I’ve mentioned it in passing in another post today, but it deserves a post of its own: Aaron Harnly has released MailPluginManager, a clever little plugin manager for Mail.app that can “inspect, enable, disable, install, and remove any plugin”.

Aaron says that he is willing to make the plugin manager available for other developers to include with their plugins, so that, as he hopes, “.mailbundle can become a first-class citizen”.

The plugin does a good job, although for some reason it doesn’t like the look of Mail Act-on:

You can find MailPluginManager in the most recent Letterbox public beta , although you don’t need to use Letterbox to get its benefits. It is a free-standing app.mail.app, apple mail, leopard mail, letterbox, plugins, manager, tips

Fans of Aaron Hanly’s Letterbox plugin, which redraws Mail.app’s interface to provide an “Outlook-style” preview pane on the right, will love a hack for Yojimbo that does the same thing.

Jon Hicks has created a modified nib file for Yojimbo’s interface that moves the preview pane to the right.

The shift involves some contraction of the Listview in the middle, but looks good:

This is Jon’s screenshot, ripped off with thanks

Jon provides some instructions for installing the new nib file. The involve digging around inside the app itself, but are not too daunting.

As Jon points out, it is a good idea to backup the existing OGMainWindow.nib file, in case you tire of the new look.

You can get the modified file and read the instructions on Jon’s web site . mail.app, apple mail, widescreen, letterbox, plugin, hack, outlook, yojimbo

French design company mac@dam has produced a set of twenty icons in four colours revolving around a “mail theme”.

The icons which come in silver, black, red and blue, include the classic Mail.app stamp icon, a letter box, an envelope and an “icard”.

I am pretty confident that the animal in the icons is a leopard although at first sight I thought it was one of those wicked flying monkeys from the Wizard of Oz.

If you fancy one of these, changing Mail.app’s default icon is easy.

The icons are freeware and are available in the Downloads section of Apple’s web site.mail.app, apple mail, address book, icons, stylish, letterbox, envelope, leopard

The developer of the widescreen, 3-pane plugin for Mail.app, Letterbox, has been busy.

He has just released version 0.16, which offers an installer, a new icon, some visual enhancements and some minor bugfixes.

Running the installer a second time offers an “uninstall” option, which is handy for people who don’t like digging around in their Mail folder.

He has also written a FAQ, a future features list and a list of known bugs.

You can get the updated plugin from the developer’s web site .letterbox, mail.app, apple mail, plugins, widescreen, GUI, hack