Hawk Wings » plugins

Hotmail, Yahoo and Lion’s mail

Tim Gaden — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 07:07:47 +0000

Mail.app users with Hotmail or Yahoo Mail accounts have long had to use third-party plugins to get hold of their emails.

MacFreePOPs is one such utility that is already Lion-compatible and supports an astonishing range of web-based mail servers, offering POP-like access to your accounts.

Another plugin, mBox Mail , is just for Hotmail users and claims to offer a more “IMAP-like” experience.

It allows mail.app (or any other IMAP-enabled mail client like Thunderbird or Entourage/Outlook) to access Hotmail messages and folders, syncs trash between your mail client and the server and also syncs up drafts, sent mail and message flags.

A patch to make the app Lion-friendly has just been released.

Unlike MacFreePOPs which is donation-ware, an mBox Mail licence costs USD 19.99, although a 30 day free trial is available to try it out first.

I ought to confess that (contrary to my usual commitment) I haven’t tested this out first to see how well it works.Similar Posts:

mail.appetizer beta now works with 10.6.4

Tim Gaden — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 23:04:02 +0000

Speaking of notification utilities, Stefan Schüßler is actively at work updating his popular (and beautiful) mail.appetizer plugin for mail.app.

The most recent development build (150) works with 10.6.4. You can download it from his development snapshot page where you will also find instructions for installing it.

For those not in the know, mail.appetizer makes beautiful notification previews of incoming email, with options to handle the email at the bottom of the preview window:

You can follow Stefan’s progress in releasing new development builds on twitter .Similar Posts:

iDeskCal: Easy calendars on your Desktop

Tim Gaden — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 11:21:03 +0000

Long-time Hawk Wings readers will remember the iCalViewer app that places a streaming calendar on your Desktop.

I discover that it’s still going strong .

For USD 11 it will stream calendars and upcoming to-dos as nicely under Snow Leopard as it did under Tiger:

It forces you to stay aware of what’s coming up, and spares the trouble of diving into iCal all the time.

iDeskCal is another utility that does something similar. It puts your selected calendars on the Desktop, but the output is more like something GeekTool would produce. Here is an example, with the to-dos hidden:

Like iCalViewer, the app lives in the menubar. Preferences include a General pane in which you can control how it operates and set hotkeys for adding events and to-dos, and hiding and displaying to-dos or the app itself:

A second pane allows you to select which calendars will be displayed:

A Display pane controls the look of the calendar on the Desktop, including its size, position, opacity and colour options:

iDeskCal is slightly more expensive (USD 12.99) than iCalViewer, and is available from the Hash Bang Industries web site. It offers a fully-functional 14-day trial.Similar Posts:

AddToGoogle: Quickly add RSS feeds from Safari

Tim Gaden — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 09:18:44 +0000

Safari allows you to specify a news aggregator app of your choice to which it pipes RSS subscriptions, but not an online service like Google Reader. Rob Wilkerson has written an extension for Safari 5.0 that plugs the gap.

Using his AddToGoogle extension, users can click on Safari’s RSS button and find that the feed is sent straight to Google Reader. Sweet!

Installation is a little more tricky than one might think. Two things to watch:

Make sure that you have the Develop menu enabled in Safari 5.0. You will find the option to turn it on in the Advanced tab of Safari’s Preferences.
Make sure that Safari is listed as the default RSS reader in Safari’s Preferences. If you have mail.app or some other aggregator selected as the default application, that choice will override the extension.

Download the extension and click on it to install it. You will see this slightly alarming warning:

Check that it is installed by opening the Extension tab of Safari’s Preferences:

The latest revision of the extension, released today, provides the option to subscribe to feeds in either Google Reader or directly as a widget on your iGoogle page.

Checking this option offers a choice every time you subscribe to a feed:

AddToGoogle is freeware and available from Rob’s wiki page at Codaset.Similar Posts:

Fix GrowlMail after 10.6.4 update

Tim Gaden — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 02:05:48 +0000

Most mail.app users will have noticed that OS updates can break their plugins and third-party bundles.

