Rolling your own Mail stamp icon is fun. Hawk Wings has covered it before. But now there is a much better Photoshop template that makes the whole process even easier.

The template was created by chekkz and is hosted on her DeviantART page where you can download it.

Then it’s simple as shooting fish in a barrel.

1. Open the PSD file in Photoshop.
2. Everything can be edited, including the text around the postmark. To edit the text, select the text layer in the Inspector, select the text tool on the left, and place the cursor in the existing text. Edit away. The default icon carries the text” Hello from Cupertino CA”.
3. Images in Mail Stamp icons are rotated 10 degrees counterclockwise (if you are wondering). The rotated image is 368 x 412 pixels in size.
4. When you have edited the text and dropped in your image, save it off as a PNG file.
5. Then you need one of the many free utilities that convert PNG files into ICNS format. I use img2icns by Shiny Frog. Drop the PNG file into its interface.
6. You’re done.

The possibilities are endless. You can make something scary that will grab your attention first thing in the morning:

Something sleek and professional might be what you need, a reminder of who is paying you to deal with all these emails:

Or something altogether more soft and cuddly like, say, a snow leopard:

Replacing the default icon is easy. Just follow the steps in a previous Hawk Wings post.

Then you have a nice icon in the Dock which is all yours:

Of course, if you can’t be bothered, you can always pick one from the 508+ icons I’ve collected on the Hawk Wings Mail stamp icons page which is about to expand further when I add the ones that have appeared in the last year.

If your creations are top notch, drop me an email and I’ll put them up on Hawk Wings for everyone to use and enjoy.

Hmmm…. Maybe we should have a competition, and try to get celebrity judges like Merlin Mann, John Gruber and that crowd. Now the blogging cogs are turning again!mail.app, apple mail, icons, stamp icons, hacks, tips, photoshop, Borka Kegslayer

Hawk Wings reader and graphic designer Sigurður Ármannsson (his blog is in Icelandic and, hence, very mysterious and cool) has whipped up a new header for Hawk Wings.

He was astonished that the old header was so plain. It didn’t take long to explain my level of Photoshop expertise to him.

The new header is obviously much more swanky but still carries through the legacy of the Red-tailed Hawk from Mail’s stamp icon and the font of the old header.

I am quite taken with it. What do you think?

For old time’s sake and by way of comparison:

UPDATE: I have asked Sigurður if he would be kind enough to take on some of the suggestions in the comments. He was, so the image now features the Lucida Grande font of the original and some drop shadow to lift out the text.

Slightly more readers who left comments prefer the new one. More interesting still, Mint tells me that 9,286 individuals visited the site yesterday. Most of them didn’t care either way!

[Thanks, Sigurður!]mail.app, apple mail, header, iceland, photoshop, very kind

Aaron emailed me a screenshot of Mail.app taken from an episode of the TV show Weeds (Series 2, Episode 5), which you can see below. Another screenshot has been posted on Flickr. It seems to show a message preview pane in a drawer on the right.

I am suspicious. It looks like a photoshop job to me.

Tiger icons and Panther Mail drawers seem odd. The Apple menu seems to be missing, the app is identified in the menubar as “Email” rather than “Mail”, the Applescript menu is where it was positioned in Panther, whereas it is on the right in Tiger Mail. The Junk mailbox appears below Trash in Tiger Mail but these are reversed in the screenshot (and these cannot be reordered):

On the other hand, it appears to be a functioning app. I’ve not seen the episode, but Aaron tells me that “the cap comes from a longer sequence that shows the character browsing through an inbox full of mail, with multiple messages popping up in that pane.”

A puzzle. What do you think?

[Thanks to an Apple Mail demi-god for technical advice. You know who you are!]mail.app, apple mail, tiger mail, panther mail, weeds, screenshot, photoshop, plugin

Downsize is a neat little utility that will resize and manipulate images to send off in Apple Mail without the need to fire up Photoshop.

It allows you to resize, watermark, and frame individual images or an entire folder full, either directly from one of your iPhoto albums or another folder. that you’ve created. A screenshot demonstrates most of its functions:

The app offers more compression and size options than iPhoto and creates files of much smaller size, so the developer claims.

It works well. I’ve been using the trial version for a few days, and it threatens to replace old favourites like Scale to Mail and ImageWell.

DownSize is shareware (USD 19.95) and available from the developer’s web site.