Reo-2007 has written a theme to give Thunderbird the “leopard Mail look”. This is the first Leopard Mail skin I’ve seen for Thunderbird, although others exist to give Mail.app the Tiger Mail and Panther Mail look.

If, for some reason, you have to use Thunderbird, it might as well look as much like Apple Mail as possible.

Reo-2007′s skin is a mixture of theme, extensions and customised CSS which combine to give the look of Leopard Mail as well as some of Leopard Mail’s new functionality, like Notes.

The overall effect is well done:

One extension provides the option to add Notes to emails, just like you can in Leopard Mail. When the Notes toolbar icon is clicked, a pop-up window appears:

The skin will only work on Thunderbird 2.0+. You can get it from Reo-2007′s page on DeviantART.thunderbird, mail.app, apple mail, leopard mail, skins, themes, email in general, notes

In the past few days, my macOSXHints RSS feed has churned out an astonished number of interesting tips for iCal, Address Book and Mail.app.

Not all of them are equally useful or productivity-boosting, but all of them are interesting, if only because there are sometimes better ways to get these things done.

1. Use Quickview for Mail.app attachments

One tip explains that highlighting an attachment in a Mail message and pressing the spacebar opens Quickview.

Not much more useful than using the Quickview button next to the “Save” button under the headers perhaps, but in the comments, another poster points out that pressing ⌘-Y when viewing a message opens all the message’s attachments in a single Quickview window, with arrows to move from one to the next.

2. Adding notes and to-dos to individual emails

Another post details a way to add notes to an individual email using Leopard Mail’s to-do feature. This is a “hack” for Leopard Mail’s inability to attach notes to individual emails.

I hardly need to tell regular Hawk Wings readers that there is a more excellent way .

3. Apply filters to Address Book contact pictures

This was news to me. If you click the “swirly cube” button next to the camera button in Address Book’s contact image editor, you are rewarded with 35 different filters that you can apply to the picture.

In effect, this brings Photobooth (my kids’ favourite Mac app) to all your Address Book contacts. There is a lot of fun to be had here, especially with the photos of contacts that you don’t much care for.

4. Use Drag ‘n’ Drop to replace icons in an item’s Inspector pane

From time to time I like to chance the icon of my Mail.app. After all there are more than 450 options and changing the icon under Tiger was easy.

Now it is even easier. A macOSXHints tip explains how to change an icon not by opening two Inspectors and cutting and pasting between the icon field in each, but simply by dragging and dropping an icon into the icon field of the target app’s Inspector. That’s much quicker.

5. Unlearn words you learnt by mistake

Mac OS X’s spell checker is a wonderful thing, surpassed only by Spell Checker X, now in the process of private Leopard-friendly beta testing and soon to reappear.

But is is possible to learn a word too quickly, a tipster on macOSXHints points out , adding a misspelt word to your dictionary which the spell checker will never again pick up. Now unlearning it is as simple as right-clicking (or “Command-clicking” in the old language) on the offending word and selecting “Unlearn Spelling” from the contextual menu.mail.app, apple mail, address book, tips, macosxhints, icons, spell checking, contacts, mailtags, notes, to-dos, productivity

Rory Bowman is taking to Leopard Mail with a passion. He has written up some pointers on “Getting Things Done” (GTD) with Mail’s new notes and to-do features.

He presents a sample screenshot using a note to list things that need to be done, talks about using Leopard Mail’s RSS feature to speed up the time you spend reading the web and what smart mailboxes are good for.

Unfortunately, my notes don’t sync to my iPhone as he suggests.

It’s not really a systematic attempt to implement GTD in Leopard Mail, but it is an interesting summary of the productivity-boosting features in Leopard Mail.

Myself, I am reluctant to incorporate the new features of Leopard Mail into a tweaked workflow for getting things done.

To tell the truth, I am bit underwhelmed by the notes and to-do features, the to-dos especially. Remember the Keynote at which Steve Jobs explained in an excited voice how he “lives in Mail”? Ah-a, I thought, that means we are now going to see something really special.

But in fact the implementation of to-dos is really crude. They are there, but the flexibility to display them sensibly (hide completed, show to-dos for upcoming week, show only a particular calendar, etc, etc) is missing. Perhaps that’s why he lives in Mail; the features are too underdone to help him get his work done and live outside Mail for a while!

The old way which uses only technology already available in Tiger is good enough for me.

I am waiting for Leopard MailTags to get its to-do and event creation features back.

How about you? Has Leopard Mail changed your productivity or workflow for the better, or do you (like me) still use it as if it were Tiger Mail, just a bit more shiny? getting things done, GTD, leopard mail, apple mail, notes, to-dos, mailtags, mail.app, productiivity

MailTags, the prince of Mail.app plugins, is now available in a Leopard-friendly public beta.

Scott outlines in a post on his web site how MailTags retains its productivity edge for Leopard Mail users. Although Leopard Mail includes notes and to-dos, MailTags still does it better. Its notes are smarter, its to-dos more flexible and its project features unmatched.

For example, tagging emails and RSS feeds with the same MailTags project makes it possible to see both sorts of data in one hit in Mail’s search window.

A list of Leopard Mail’s abilities without and with MailTags makes the advantages clear:

The beta has been hassle-free for me since upgrading to Leopard last Friday. Now in its fifth version, most of the kinks have been ironed out by Scott’s squad of beta-test commandos. MailTags to-dos don’t work for the moment, neither does the option to “view the originating message”. But they will.

Download and enjoy.

It’s all good for me, but heed Scott’s warning nonetheless: “We strongly recommend you maintain backups of your mail data or avoid using MailTags in critical situations.” mailtags, mail.app. apple mail, productivity, plugins, projects, notes, to-dos, public beta

Drummond Field has written an applescript that exports an email from Mail.app into Yojimbo.

Unlike other “Email to Yojimbo” scripts, this one offers the option of exporting the email into Yojimbo as either a note or a PDF.

Select the message, run the script and a dialog appears:

Drummond doesn’t have a web site to host the script on, so it finds a home on Hawk Wings for the moment.

Download it here

Don’t stop there though. Other useful Yojimbo scripts include:

1. A script to push Yojimbo notes onto an iPod.
2. A script to send a Yojimbo item with Mail.app.
3. A script to email yourself notes that are automatically inserted into Yojimbo.
4. Scripts for Yojimbo, NetNewsWire and de.licio.us integration.
5. All the other scripts you can find by searching Hawk Wings for “Yojimbo” and “script”.

mail.app, apple mail, applescript, yojimbo, pdf, notes, ipod, netnewswire, delicious, tips, productivity

Making use of Yojimbo’s newly-expanded “applescriptability”, Steve Kalkwarf has knocked out an applescipt that copies notes and passwords tagged with “ipod” to an iPod.

It creates a sub-folder called “Yojimbo” in the Notes folder of your iPod and copies all the matching items to it. Of course, with a little bit of tweaking in Script Editor, you could easily set the script to transfer notes with a different tag.

A couple of things to note:

If the note is longer than ~4KB, it gets chopped up into chapters.

A poster on the Yojimbo Mailing warns that notes containing a colon in their title may not behave well in the transfer.

I don’t have an iPod to test this. I only buy Apple products that can run Mail.app. Still, by all accounts it works a treat. not apple mail, yojimbo, applescript, ipod, notes, syncing, PDA road warrior, mobility, productivity

Konrad Lawson has written an applescript which will cleverly pick out the text of an email you have sent to yourself and use it to create a note in Yojimbo.

You attach it to a rule that matches text in the subject line (like, say, “Note:”). Then anywhere that you have access to email — the coffee shop, the library, roaming the street or wherever, you can email yourself something worth remembering. Get back to your Mac and you will find it waiting for you in Yojimbo.

It’s a useful addition to a growing number of applescripts for Yojimbo that help the app to work even smarter: Jim Correia’s script that exports a selected email into Yojimbo and Dylan Damian’s del.icio.us-NetNewsWire-Yojimbo “mash-up” scripts.yojimbo, mail.app, apple mail, productivity, notes, applescript, getting organised