This happens because Apple now changes the UUID (Universally Unique Identifier) of Mail with every update, and requires plugins to match the new UUID each time in order to function. Thankfully, most developers are on the ball and provide updated versions of their plugins in good time.

GrowlMail, a notification plugin for mail.app that uses the Growl framework, fell prey to this problem after the 10.6.4 update.

If yours is broken, you can download a patched version of the plugin from the developer’s web site.

He also provides new plugin compatibility UUIDs that may bring other disabled bundles back to life.

Further help for other disabled plugins (like DockStar) is available in a macOSXHints tip .

UPDATE: 5 July 2010 A new version (1.2.2) of GrowlMail has been released, which is compatible with 10.6.4.mail.app, apple mail, plugins, growlmail, growl, notificationSimilar Posts:

Snippets plugin for Google Quick Search Box

Tim Gaden — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 09:47:15 +0000

QuickSnippets is a new plugin for Google Quick Search Box (QSB) that adds basic snippet management to the utility’s toolbox.

It is easy to use and quite clever.

First get the plugin from the developer’s Github site.

Copy the plugin file to your ~/Library/Application Support/Google/Quick Search Box/PlugIns/ directory, and restart QSB.

Then to add a snippet, all you need to do is activate QSB and type quicks and select the QuickSnippet Regist option:

Enter the trigger and the snippet itself into the dialog box:

I’ve found that cutting and pasting blocks of texts into the snippet box preserves the line breaks when they are activated later.

When you’ve entered all the snippet you want, dumping them into an email message or other document is easy.

Just activate QSB, and type the snippet’s trigger. The snippet appears in the list below:

Select it and hit Enter. All done!

Obviously it’s not TextExpander, but for a lot of people it might be all the snippet management you need.

QuickSnippets is freeware and comes with more copious instructions in English and Japanese. google, google quick search box, plugins, snippets, text, productivity, not apple mail, not mail.appSimilar Posts:

Scripts to integrate Toodledo with mail.app and MailTags

Tim Gaden — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 11:36:45 +0000

Hawk Wings reader Himanshu Shukla emails to share two applescripts he has written which integrate the online to-do manangement service Toodledo with Apple Mail and the prince of productivity plugins, MailTags .

His first script simply pipes a selected email from mail.app into your online Toodledo account, where it will wait for you to tag it, give it a context and a project or folder.

The second, more complicated script uses MailTags to tag and add other information to the task before you send it off.

When this script is run, it open up a copy of the email, ready to forward to Toodledo and offers you the chance to map fields from the message’s MailTags pane onto categories that Toodledo understands:

Keywords in Mailtags = Context in Toodledo
Project in Mailtags = Folder in Toodledo
Due-date in Mailtags = Due-date in Toodledo

Priorities:

Very Low (Mailtags) = “-1. Negative” (Toodledo)
Low (Mailtags) = “0. Low” (Toodledo)
Normal (Mailtags) = “1. Medium” (Toodledo)
High (Mailtags) = “2. High” (Toodledo)
Urgent (Mailtags) = “3. Top” (Toodledo)

Clever! You can tag and process the task without leaving Mail’s interface.

Of course, it’s even more clever to trigger the script with a keyboard shortcut, either in Quicksilver or Fastscripts or MailTags’ sister app, Mail Act-on:

You can get the scripts from Himanshu’s web site where they are freeware.

Combined with Toodledo’s own iPhone app or the Action Lists iPhone app , which is a dedicated GTD system using Toodledo as its backend, you can recreate a robust workflow for Getting Things Done that goes with you on the road.gtd, getting things done, applescript, scripts, mail.app, apple mail, plugins, toodledoSimilar Posts:

Script to archive emails into Evernote

Tim Gaden — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 11:56:12 +0000

Justin at veritrope has written an applescript that will quickly import emails from mail.app into Evernote , the web-based note and information manager.

It’s easy to use.

First, get the script from veritrope.

Like all Apple Mail-related scripts, the best place to store it is in your ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/Mail folder, so that it appears at the top of the AppleScript menu when mail.app is open.

