Hawk Wings » iTunes

miniMail interface gets better and better

Tim Gaden — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 11:01:37 +0000

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 . mail.app, apple mail, itunes, interface hack, plugin, keyboard shortcutsSimilar Posts:

MiniMail 1.0.2: Leopard ready and smarter

Tim Gaden — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 14:30:22 +0000

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 . mail.app, apple mail, itunes, interface hack, plugin, keyboard shortcutsSimilar Posts:

What to do after deleting Mail.app by mistake

Tim Gaden — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 11:46:16 +0000

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. mail.app, apple mail, custom install, ical, address book, reinstall, ichat, itunes, safariSimilar Posts:

A cheeky set of iApp replacement icons

Tim Gaden — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 11:34:56 +0000

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 . icons, mail.app, apple mail, ical, address book, iapps, itunes, a little bit naughty, a little bit niceSimilar Posts:

OmniGrowl: Growl alerts from iCal, RSS feeds and more

Tim Gaden — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 12:12:59 +0000

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 .productivity, notifications, ical, address book, itunes, growl, alerts, rss, Similar Posts:

SignatureProfiler 1.3: Skype, HTML, CSS, images, hyperlinks and more

Tim Gaden — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 13:14:43 +0000

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 .mail.app, apple mail, signatures, CSS, HTML, plugins, iTunesSimilar Posts:

Signature Profiler: Clever signature plugin for Mail.app

Tim Gaden — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 11:55:10 +0000

Scott Little has written a clever plugin that manages signatures in Mail.app and adds extra features like iTunes info and account-specific tail signatures.

When the bundle is installed (Scott provides specific plugins for Panther and Tiger Mail) and configured, its options can create quick distinct outgoing signatures from the same signature file:

As he explains,

Basically what this plugin does for you is add the ability to have replaceable tags in your signatures that are context sensitive to the Mail account that you are sending from. In addition, you can have it autofill information from iTunes into a signature as well.

For example, by adding placeholders like {itunes.display.info} to a signature in Mail’s signature preferences, you create a tagline that can be added to emails sent from any of your accounts which you specify:

It’s a clever idea. Although Scott hasn’t tested it on an Intel Mac, the Tiger bundle seems to work fine on my MacBook Pro.

It adds another set of options to other tips for creating HTML signatures and CSS signatures in Mail.app.

The plugin is donation-ware and available from Scott’s web site . mail.app, apple mail, plugins, signatures, itunes, tipsSimilar Posts:

Four things I didn’t know about Apple

Tim Gaden — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 13:30:32 +0000

Yesterday Apple Australia kindly flew me up to Sydney for a look around its corporate headquarters and for a very interesting two-hour press presentation from Mr iPod and Mr Hardware. (Mr Software is at WWDC, so I didn’t hear from him.)

In the course of the day, I discovered four new things about Apple that I didn’t know before.

1. The black MacBook is intended to be a 12″ PowerBook replacement

I had the chance to ask Mr Hardware as he was presenting the now complete range of Intel Macs whether anything was coming to replace the 12″ PowerBook.

He told me that Apple has received a lot of feedback from users about the need for a small notebook with a “more professional look”. Apple made a conscious decision to meet that demand with the black MacBook, giving those users the look they wanted at the cost of a slight hit in performance and features. Is that why they cost more?

2. Only 26% of Mac users do backups, 4% use automated solutions.

Of course, you know at one level that the numbers are low, but it is still a shock to see just how low they are.

Those who have watched the keynote will know that Leopard’s Time Machine is designed to increase these numbers dramatically.

Will it work? I don’t think so. The current ability to automate backups with Backup 3.0 and the plethora of third-party automated backup options haven’t brought large numbers of users to the party. This won’t either. It’s not the technical ability that’s missing; it’s the personal habit.

Dear reader, for the love of God get yourself into that 4%. Don’t read the other two things I didn’t know about Apple. Go now and check out DejÃ Vu or BackityMac or SuperDuper! or, if you have a .Mac account, Apple’s own Backup.

3. iTunes prints really nice CD covers.

I use iTunes a lot, but it never occurred to me to visit its Print menu. Mr iPod demonstrated how easy it is to make jewel case covers in iTunes and how nice the final result looks:

4. Steve Jobs doesn’t trust people who use words as a tool of their trade

At the airport I picked up a copy of Jeffrey Young and William Simon’s iCon: The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2005) (Amazon ) to read on the plane.

On the homeward flight I discovered an answer to the mystery about the lack of communication between engineers and development teams at Apple and journalists, bloggers and third-party developers (after all, code is words).

When Steve Jobs returned to Apple and became Interim CEO in 1997, he

…quickly saw things that he didn’t like. His predecessors in the CEO’s office has never figured out how to take the reins in a commanding manner…. He set about changing the culture of Apple. Some of the changes were small (no dogs at work, no smoking), and some where whoppers, such as the absolute ban on talking to anyone outside the company who uses words as a tool of his trade. (The one exception: it was okay as long as you has a public relations dog-watcher sitting at your side and yanking your leash whenever she wanted you to stop talking.)

apple, steve jobs, itunes, not apple mail, macbook, words, culture change, backup, thanks Fiona, iPodSimilar Posts:

Griffin’s Proxi and Mail.app

Tim Gaden — Wed, 12 Apr 2006 12:40:43 +0000

This morning on TUAW I read about Griffin’s Proxi, which has been released as a public beta.

Griffin is using it as a utility for working with its various hardware products like the PowerMate and Radio Shark.

But the reach of the app is much wider. Proxi is in fact a kind of FastScripts / HotKeys / Growl / Quicksilver mash-up. It performs some of the functions of all those utilities, without totally replacing any of them.

Proxi comes with pre-built scripts and “blueprints” to interact with a number of apps—iChat, Mail.app, iTunes and Skype—as well as general AppleScript and application launcher abilities.

Because this is Hawk Wings, we are interested mainly in Mail.app. After the jump you will find some screenshots and two quick suggestions on how it works with Mail in useful ways.

For Mail it offers a notification system to replace utilities like iAlert, GrowlMail or MailAppetizer.

The editor offers you lots of options constructing for the format of the notification for yourself:

Click on image for a larger view

It offers pre-made fields like subject, name, account and so forth that you can drag and drop onto the screen where you want them. You also have full control over the text, colour, layout and font. A notification template can be constructed in a few minutes:

Proxi also offers a hotkeys option that can launch AppleScripts. Here it is launching the “Change SMTP Servers” script , one of Andreas Amann’s Mail Scripts , that I have to run every morning:

There is a lot more to say about Proxi. Particularly nice are the iTunes notifications.

Because you are able to control the size of the graphic in the notification of new tracks, you can get a nice big flash from the album graphic.

There is also a pre-packaged applescript for displaying the CPU load and memory usage of your apps at a single keystroke and another to append material to the clipboard.

Griffin maintains a wiki with many more tips and tricks. There is also a blog, which among other things carries a post on how to make your own Proxi plugins (if you know a bit of Cocoa).

It is still in beta, but the opportunities seem to be enormous. Download it and play with it yourself.mail.app, apple mail, itunes, ichat, notification, applescript, proxi, griffin, application launcher, hotkeysSimilar Posts:

Betalogue ponders slow death of plain text

Tim Gaden — Tue, 04 Apr 2006 14:34:14 +0000

Pierre Igot at Betalogue got the Red Hot Chilli Peppers promotional email from the iTunes Music Store today.

It prompts him to provide a good / cranky summary (depending on whether you are a plain text / HTML person) of reasons to dislike HTML emails.

He also wonders whether emails like this are a sign that plain-texters are on the verge of extinction:

…itâ€™s yet another sign that plain-text e-mail is becoming more and more neglected…. Sooner or later, I guess that I too will be forced to switch to HTML e-mail. It really annoys me, because I believe that my reasons for preferring plain-text e-mail are perfectly valid and will remain so for many years to come. But if plain-text e-mail becomes less and less usable, we simply wonâ€™t have any other alternative. And Apple will have a certain amount of responsibility in this.

email, plain text, html, RTF, mail.app, apple mail, itunesSimilar Posts: