icons

The old interface did a good job, he remembers. It “had amazing support for CSS and standards-based markup”.

But the new client wraps the whole email in a new DIV container:

This process is obviously aimed at foiling any modifications to the .Mac GUI caused by the use of type selectors. And if properly executed it would not impact the appearance of the source email. However, .Mac adds a gratuitous DIV just inside the new #messageCanvas DIV, consequently rendering all CSS useless…

As a result, direct marketers are faced with a dilemma:

So the result is that we’re at an impasse with .Mac: either we support other clients or we support .Mac. The former is the obvious choice, leaving us with .Mac emails looking like those rendered in Gmail and Hotmail. Bummer.

Or not.

(Hawk-eyed readers will notice that a coding work-around for this is presented in the comments to the original post.).Mac, dotmac, webmail, interface, CSS, direct marketing, standardsSimilar Posts:

• Apple previews new .Mac Mail interface
• Yahoo! pulls the plug on POP3 access?
• Bounced emails cost $5 billion a year
• Roundcube: Mail.app-like webmail
• Podcast: MacNotables email client shoot-out

Lifting a quotation from an Ars Technica review of Tiger, he thinks that Mail.app’s inability to do this is characteristic of an email client that is “hideously ugly,” and “inflexible, inconsistent, and again, a little strange.”

If Mail did provide those options, he says, “I would be able to see many more email headers than I can now, and provide myself with a more enjoyable reading experience.”

He creates a mock-up of a wide-screen view and takes the opportunity to serve out the Apple Mail Team for “Mail’s overdesigned UI”.

Who knows?

At one stage the Apple Mail Team was thinking about an Outlook-like wide-screen view, but there is no sign of a native implementation in the Leopard Mail previews.

In the meantime, of course, Aaron needs to get hold of Aaron Harnly’s excellent Letterbox plugin , which does exactly what he wants. (These are two different Aarons, I think.)mail.app, apple mail, Apple GUI, interface, wide-screen, Outlook, pluginSimilar Posts:

• Letterbox (widescreen plugin) for Leopard
• Wide screen plugin for Leopard Mail released
• WideMail 0.1.0: Real Widescreen Preview Column
• Aaron Harnly’s clever Mail.app Plugin Manager
• Correo: A new Camino-flavoured mail client

In brief:

1. Firefox issues when sending mail — Firefox can unexpectedly quit when sending an .Mac webmail message with a large attachment.
2. Entourage folder accents convert to HTML — The webmail interface converts Entourage folders with accents into HTML tags. Advice: Don’t use accents.
3. Scrollbar issues when expanding the Address Book — The interface doesn’t draw scrollbars for an expanded correctly when using the two-pane view.
4. Ways to use the online Address Book to create new messages — Two ways to use the online Address Book to create a new message. And one thing not to do.

.mac, dotmac, apple, technotes, firefox, entourage, accents, address book, interfaceSimilar Posts:

• Apple’s fistful of new MobileMe technotes
• Two Mail technotes updated
• Apple previews new .Mac Mail interface
• Set Gmail as default email app in Firefox 3.0
• Address Book to CSV Exporter

A month ago Apple announced a new look for its webmail service, based on the look of Apple Mail, powered by Ajax and with some keyboard shortcuts à la Gmail thrown in.

In general, the announcement met with cautious welcome, although many wondered if it would be enough to stem criticism of Apple’s online offerings.

Now we can all see for ourselves.

The interface looks just like Mail.app except for an Address Book search field in the bottom left:

Preferences offer further options for two-pane or three-pane viewing, large or small mailbox icons, keyboard shortcuts or not, mailbox behaviours, number of messages to view at a time and more.

The most innovative new thing is the introduction of the single-letter keyboard shortcuts pioneered by the Gmail interface.

No doubt many people will find these more convenient that the multiple-keystroke combinations required in the Desktop app, both easier to remember and easier to execute.

Die-hards like me will find themselves pressing the Desktop combinations and wondering why nothing happens, but we will adjust.

Drag and drop is very smooth and welcome, especially as the webmail interface doesn’t allow for all the plugins one might otherwise use to make filing easier and quicker.

If you have a .Mac account, check in and test it out for yourself. Otherwise see Apple’s pitch on it. Is it all you hoped for?

[Derik DeLong - and just about everyone else - beat me to it]mail.app, apple mail, Dotmac, webmail, interface, gmail, keyboard shortcuts, appleSimilar Posts:

• Gmail’s new interface, shortcuts and Safari
• Every Google web app keyboard shortcut
• Gmail shortcuts in Thunderbird and Fastmail
• Better Gmail 0.8 adds Mail.app skin and more
• Apple previews new .Mac Mail interface

He asks,

I’m sorry, but how old is that screengrab? it looks completely different to my mail.app, is this some of the hawkwings add-ons?

It is. I have modified the look of my Mail.app with two utilities that are easy to use and give (to my mind) a much nicer work environment. Compare these two interfaces:

First, the lozenges in mine (the front one) are gone, thanks to Mail Stamps. Now they are big, bold and brassy, just how I like them.

Harder to see but still noticeable, I have run UNO , system-wide theming utility for OS X that brings the unified Toolbar/Titlebar and lighter metal look of Mail and iTunes to all your skinnable apps.

I like the look. And, of course, once you get the taste for it, it’s hard to stop.

You can replace Mail.app’s Dock icon with one of the 295 alternatives on the Hawk Wings’ icon list, which also contains instructions on how to do it.

You can also replace the new mail badges that appear over the icon in the Dock with one of a number of alternatives.

Using the tips for hacking the Letterbox plugin, you can start to make changes to the nib files which control the layout of Mail.app’s message list and preview pane.

Lastly, if you are really keen, you could replace the mailbox icons with any number of improbable images that appeal to you. Use the Hawk Wings Hasta la Vista icon set, or make something better yourself.

Needless to say, no one in their right mind would try this without having backed things up first.

Go on. Take out the cleaver and make a Mail.app of your own! mail.app, apple mail, interface, hacks, icons, dock, notification badges, mailbox icons, nib filesSimilar Posts:

• Docktopus 1.0.2: Mail badges everywhere!
• An interface hack too far?
• Hacking the look of Mail—badges, icons, mailboxes
• Hawk Wings Mail stamp icon list tops 300+
• New Mail Stamp Icons: Simpsons, Mario Brothers, UK stamps