Then find the email that you want to save into Evernote, highlight it and click the AppleScript menu on the right of your menubar:

The script grabs the email and shunts into Evernote. It loads the message first into Evernote’s Desktop app from which it syncs up automatically.

The script also presents a dialogue so that you can tag the email and select where to store it:

Chosing the “Select notebook from list” options retrieves a list of your existing notebook and also offers you the option to create a new notebook on the fly.

A nice Growl alert lets you know when it’s done.

The end result is a new Evernote note, nicely tagged-up and with a hyperlink back to the original message in mail.app:

Of course, it all goes much faster if you fire the script with a trigger in Quicksilver or set a keyboard shortcut for it with a utility like Daniel Jalkut’s excellent FastScripts .

veritrope also provides a fistful of applescripts for integrating Evernote with other popular apps like Yojimbo, NeetNewsWire, MacJournal, DEVONThink, even (of all things) Entourage.evernote, mail.app, apple mail, applescript, script, plugins, quicksilver, fastscripts, yojimbo, productivitySimilar Posts:

10.6.2 broke my Mail plugin! :-(

Tim Gaden — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 11:24:15 +0000

Apple has changed the way that Mail.app interacts with plugins in Snow Leopard.

As Ken Aspelagh describes it on the Mac Observer:

“Each new version of Mail and the associated Message framework includes a unique code. Plug-ins have to explicitly declare themselves compatible with each new version,” Mr. Aspeslagh told The Mac Observer. “There is some sense to this as plug-ins are closely tied to the inner working of Mail, and stand the chance of breaking when Mail.app updates. Apple didn’t want to take this chance, so now they automatically disable all plug-ins with each update.”

So today’s 10.6.2 update is likely to break some plugins.

Most developers are only too aware of this issue, and will get updated plugins out fast.

Greg Welch, who develops the MailRecent and MailFollowUp plugins, has already got new, 10.6.2-compatible versions out the door.

Eric Hinterbichler has done the same with his new Herald Notification utility.

Other developers are sure to follow quickly. Some acted weeks before the update appeared, like Aaron Harnly who pushed out a compatible version of his Letterbox plugin three weeks ago.

10.6.2 broke the Mail clipping plugin from Omnifocus, but fortunately this can be restored simply by reinstalling it.

Other plugins, especially those not so actively or quickly supported, might be more difficult.

langui.sh has published some Terminal commands that will (potentially) revive other busted plugins. He has written them for GrowlMail but they could easily be adapted for other plugins, and “trick” them into working again.

It’s worth a shot, especially if you are in love with a plugin that’s not so well supported. However, maybe make a backup of the plugin’s bundle first. You know, just in case.apple mail, snow leopard, mail.app, plugins, UUID, AppleSimilar Posts:

Clever miniMail plugin for mail.app re-released!

Tim Gaden — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 10:44:18 +0000

Scott Morrison of Indev Software (producers of the MailTags and Mail Act-on plugins) has released a souped-up version of the miniMail plugin, which he recently acquired from Olive Toast Software.

miniMail 2.0 retains all the goodness of the original–the ability to minimize Mail.app’s interface like you can in iTunes–but adds more features and flexibility.

The minimised interface is elegant and efficient, as you would expect from the developer of MailTags:

It is also fully integrated with Mail Act-on, allowing you to use the same keystrokes to file messages away quickly.

The plugin’s Preference pane offers options to control which mailboxes it monitors, text size inside the minimized interface itself and how it should expand again when double-clicked (to the mail mail.app window or a single message window):

The Preference pane also controls miniMail 2.0′s new feature–multiple mini viewers.

You can now open a Message Viewer for a number of individual mailboxes and minimize them to keep track of new messages in particular accounts or even RSS feeds.

Here I am monitoring my work email in one miniMail window, my Hawk Wings email in another (one canny doctoral student sends his emails to both!) and the network status RSS feed of my ISP:

Very handy for keeping focus on important things whilst filtering out the rest.

miniMail is shareware (USD 12.95) and is available from Indev’s web site . Registered users of MailTags and Mail Act-on qualify for a USD 4 discount.mail.app, apple mail, mailtags, mail act-on, minimail, plugins, productivitySimilar Posts: