Late last year, I posted about a new plugin for mail.app, miniMail which offers a minimised “iTunes-like” interface for Apple Mail.

Then it was at 1.0.2, now it is at 1.1. And its list of features gets longer and better with each update.

When the plugin is installed, clicking the green bubble in the top left hand corner of Mail results in a mini-interface just like the iTunes option:

It now boasts an impressive array of keyboard shortcuts, mostly the same as mail.app’s own, although it has some of its own:

• Return will open up the individual message in mail
• Spacebar opens up a Preview pane, or “Quickview-esque” view of the message
• Right and Left Arrows move to the previous or next message
• The Command key plus an arrow moves to the first or last message

Here’s a screenshot with the plugin’s Preview Pane on display and the list of supported Mail shortcuts:

It adds its own tab to Mail’s Preference where further options can be set, including displaying the subject and sender on separate lines for greater readability, whether to start Mail with the miniMail interface displayed by default, the font size of the main text and more.

Of course, I am always going to use my Mail beautiful, bold and big (is there a more lovely sight for a Mac user than a fully-tricked out Mail.app doing its thing?), but people who are conscious of screen real estate will love this.

MiniMail is shareware (USD 9) but offers a 30 day free demo. You can get it from the developer’s web site .

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MiniMail is a plugin that allows Mail.app users to minimise Mail’s interface into an “iTunes like” mini-format, instead of to the Dock. It must have come out when I was on a break from Hawk Wings, so a new Leopard-ready release gives me a chance to look it over.

It installs as a classical Mail mailbundle. When active, clicking on the Green “+” button in the top left hand corner of Mail.app, reduces the interface to space-saving proportions:

It features a Get Mail, New Mail and Options menu with the most frequently used actions, as well as providing support behind the scenes for all of Mail’s keyboard shortcuts:

The pane itself can be resized to the dimensions that suit the user.

It also offers options in a pane within MAil Preferences which allows the user to chose which mailboxes to monitor for new messages:

MiniMail is shareware (USD 9) although it offers a 30 day free demo. You can get it from the developer’s web site .

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Nick Flood posts a problem in the user forums at HEXUS:

I stupidly deleted mail.app and I now need it. I can’t find the download anywhere on the internet.

Can anyone help me out?

Once upon a time, you had to get hold of Pacifist , a neat little app that extracts applications from packages, disk images and archives.

You could use it to navigate through your original OS X discs to find Mail.app, extract and install it.

But now (and not everyone knows this) there is an easier way.

Tiger allows for the “custom installation” of individual apps without the need for third-party helpers.

Just insert your installation disks and follow the instructions in this Apple technote, “Custom installs in Mac OS X 10.4″ :

This custom reinstall option can also be used with Address Book, iCal, iChat, iTunes and Safari.

Of course, sometimes Mail.app is so buggered up with hacks, scripts, plugins and add-ons that you may want to delete it and re-install on purpose.

An earlier Hawk Wings post (see “The Final Solution: Reinstalling Mail.app“) covers the steps to do that successfully.

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Looking for a bit of spice in your iApps? Cian Walsh’s iLust icon set might be just what you are looking for.

He describes them modestly as “simply an experiment in how much you can run with a theme before it grinds to a complete halt”.

Naturally the ones that interest me the most are the icons for Mail.app (a ‘love letter theme’), iCal (a calendar complete with pin-up girl) and Address Book (a “little black book”, of course):

But the rest of the icons carry on the cheeky theme nicely, from the Martini-decorated iTunes replacement to the DVD in a brown paper bag for iDVD:

The iLust icon set is free and is available from Cian’s web site .

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OmniGrowl is described by its developer as “an expandable framework for sending Growl Notifications for applications that do not natively support Growl”.

(Growl is a pop-up notification system for OS X that installs itself as a Preference Pane. Depending on how you work, Growl can either enhance your productivity or distract you to death.)

Once installed, users can set it through Growl’s main preferences to provide alerts from iCal, Address Book, iTunes, power status changes (battery or AC), RSS feed alerts, SMART hard-drive failure reports, alerts from Software Update and more.

It offers a full range of options for iCal alerts, each of which can be set independently or even switched-off altogether: Alerts for iCal events in one hour, 30 minutes or 10 minutes, alerts for all-day events and to-dos the day before.

Alerts can also be set for birthdays stored in Address Book and iCal.

In deference to GrowlTunes and other modules which display iTunes track changes, its iTunes settings are turned off by default. Still, the developer includes it as a way of making OmniGrowl a comprehensive app and potentially to reduce the number of apps one needs to run.

It can also display hourly alerts from RSS feeds. CNN, BBC and The New York Times are included by default, but the interface makes it easy to add extra feeds (up to 16 in total) that you particularly want to keep an eye on.

A recent update adds support for AFP alerts, “a pretty specialized need” that lets you know when AFP users connect or disconnect to your computer.

If you live in Canada (oddly the home of a disproportionate number of Mail.app-related developers), it now also tells you about local concerts and events by polling the Canadian OnTour web site.

It is open source and designed with customisation in mind (source code and some instructions included).

OminGrowl is donation-ware and available from the developer’s web site .

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Scott Little has released a substantial update to his SignatureProfiler plugin for Apple Mail, which manages signatures and adds extra features like iTunes info and account-specific tail signatures.

The new version (1.3) adds the option to insert a variety of Skype images into your sig, new placeholders for images and hyperlinks in your sigs, greater stability and more.

Most usefully of all, it now allows you to add HTML and CSS to signatures without all the messing around with cryptically-named files like 92768111-8FA1-4572-977D-C94D7A5FDB9A.webarchive that was involved in previous signature hacks like this and this .

Now, creating fancy signatures is much easier. A new contextual menu in SignatureProfiler for Mail’s signature preference pane makes it fast, easy and error-free:

You can drop an HTML file or a webarchive right into the signature you want. Options to add an obscured email address and other fields which SignatureProfiler fills in when constructing the signature means that you can construct great signatures in minutes:

Of course, this will appeal most to fans of Rich Text emails rather than to old fuddy-duddies like me.

Still, the ability to add info about your iTunes habits, account-specific tail signatures and other features of the plugin do not break the sacred bonds of plain text brotherhood, so there is lots for every Mail.app user to enjoy here.

SignatureProfiler is donation-ware and it is available from Scott’s web site .

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