Hawk Wings » keyboard shortcuts

Notify plugin: New features, 30% discount

Tim Gaden — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 22:34:10 +0000

The email notification utility Notify has just been updated.

The new release comes with a slew of new features, including keyboard shortcuts, the ability to grab photos from Address Book for its Growl notifications, smarter options for message reading and handling and better support for plain text.

Notify is at the feature-rich “high end” of the spectrum for email notifiers. Like MailCue , it is almost a mini-email client in itself.

It offers built-in support for Gmail and Google Apps, MobileMe, Rackspace and “ordinary” IMAP accounts:

The interface is minimal and well-crafted, offering options to read, delete or move messages in the menubar drop-down pane:

Buttons across the top recheck the account, launch the message in the webmail client or offer a full preview in Notify.

This new release (2.1.3) adds support for keyboard shortcuts but they are not — as far as I could see — documented. This leads to much fun with guessing and trial and error.

Preferences allow the user to set defaults for frequency of checking and message handling:

It also integrates with Growl, which does the heavy lifting for the notifications themselves.

The notifications comes in the style of Growl’s “smoky glass” Bezel.

Some people swear by the productivity and focus gains of using notifiers rather than email clients to monitor email traffic.

I am not entirely convinced. I remain a great fan of Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero approach (he’s writing a book! ), with its stress on reducing the intrusiveness of email checks in your work. In my experience, he is right that,

“always on” email checkers have a tendency not only to blow a lot of unnecessary time and attention on scanning the horizon, but that the quality of their resulting email work often suffers.”

Still, if you have a cast-iron will and you’re looking for a notification utility, this one is nice.

Notify is shareware and is available from the developer’s web site . It normally costs USD 10, but is currently on sale for 30% less.

Of course, mail.appetizer also creates lovely notifications and is now (in beta form) compatible with 10.6.4. And it’s donationware.Similar Posts:

Keyboard Shortcut to add hyperlinks in Mail.app

Tim Gaden — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 12:48:58 +0000

Hawk Wings reader Adam sends in this tip for creating a custom keyboard shortcut that adds a hyperlink to an email in Mail.app without the need to go searching through its menu options.

Hawk Wings has covered creating bespoke shortcuts before as well as the virtues of moving around in Mail.app using only the keyboard. Few things do more to speed up your email workflow.

So, you can never post often enough about keyboard shortcuts, and this is a good one.

Adam writes:

In Mail.app I wanted ⌘K to be my shortcut for adding a link in the body of a message. But the command is usually only available via the submenu Link > Add… under the Edit menu. On a whim, I went to System Preferences > Keyboard & Mouse > Keyboard Shortcuts, hit the plus sign and in the box for Menu Title entered “Add…” (no quotes, and using Option-Semicolon for the elipsis). It worked!

If you are a visual learner, this screenshot of the process Adam describes might help too:

Mail.app then kindly adds the new shortcut to your menu, so that you never forget it:

Once you get the taste for it, you won’t want to stop there. Add another to insert a bulleted list (if you go for those):

Of course, both these examples are for Rich Text people. I can’t bring myself to abandon plain text — there’s something noble about it, something efficient, something respectful of the recipient’s settings for displaying text; it’s the way our forefathers did email.

But I recognise that I am a dinosaur in these matters.

Great tip, Adam. Thanks! mail.app, apple mail, tips, hyperlinks, keyboard shortcuts, productivity, bulleted lists, customisingSimilar Posts:

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:

Script to Show/Hide Preview Pane in Mail

Tim Gaden — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 09:00:57 +0000

After switching to mail.app from Thunderbird, the blogger at 48-Hour Days found that that she (or he) couldn’t live without Thunderbird’s F8 keyboard shortcut for showing and hiding the Preview Pane.

As everyone knows, you can show or hide it in Apple Mail by double-clicking the small dot in the separator between the Mail Viewer and the Preview Pane — Apple’s Technote shows you how.

But if that is not quick enough for you, 48-Hour Days provides an applescript that will automate the process and which can be bound to a Quicksilver trigger or FastScript’s shortcut.

Only hardcore keyboard fanatics will want to use this, but there are people like that out there, and this post is for them. mail.app, apple mail, thunderbird, keyboard shortcuts, applescript, preview pane, tipsSimilar 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:

Better Gmail 0.8 adds Mail.app skin and more

Tim Gaden — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 11:54:00 +0000

Gina Trapani at Lifehacker has done all Gmail users an enormous favour with her Better Gmail extension for Firefox.

She has taken some of the best Greasemonkey scripts for Gmail and rolled them into a more user-friendly extension that adds (among other things): coloured labels, a mind-bending array of extra keyboard shortcuts, a fixed font option, larger attachment icons, skins and more.

