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, safari

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 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, apple

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, productivity

The current “Tip of the Week” from Apple describes how to email a URL from Safari.

It’s as easy as pressing ⇧⌘I and then sitting back while Mail.app creates a new message containing the link.

That’s it.

I hesitated about posting this, but sometimes tips aren’t as well known as you might think, like using ⌘] and ⌘[ to cycle through the available HTML, Rich Text and plain text views of an email, or using Gmail-like “Conversation” views in Apple Mail.

If you use some other browser, you will have to make your own arrangements. OminWeb users can use a bookmarklet to send a link, Firefox users can customise their toolbar by adding a “Send Link” button and Camino users can uses ⇧⌘L. url, safari, camino, firefox, mail.app, apple mail, keyboard shortcuts, gmail, tips, emailing a link

Evan Williams (“originally from the cornfields of Nebraska” which sounds nice) has produced a handy Gmail shortcut cheatsheet .

It lists all those keyboard shortcuts for Gmail that you can never remember in once convenient printable (or archivable into Yojimbo/SOHO Notes/whatnot) sheet:

You can add it to the Complete Google Apps Cheatsheet, the Thunderbird one, the Entourage cheatsheet and the complete list of Apple Mail shortcuts for a large amount of things to wrap your head around. email, gmail, thunderbird, keyboard shortcuts, productivity, Apple Mail, mail.app

The Dashboard widget xCuts is a keyboard shortcuts reference that lets you easily browse the shortcuts for Mac OS X, Quicksilver and more.

A recent update adds a section for switchers, which gives them easy access to the Mac OS X equivalents for the Windows shortcuts they already know.

To save space, the widget can be collapsed to the small size of the graphic in the top right of this post. When you need it, click on it to expand to the full interface:

Searches can be focussed by category, scope and object. The magic is powered by a MySQL database, accessed over the web with Ajax.

xCuts is freeware and is available from the developer’s web site .

[Thanks, Adrian]keyboard shortcuts, mac osx, productivity, quicksilver, widget, dashboard, not apple mail, apple, switching

Keyboard shortcuts are great time-savers, as everyone knows. The only problem: you need to remember them to save the time.

KeyCue is a nifty little app that will — at a single keystroke (by default the ⌘ key) — list all the available shortcuts for the currently active app, in this case Mail.app and iCal:

Press another modifier key and the screen will highlight the matching keys in yellow. Select the shortcut you couldn’t remember, and the screen disappears.

The app’s Preferences pane offers option to customise the keystroke which calls the app, the contents of the window and when the window should disappear.

KeyCue is shareware (USD 14.99) and is available from the developer’s web site .

[Thanks, Adam] productivity, keyboard shortcuts, keystrokes, time-saving, apple, Mac OS X