Eagle-eyed Hawk Wings reader Dave Foshee emails to say that he has spotted a Leopard-friendly beta version of GrowlMail.

He found the link in a post on the Google Groups Discussion list for Growl.

The poster is offering it as a beta and asking for feedback on how well it works.

It works very well for me, so I encourage you to give it a go yourself, especially if you are looking for a slick, visual notification summary of your email.

Of course, you will need to install Growl first.

[Thanks, Dave!]apple mail, leopard mail, mail.app, growl, growlmail, leopard, notification, plugins

Daniel Parnell has released an initial Leopard-friendly version of HTTPMail (1.50), a plugin for Mail.app that fools Hotmail and MSN web-based email accounts into downloading POP emails into Mail.

It basically does the same thing as MacFreePOPs, now also released for Leopard.

The plugin comes in a disk image with an installer and a detailed PDF on how to use it.

Daniel provides a handy list of how far the Leopard development has come:

He also outlines how to set up a Hotmail account in Mail.app using the plugin. He reminds users that older free Hotmail and MSN accounts will probably work but that newer one may need to be upgraded to Hotmail Plus .

HHTPMail is freeware and available from Daniel’s web site (but not yet from its sourceforge page ). microsoft, httpmail, hotmail, msn, plugins, mail.app, apple mail, email, leopard

Spanning Sync has released a new version (1.1.3) of its iCal-Google Calendar syncing utility, which offers several significant stability improvements.

In particular this release makes large syncing attempts more reliable and less memory-intensive.

Also, in Leopard it now allows the syncing of iCal-Address Book’s Birthday calendar, as well as CalDAV and subscribed calendars.

The developers are quick to point out, however, that Leopard users are still experiencing problems, ranging from data loss to minor annoyances. They offer a short and a lengthy explanation and some tips on how to unstick Leopard iCal when things go wrong.

Spanning Sync casts USD 25 for one year and USD 65 for a life-time licence, although a free trial copy is available from its web site .gmail, google calendar, ical, address book, syncing, leopard, caldav

Engadget has published the results of its shoot-out between Vista and Leopard. Naturally, Mail.app and iCal win over Windows Mail and Windows Calendar.

In fact, to cut to the chase, Leopard wins the features shoot-out with 46 points to Vista’s 41.

Thinking about this exercise put me in mind of Umberto Eco’s well-known comparison between Macs and PCs, which he published in the Italian news magazine Espresso in 1994.

It is worth quoting at length:

…Insufficient consideration has been given to the new underground religious war which is modifying the modern world. It’s an old idea of mine, but I find that whenever I tell people about it they immediately agree with me.

The fact is that the world is divided between users of the Macintosh computer and users of MS-DOS compatible computers. I am firmly of the opinion that the Macintosh is Catholic and that DOS is Protestant. Indeed, the Macintosh is counter-reformist and has been influenced by the ‘ratio studiorum’ of the Jesuits. It is cheerful, friendly, conciliatory, it tells the faithful how they must proceed step by step to reach–if not the Kingdom of Heaven–the moment in which their document is printed. It is catechistic: the essence of revelation is dealt with via simple formulae and sumptuous icons. Everyone has a right to salvation.

DOS is Protestant, or even Calvinistic. It allows free interpretation of scripture, demands difficult personal decisions, imposes a subtle hermeneutics upon the user, and takes for granted the idea that not all can reach salvation. To make the system work you need to interpret the program yourself: a long way from the baroque community of revellers, the user is closed within the loneliness of his own inner torment.

You may object that, with the passage to Windows, the DOS universe has come to resemble more closely the counter-reformist tolerance of the Macintosh. It’s true: Windows represents an Anglican-style schism, big ceremonies in the cathedral, but there is always the possibility of a return to DOS to change things in accordance with bizarre decisions; when it comes down to it, you can decide to allow women and gays to be ministers if you want to…..

And machine code, which lies beneath both systems (or environments, if you prefer)? Ah, that is to do with the Old Testament, and is talmudic and cabalistic…

Which is more whimsical: the attempt to compare the feature sets of Vista and Leopard on the assumption that they rest on some notional level playing field or structuralism gone wild in correlating computers with Christian denominations?

What spirit of prophecy lead Eco to pair Anglicanism’s current troubles so precisely with the ever-increasing torment of Windows users? apple, not apple mail, not mail.app, windows, vista, leopard, catholicism, protestantism, Anglicanism, whimsy, switching, conversion

Hmmm… Ever published a blog post, only to discover a better solution thirty seconds later?

The iCal Events widget has been updated for Leopard and now sports a more pretty interface.

