Someone, who seems to have some personal knowledge of Snow Leopard, claims to have solved the mystery of Snow Leopard’s shrinking mail.app.

In a post that details the various myths doing the rounds on the shrinking apps—no PPC code (false!), smaller binaries (false!), missing language files (false!)—the writer spills the beans:

When you look in Mail.app you see that language files use up most of the disc space. Inside the language folder (e.g. “German.lproj”) are a lot of .nib files (the extension of Interface Builder). Inside normally are two files. One is a very small “keyedobjects.nib” and the other is very big “designable.nib” file… Now the “designable.nib” is gone. It seems like it had no reason other than to give hackers a chance to mess with the application’s UI design.

I guess he is referring to these two files which are inside each (c. 84) folder within every (18) lproj localisation folder, as in this example from the English.lproj GeneralPreferences.nib folder:

Perhaps this is as false an explanation as all the others.

Still, it has enough specifics, specifics that only someone with access to a build of Snow Leopard could know, to lend the story credence.

Related posts

• Why Apple Mail makes Leander smile
• Snow Leopard Mail.app to be two thirds smaller!
• New .Mac mail interface is here
• Mail.app on Mac trumps Ubuntu hands down
• Hacking Mail.app’s interface

As Quicksilver fans all over the world know, the Blacktree web site has been down since at least last Friday.

Now it’s back. Developer Alcor says that the site was down due to “a plugin downloading bug (and a subsequent server overuse)”.

You can now download the latest Leopard-friendly build of Quicksilver and install all the plugins your heart desires (quite a lot in my case).

Related posts

• xCut: Keyboard Shortcut Reference widget
• Zimbra gets friendly with Safari 3.0, CalDAV, iPhone
• Yojimbo: Bare Bones’ new information manager
• Word count script for Quicksilver
• Tweaking Quicksilver’s new cube interface

Nick Kreeger has released the first version of a new open source email client for Mac OS X, which “blends technology from two popular Mozilla projects, Camino and Thunderbird, to create a polished native Macintosh application”.

The “Welcome to Correo” email waiting in the inbox describes it as “Mac essence, Gecko powered”.

Extra user interface polish is provided by Jon Hicks , who has provided the icons and other bits and pieces.

And it does look nice:

As Nick admits, it is pretty basic at the moment, although multiple POP and IMAP accounts are supported.

It also features a quick switch between the classic “Mail.app” layout and an Outlook-like “wide-screen” view.

He has big plans for the app though:

There are many planned features for the mail client, including plugin capability (to allow development of extensions such as PDA synchronization), tabbed window interface, address book support, keychain access, and various other to-be-determined features.

A roadmap on the app’s wiki gives an additional sense of where the app is headed.

I sense the end of unqualified “Wildebeest’s butt” wisecracks about Mozilla mail clients.

Correo 0.1 is free and available from Nick’s web site .

[Thanks for the tip-off, Bronson!]

Related posts

• Correo 0.2: Camino-flavoured email client advances
• NetShred X 3.17: Thunderbird, Camino support
• Useful Thunderbird tutorial
• Universal Thunderbird builds with Address Book support
• Two great Mail.app tips

Remember a few months ago there was an apparent stampede of people, headed by Mark Pilgrim, who were abandoning Macs for Ubuntu? (Although some later came back.)

Java podcaster Tim Shadel is going the other way , dumping Ubuntu after using Linux for years and stretching his legs into Mac OS X.

Since Mail.app was the straw that broke the camel’s back for Mark Pilgrim, it’s extra interesting to read Tim’s experience with Mail, compared to Evolution, his Linux mail client:

Mail.app is great. Evolution almost works. I have to use exchange at work (I have Ubuntu installed there, too). Evolution has a module to integrate with Exchange, and it sorta thinks about working. It’s slow, and frequently it hangs. So much so that I got sick of typing

ps -ef | grep evolu | grep -v grep | awk ‘{ print $2 }’ | xargs kill

that I put it in a batch file shell script. I ran it no less than twice a day, sometimes more. Calendaring almost worked, except when it didn’t. Frequently I’d send out an appointment only to figure out that my colleagues version of the appointment didn’t repeat over the right interval. I don’t blame anyone for having trouble integrating with a Microsoft product. But at the end of the day, it was still annoyingly brittle. On Mac, there’s Entourage — an M$ product to work with the M$ server. As it is, Mail.app rocks for processing my personal email really efficiently. Oh, and it can export your mail to mbox. Duh. On Ubuntu, mail almost works.

He goes on to list many more ways in which Mac OS X simply provides a superior user experience—searching, wireless, GUI, audio effects, bluetooth and more.

In the end, it’s all about an OS that (wait for it…) “just works”:

My reasons for choosing to dump Ubuntu for a Mac are almost entirely about the experience. After years of Linux work, I’m tired of fiddling. I’m tired of things that almost work. I’m ready for a change. I’m sick of the war to get things to work. I’m ready to simply Get Things Done.

Related posts

• Ubuntu switcher takes a step back to Mac
• What if: Opening up Mail.app
• Why Apple Mail makes Leander smile
• Snow Leopard’s shrinking mail.app: Mystery solved
• KMail to Mail.app import script improved

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]

Related posts

• Quicksilver and Yojimbo 1.2
• Quick insertion of Apple-centric glyphs
• Howler of the Year?
• GTD-style widget for iCal to-dos
• Five favourite time-saving Leopard Tips

Leander Kahney loves the way that Apple Mail reformats the date of an email on the fly as you resize the Date column in the List Viewer.

Other clients display an ellipsis or just chop the date off, but Mail is in a class of its own:

…only Apple’s Mail actually changes the format. When I first discovered this, I sat there delighted, making the column wide and then narrow, beaming as the date format switched smoothly and seamlessly between numbers and text to perfectly fit the space allocated.

Part of the magic of this discovery was the serendipity. If it had been a “feature” — a behavior purposely brought to my attention by Apple — I would have shrugged and said, “so what?” But because I discovered it by accident, it struck me as artisan touch; a craftsman’s attention to detail.

For him it is a reminder of the repeated way in which “Apple delights with its focus on the user experience”.

Surely it is just coincidence, but it is nice to read Leander’s epiphany after a month in which Mail.app gave Mark Pilgrim an excuse to switch away from OS X altogether.

Related posts

• Snow Leopard’s shrinking mail.app: Mystery solved
• Rui Carmo spanks .Mac
• Mail.app on Mac trumps Ubuntu hands down
• 10.4.6: Mail, GPGMail and MailStamps issues
• Why do people call it “Mail.app”?