Late last year, I posted about a new plugin for mail.app, miniMail which offers a minimised “iTunes-like” interface for Apple Mail.

Then it was at 1.0.2, now it is at 1.1. And its list of features gets longer and better with each update.

When the plugin is installed, clicking the green bubble in the top left hand corner of Mail results in a mini-interface just like the iTunes option:

It now boasts an impressive array of keyboard shortcuts, mostly the same as mail.app’s own, although it has some of its own:

• Return will open up the individual message in mail
• Spacebar opens up a Preview pane, or “Quickview-esque” view of the message
• Right and Left Arrows move to the previous or next message
• The Command key plus an arrow moves to the first or last message

Here’s a screenshot with the plugin’s Preview Pane on display and the list of supported Mail shortcuts:

It adds its own tab to Mail’s Preference where further options can be set, including displaying the subject and sender on separate lines for greater readability, whether to start Mail with the miniMail interface displayed by default, the font size of the main text and more.

Of course, I am always going to use my Mail beautiful, bold and big (is there a more lovely sight for a Mac user than a fully-tricked out Mail.app doing its thing?), but people who are conscious of screen real estate will love this.

MiniMail is shareware (USD 9) but offers a 30 day free demo. You can get it from the developer’s web site .

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MiniMail is a plugin that allows Mail.app users to minimise Mail’s interface into an “iTunes like” mini-format, instead of to the Dock. It must have come out when I was on a break from Hawk Wings, so a new Leopard-ready release gives me a chance to look it over.

It installs as a classical Mail mailbundle. When active, clicking on the Green “+” button in the top left hand corner of Mail.app, reduces the interface to space-saving proportions:

It features a Get Mail, New Mail and Options menu with the most frequently used actions, as well as providing support behind the scenes for all of Mail’s keyboard shortcuts:

The pane itself can be resized to the dimensions that suit the user.

It also offers options in a pane within MAil Preferences which allows the user to chose which mailboxes to monitor for new messages:

MiniMail is shareware (USD 9) although it offers a 30 day free demo. You can get it from the developer’s web site .

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• miniMail interface gets better and better
• Wide-screen hack for Yojimbo
• Wide screen plugin for Leopard Mail released
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Dane Harnett has released a widescreen plugin for Leopard Mail, which gives Mail.app an “Entourage” or “Outlook” look.

It is not as polished as Letterbox , the first and best of the widescreen plugins developed for Tiger Mail.

Aaron Harnly is working on the Leopard version , but if you really can’t wait, and plenty of people seem to think that this is the bees’ knees of email functionality, WideScreenMailPlugin will do the trick.

In essence it shifts the preview pane from the bottom to the right-hand side of Mail.app’s interface:

WideScreenMailPlugin is freeware and available from the developer’s web site .

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• WideScreenMail plugin gets two-line preview
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Hannes Bretschneider has written a script that displays notifications about newly arrived mail on the Desktop using the GeekTool utilty.

GeekTool is a Preference Pane utility that can pipe the result of Unix commands, scripts and other things onto the Desktop. There are many ways to use it. For example, Lifehacker journo Gina Trapani uses it to pipe her plain text to-do files onto her Desktop.

Hannes’ script grabs the sender and subject line of new messages. When a GeekTool entry is created for it:

It outputs the results to the Desktop:

Like all GeekTool outputs, the font face, point size, position on the Desktop and many other options can be set in the GeekTool Preference Pane.

This elegant notification solution runs in the background and avoids the need to use another notification utility.

On the other hand, in order to get the most of out it, you need to be able to see your Desktop. I can’t remember when I last saw mine.

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Juan Ignacio Leon’s excellent iPhoto2Gmail plugin has been updated and now offers even smarter ways for Gmail users to email photos from iPhoto.

Basically, it adds a pane to iPhoto’s “Export…” dialog:

The updated version offers a Contacts button that pulls down your Gmail contacts so that you pick the recipient(s) from that list.

Other new features include:

- A bugfix for RAW and other non-jpeg files that were not properly renamed when scaled.
- A fix for some situations in which the plugin would try to send message without recipients.
- Re-written code to be Object Oriented and Modular for maintainability.

You can get the revised version from Juan’s web site .

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Chris Landon emails with a reasonable request, something you don’t miss or even think about until someone else mentions it.

He points out one thing that Thunderbird and Mail.app can’t do, and that’s coloured mailboxes.

He writes:

Do you know if there’s such a plug-in, etc, for color coding a folder? I have over a hundred folders an it makes it difficult to get to a specific folder, quickly. I could have created more sub-folders than the bunch I already have, but this does not help my situation either.

Here’s an example (I was using Thunderbird at the time and it does not have it either)…

Would it also be difficult to write a plug-in for this?

I don’t know of a plugin that does this, nor do I know how difficult it would be to code, but my hunch is a lot of people would use it.

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