The developer says that on Leopard the widget is “dramatically less processor- and memory-intensive” that it was under Tiger.

It pulls your events out of iCal and displays them, nicely colour-coded, for today and as many days into the future as you care to set in the preferences on the reverse of the widget.

Clicking an event takes you to it in iCal. It now also features a useful tooltip. Hover your mouse over the event and it displays the contents of the notes field and the location in the widget’s status bar.

The Preference Pane on the back also allows you to select which calendars the widget will pull events from.

iCal Events is freeware and available from the developer’s web site .ical, widgets, dashboard, events, leopard, productivity

I’ve been using Leopard for long enough now to collect five tips that save me time and effort. Let me pass them on to you.

Find emails faster in Leopard Mail

Before Leopard it was possible to find emails in the list view of a mailbox faster by using the Mail Type Select plugin. With this installed, Mail.app jumped to the first message that matched your keystrokes, just as Finder does. So typing “Ros” quickly found the first email in the mailbox from Rosemary.

Now this feature is built into Leopard Mail by default. Try it out. It makes a difference.

Do your sums faster

Now that I am a Dean and need to set and manage budgets, I need to do sums more than ever before. A nice new feature in the Spotlight window, does your sums for you.

Just type in an equation, say, “12 * 34″ and Spotlight goes to Calculator and does the sum for you, giving you the answer in the Spotlight results. Nifty.

Edit iCal to-dos and events faster

In Tiger you could edit events and to-dos from the information pane. Now, iCal’s sidebar has gone to God. To edit an iCal item, you need to double-click it, wait for the details pane and then click again on the edit button on the bottom.

These extra clicks add up over time. Especially if, like me, you live in a fluid world in which tasks and meetings are always changing.

Luckily, there is a short cut to get straight to editing an event or a to-do.

Click once on the iCal item to highlight it. Then press ⌘-e (Command + ‘e’) and you launch into an edit dialog straight away.

Create better iCal events in Mail faster

Hovering the mouse over a name or details of an event in Leopard Mail activates Leopard’s Data Detector and produces a drop box with the option to add it to Address Book or iCal.

That’s pretty smart, but there is something even smarter lurking here.

If you block all a contact’s information before you hover over the name, for example, or details of an event for iCal, the data detector pastes all the information into the new contact’s or event’s notes field.

Get more out of iCal’s Dashboard Widget

The iCal Widget in Leopard has a secret up its sleeve. If you click on it once, it displays the monthly calendar we all knew and loved in Tiger.

Click on it once more, and it pulls your events for the day out into a third pane:

I get this information more easily from MenuCalendarClock, but if I didn’t have it, I’d value it here. UPDATE: Thirty seconds after posting this I found a smarter Dashboard solution.

[Via macOSXHints , TUAW , trial and error and poking around]mail.app, apple mail, ical, leopard, productivity, tips, dashboard, events, to-dos, calculator, spotlight, apple, widget

In a post on his web site , Chris Messina wonders why Apple doesn’t extend its Coverflow technology as a way of “browsing people”.

Formerly a member of the development team for Flock (“The Social Browser”), he once toyed with idea himself.

He has mocked up a vision of how this might look in Address Book:

Image shamefacedly nicked without any kind of permission from Chris’ post

The possibilities, he suggests, are enormous:

Imagine this kind of view showing up in Mail.app, Adium, iChat… where your friends, family and the rest get to update their own user pictures on a whim, and set their status and contact preferences in a way that visually makes sense.

This is a terrific idea. One of the best things about Mail is its human face.

Pulling the photos from contacts in Address Book and displaying them in their emails makes my day more personal. It humanises the time I spend emailing and reminds me that I am really dealing with the people behind the emails, not just with text. In fact, this was one of the reasons why I switched from PCs to Macs a few years ago.

For the same reason, I really like the iFaces notification utility, which still worked under Tiger but sadly may not work anymore. It sat on the Desktop and displayed the faces of people who had written newly arrived and unread emails (see screenshot on the right).

It’s another small way to give email a human face.

Of course, Chris is talking about something far more adventurous than that. I’m only imagining how good it would to have that contact information to hand in the results of a “Spotlight: Xxxx Xxxx” search from the Contextual Menu in Mail.app. Chris’ vision is more informed and his horizon wider.

UPDATE: As Aaron Harnly points out in the comments, you can get a rough and ready experience of what this might be like, by browsing your ~/Library/Application Support/Address Book/Metadata folder with Coverflow in Finder:

You can even use it to play the “face recognition game” Aaron describes. Hours of funmail.app, address book, contacts, coverflow, spotlight, apple, leopard