It almost converted me. Almost.

Now the latest version (0.8) adds even more goodies — bottom posting for replies, Google Reader integration, fixed conversation previews, and a Mail.app skin:

Each option can be enabled or not as you like from the extension’s preferences.

Needless to say, with the labels feature and the extra keyboard shortcuts that Better Gmail provides, it is not very difficult to hack up a very efficient “Getting Things Done” (GTD) system, which doesn’t have all the polish of the tailor-made GTDInbox (formerly GTDMail) extension , but not everyone needs that kind of power.

It also makes managing mailing lists the work of a new keystrokes and can filter work emails from personal emails quickly and easily.

I could go on and on.

Marriage is for life, we like to hope. Mail.app and me are forever (obviously), but — golly! — the occasional harmless flirt with Better Gmail is diverting! Try it out for yourself.gmail, mail.app, skins, email, labels, keyboard shortcuts, productivity, GTS, Getting things done, webmail, alluringSimilar Posts:

Moving around Mail with the keyboard alone

Tim Gaden — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 14:13:30 +0000

Michael Boyle finds Mail frustrating to get around in.

He asks:

Why oh Why can’t Apple Mail allow me to navigate with the arrow keys the way NetNewsWire does? The relationship between the feeds pane and each feed’s posts in NNW is so fast and intuitive; whereas there seems to be no relationship between the mailboxes pane and the message panes in Apple Mail.

I am happy to admit that driving NetNewsWire with the keyboard alone is a pleasure.

However, it can also be done in Mail, even if the process is not quite as intuitive.

If you are keyboard-only kind of person, see an earlier Hawk Wings post “Moving around Mail.app using the keyboard“.mail.app, apple mail, Tips, keyboard shortcuts, tab key, conversations, netnewswire, productivitySimilar Posts:

Gmail’s new interface, shortcuts and Safari

Tim Gaden — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 13:06:44 +0000

A poster on MacOSXHints makes a good point about the new Gmail interface and Safari.

Although Gmail’s new right-hand menu doesn’t work in Safari, the keyboard shortcuts for the options it contains work fine.

And they are, of course, “r” for Reply, “a” for Reply All and “f” for Forward.

Keyboard shortcuts are great. Although the jury is still out on whether they actually make you faster or just make you feel faster, just feeling faster is good.

So, it’s worth expanding these three to include all the keyboard tricks in a nice, complete and printable list of Gmail shortcuts .

Or if you are a real Google fanatic, the Complete Google Apps Cheatsheet .

Desktop email client fanatics like me will find it useful to know about the Thunderbird one (PDF) , the Entourage cheatsheet (PDF) and the complete list of Apple Mail shortcuts (PDF). email, gmail, thunderbird, keyboard shortcuts, productivity, Apple Mail, mail.app, safariSimilar Posts:

New .Mac mail interface is here

Tim Gaden — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 03:27:28 +0000

The promised new-look interface for .Mac Mail is here and it looks good.

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 Ã 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:

Moving around Mail.app using the keyboard

Tim Gaden — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 13:13:27 +0000

A poster on macOSXHints explains how to move around Mail.app’s interface using the keyboard.

Like the keyboard shortcut for emailing a URL in Safari, this is another tip that may not be as well-known as it should be. A number of people emailed to say that they would like to see more “basic tips” on Hawk Wings, so I’m going to town on this one. Power users turn away now….

You can use the tab key to switch between the three areas of Mail.app’s interface — (1) the Mailbox Viewer, (2) The Message List Viewer, the (3) Preview Pane and the search field in the Toolbar:

The arrow keys help you to move around within each area. For example, as the poster on macOSXHints points out,

if you use Organize by Thread (from the View menu or otherwise) and the thread is collapsed, a shortcut to expand the thread and automatically select the first unread email in that thread is to have that thread selected, then just tap the right arrow.

You can now navigate up and down the thread with the arrows and re-collapse it with the left arrow.

You can navigate around, expand and contract mailboxes in the Mailbox Viewer in the same way.

These tips can save you time as you learn to work without the need for a mouse. You can save yourself more scrolling and dragging and dropping by using Mail Act-on to file emails with a keyboard shortcut.

Mail Type Select offers even more efficiency. With this plugin installed, the Message List Viewer will jump to the first match for any text string you type in just like Finder. Nifty!

[P.S. An Intel version of ecto 2.4.1 is out, in which this was posted for old time's sake. Via TUAW ]mail.app, apple mail, Tips, keyboard shortcuts, tab key, conversations, threaded view, productivitySimilar Posts: