The poster at Aaron’s UI Design Blog is seriously steamed up about Mail’s inability to display email in a “wide-screen” format with an Outlook-like preview pane.

Lifting a quotation from an Ars Technica review of Tiger, he thinks that Mail.app’s inability to do this is characteristic of an email client that is “hideously ugly,” and “inflexible, inconsistent, and again, a little strange.”

If Mail did provide those options, he says, “I would be able to see many more email headers than I can now, and provide myself with a more enjoyable reading experience.”

He creates a mock-up of a wide-screen view and takes the opportunity to serve out the Apple Mail Team for “Mail’s overdesigned UI”.

Who knows?

At one stage the Apple Mail Team was thinking about an Outlook-like wide-screen view, but there is no sign of a native implementation in the Leopard Mail previews.

In the meantime, of course, Aaron needs to get hold of Aaron Harnly’s excellent Letterbox plugin , which does exactly what he wants. (These are two different Aarons, I think.)mail.app, apple mail, Apple GUI, interface, wide-screen, Outlook, plugin

The poster at Apathy Online has developed a quick hack for Panther Mail users that will give them the “Outlook-like” three-pane layout.

Tiger Mail users can use Aaron Harnly’s excellent Letterbox plugin . However, despite a few positive reports, Aaron doesn’t promise seamless operation in Panther Mail.

If Letterbox fails you in Panther, this could be the fall-back you are looking for.

The end result looks like this:

Image from ApathyOnline

Installing it is easier than you might think.

First, quit Mail. Then navigate to it in your Applications folder and right-click on Mail’s icon. Select the “Show Package Contents” option:

Then navigate through the Contents and Resources folders to the English.lproj folder. (Or the lproj folder for the language you use.)

Open it. Find the MessageViewer.nib file:

Back-up the original file before you do anything, either making a duplicate in the same place or copying it to the Desktop.

Then right-click on the MessageViewer.nib icon, choose the “Show Package Contents” option again and replace the files inside with the three modified files from ApathyOnline.

Restart Mail.app and enjoy.

Disclaimer: I have not tested this myself, no longer having a Mac with Panther installed. Also, since I can’t remember that far back, I have simply assumed the layout of the Mail package is the same. If it isn’t, I hope that someone will tell me. mail.app, apple mail, hacks, three pane, outlook, panther, tiger, widescreen

The latest TWiT “Inside the Net” podcast deals with online calendar services and the quest for inter-operability.

Guest presenter Scott Mace (Calender Swamp ) talks up Apple’s iCal and Google Calendar which get good marks for working well together (although not always). However,

The biggest problem has been Microsoft Outlook, which I would say most of the world’s calendars are stored in right now. And Outlook has not played well with others.

[Pause the podcast here and get a copy of OMiC which helps Mail.app and iCal play well with Outlook-generated email and calendar data.]

Google Calendar gets Scott’s vote for the most complete solution although his wife (“an Apple bigot”) thinks that iCal is the bees’ knees and she does things with colour in iCal that other calendar apps can only dream about.

The open source calendar app Chandler gets a good rap too, although it is still in beta and has been for a long time.

UPDATE: Hope on the horizon for iCal-Google Calendar synchronisation.ical, online calendaring, google calendar, productivity, outlook, gcal

Apple has updated its technote on dealing with winmail.dat files.

After pointing out that winmail.dat files the result of emails containing rich text information sent “from a Microsoft email application (such as Outlook and the Microsoft Exchange Client)”, the technote advises:

To avoid seeing these attachments in the future, you ask the sender to deselect the email’s “Send to this recipient in Microsoft rich text format” checkbox or preference setting in mail client before they send the message.

Fortunately more immediate help is at hand.

OMiC is a plugin that can extract the files from a winmal.dat attachment on the fly. Since I last posted about it, it has got smarter.

It no longer uses the Save dialog, but decodes and presents the included files in Mail’s Attachment View:

It also now supports Panther (10.3), winmail.dat files with the wrong MIME type and Outlook’s iCalendar format.

It’s the kind of functionality that should be built-in to Mail.app but isn’t.

OMiC is shareware (5 euros = USD 6.30) and is available from the developer’s web site . If you live in a Windows world, the money will be well worth it.mail.app, apple mail. winmail.dat, outlook, attachments, microsoft exchange, tips, plugins

Odissefs Pantazis-von zur Gathen (very cool!) has written an applescript that will request return receipts from recipients with email clients that can handle them.

Many people look for this if they are working in an Outlook world.

Odissefs’ script creates a new message in Mail.app, prompting you for the account you wish to use:

Then you compose the email as usual and send it off. If your recipient is using a compatible client, they will get a request to send back a read receipt, which then duly appears:

It is easier to set up than Joel Nelson’s script (see an earlier Hawk Wings post) although I have found it to be a little erratic. Sometimes the request for confirmation doesn’t come through to the recipient even when she or he is using Outlook.

You can find the script on the Apple Discussion Forums or on Ody’s web site .

Personally I am glad that Mail.app can neither send nor receive these things. Nothing annoys me more than people interrupting me to ask for a confirmation that I am reading their emails, when I am in the middle of reading them.

But if you go for this kind of thing or you are in a work environment in which they are required, you will like Odissiefs’ work.mail.app, apple mail, outlook, thunderbird, read receipts, applescript, scripts, plugins, productivity,

Sooner or later, all Mail.app users who have any kind of email communication with Outlook users will get a message containing the dreaded unopenable winmail.dat file.

TNEF is a utility that extracts the files buried inside. It can really save your bacon.

Now a developer has wrapped the utility into a mail.app bundle which automatically recognises incoming emails with winmail.dat attachments.

When they arrive, it either opens iCal if the embedded file is an Outlook appointment or prompts you to save the embedded files in a folder of your choice:

I don’t get enough email from Outlook users to need it. Firing up TNEF’s Enough app on the odd occasion is all I need.

If you get a lot of this kind of email, the plugin takes out some extra steps and might be worth the shareware price.

OMiC is shareware (5 euros = USD 6.30) and is available from the developer’s web site . He hopes to make some money from the plugin for his compulsory military service, which begins soon.windows, outlook, exchange, winmail.dat, mail.app, apple mail, attachments, ical, files, TNEF enough, plugins

Gabor Cselle has posted some examples of innovative email client design which break the three-pane “Folder -> Email list -> Selected Message” design straight-jacket, popularised by Outlook (and now also available in Mail.app).

The central problem with email clients, he suggests, is not getting rid of Junk emails; it’s learning how to deal more cleverly and efficiently with what’s left:

Today, we seem to be at a point where it seems like we might be able to solve the spam problem. But the problem of figuring out which of the non-spam emails is important, and what it relates to, still exists.

He presents three creative attempts to solve that problem.

TaskMaster , developed by XEROX at PARC in 2003, puts your tasks at the top of the hierarchy, with emails and attachments related to that task grouped underneath:

Click image for a full-sized view

Bifrost from Lotus Research organises email on the basis of who sent it, rather like Microsoft’s SNARF project. It relies on you to nominate important contacts and organise contacts by their various relationships to you. After that, email is orgnaised for you in a “social” or relationship-based hierarchy.

Lastly he considers “cool features” like contact maps and thread arcs in ReMail from IBM , both of which structure your emails or contacts in more useful ways than the folder-email-selected email model:

Your mind does stop for a minute when you read something like this.

You suddenly realise how much time you spend making the three-tiered model work for your needs. You get to imagine for a moment what it would be like if the email client worked for you rather than you for it.email client, deisgn, three-pane, outlook, mail.app, apple mail, email, UI design, usability, productivity