Hawk Wings » labels

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:

Get nicer looking Thunderbird labels

Tim Gaden — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 12:12:44 +0000

Thomas McMahon has knocked out some styles for the “Stylish” CSS-extension that produce brighter, better looking labels in Thunderbird.

The Stylish extension is a user style manager: “Stylish is to CSS what Greasemonkey is to JavaScript, and unlike other methods of using user styles, most styles take effect immediately.”

When you have installed Stylish, you can follow the instructions on Thomas’s web site to download some pre-made label styles that will turn your Thunderbird labels from this in to this:

And it’s not just a Mac-only solution as Thomas notes:

The new labels code has been tested in Thunderbird 1.5 and 2.0 on Mac and works great. It should work fine under Windows and Linux too.

thunderbird, mozilla, stylish, labels, CSS, hack, extension, not apple mail, not mail.app, emailSimilar Posts:

One thing Thunderbird and Mail.app can’t do

Tim Gaden — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 11:23:55 +0000

Chris Landon emails with a reasonable request, something you don’t miss or even think about until someone else mentions it.

He points out one thing that Thunderbird and Mail.app can’t do, and that’s coloured mailboxes.

He writes:

Do you know if there’s such a plug-in, etc, for color coding a folder? I have over a hundred folders an it makes it difficult to get to a specific folder, quickly. I could have created more sub-folders than the bunch I already have, but this does not help my situation either.

Here’s an example (I was using Thunderbird at the time and it does not have it either)…

Would it also be difficult to write a plug-in for this?

I don’t know of a plugin that does this, nor do I know how difficult it would be to code, but my hunch is a lot of people would use it. mail.app, apple mail, thunderbird, mozilla, mailboxes, colours, labels, pluginSimilar Posts:

Power tips for Thunderbird users

Tim Gaden — Sun, 23 Jul 2006 11:39:47 +0000

Mark Stosberg has posted a list of five power tips for serious Thunderbird users.

When Mark switched from mutt, he was “skeptical that any graphical e-mail program could rival Mutt for performance and efficiency, not to mention the simplicity of accessing it anywhere through a text-based console.”

But Thunderbird surprised him. Not only does it rival mutt, it offers “a number of new workflow improvements, especially easier filtering and labels.”

He outlines how he makes the most of Thunderbird’s filtering and labels to increase his productivity and offers four keyboard-enhancing extensions for Thunderbird.

He rounds his list out with “Master keyboard shortcuts” and a tip on using Unison to sync his Thunderbird folder between multiple Macs.thunderbird, productivity, tips, extensions, keyboard shortcuts, labels, filtering, synching, mutt Similar Posts:

Printing Address Book contacts

Tim Gaden — Thu, 18 May 2006 15:28:17 +0000

Creativebits carries a tip on how to print contacts from Address Book if you need the information and are away from your computer.

Ivan points out that Address Book contains a “Pocket Address Book” printing format.

If you are looking for greater flexibility, it is worth remembering another helpful app that expands your options.

Address Book Reports offers a variety of templates that include Card and Phonebook sizes and well as allowing for custom print-outs (Hipster contact lists, anyone?).

It also does envelopes and labels, and all of that for only USD 15. You can get it from the developer’s web site .

[Via TUAW ]address book, contacts, printing, lists, labels, custom, helpful apps, hipster, productivitySimilar Posts:

Snail Mail 1.4: Smarter, more reliable

Tim Gaden — Thu, 20 Apr 2006 14:26:57 +0000

When last I looked in January, Snail Mail, an app that prints beautiful envelopes from your Address Book contacts, was at version 0.6.7.

Now suddenly it’s at 1.4! In the meantime, it has got smarter about printing Home or Work addresses by default and the current profile correctly remembers the settings you last used each time you open it.

Several printing bugs have been ironed out and other minor improvements implemented.

The finished product looks as good as ever:

Snail Mail is donation-ware and is available from the developer’s web site .address book, printing, contacts, envelopes, labels, plugins, helpful appsSimilar Posts:

GmailStatus: Menubar notification for Gmail

Tim Gaden — Fri, 03 Feb 2006 13:23:53 +0000

GmailStatus is a Menubar app that notifies you of new emails in your Gmail account.

There’s nothing revolutionary about that, but GmailStatus has some nice features that set it apart from GmailNotifier, even after GmailNotifier has been hacked.

Both allow you to manually or automatically check your Gmail account, jump straight to a Compose window or to the Inbox.

But GmailStatus is smarter about labels. It allows you to see the number of new emails by label and to open them in a browser:

It also has support for a user-defined hotkey and shows you your account usage when you hover the mouse of the menubar icon.

It will work through https and http proxies set in the Network settings.

On the other hand, GmailNotifier’s icon is prettier. Function or form? You decide.

The latest version released today (1.0.7) fixes a parsing issue caused by changes at Google’s end.

GmailStatus is donation-ware and is available from the developer’s web site .
menubar, Gmail, notification, labels, proxies, https, account usage, GmailNotifier, emailSimilar Posts:

Address Book Reports 2.0.5: Smarter print-outs

Tim Gaden — Tue, 03 Jan 2006 00:02:56 +0000

You can’t spend all day in front of your computer. Sometimes you need to go out, but you still need to be able to contact people. Enter Address Book Reports.

This app provides flexible and useful print-outs of the contact information in your Address Book. It offers significant improvements on Address Book’s built-in printing.

Its Card and Phonebook styles are ideal for slipping into a Day planner, Filofax or diary.

Address Book Reports also allows for custom page sizes for the reports, so hipster-wielding retro-tech GTD fans are catered for as well. 3″ x 5″ print outs are just a few clicks away.

The main window allows you to chose which fields to print for each report style and whether to print the lot or just specific groups:

The app can also print envelopes (US and international sizes) and labels (Dymo, Avery, even a POSTNET bar code).

Address Book Reports is shareware (USD 15) and available from the developer’s web site, where you can also check out some sample print-outs.Similar Posts:

Coloured labels on the fly for Mail.app

Tim Gaden — Sat, 17 Dec 2005 22:23:30 +0000

Alex Valentine asks, “Please tell me, is there a way to add color labels to your messages, like one can in Eudora?”

Yes, there is. In fact there are at least three ways to do this in Apple Mail:

Use the Label Scripts collection of AppleScripts.

Set up rules in Mail Act-on that will colourise the background of emails in Mail.app on the fly with a keystroke conbination. This is what I do, also setting a MailTags keyword which tells my smart mailboxes what to display.

Use the tutorial and AppleScript provided in this hack on O’Reilly.com.

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