Here’s a nice story.

Michelle Lentz, a US technology writer, has recently switched from PC to Mac. She was tempted to stick with Entourage for her email–”I want the familiarity of the Microsoft products”.

But she was brave. She transferred all her email over and was delighted by discoveries like Mail.app’s rules-based ability to change the background colour of emails. (“I actually couldn’t do this in Outlook.”)

But what really turned her head around was the wealth of plugins that allow Mail.app users to tweak and extend the app to meet their needs:

…I used a bunch of plug-ins to make it a more useful productivity tool for me. I was not happy with the way the ToDos worked, plus I wasn’t overly thrilled with how I had to manually file things. I remembered that a lot of these things I had fixed in Outlook as well using plug-ins. I was thrilled to find tons of Mail.app plug-ins.

She found – and loves – MailTags, MsgFiler, Mail.appetizer (recently updated for Leopard), MenuCalendarClock and (briefly) Letterbox , a fair number of the plugins in the Hawk Wings Top Ten Plugins list.

And the end result?

I’ve made Mail just as productive, if not moreso, than how I was running Outlook. This I can live with.

switching, productivity, mail.app, apple mail, leopard mail, entourage, outlook, plugins, rules, smart mailboxes

After a pause brought on by server troubles, Secrets, the clever system preference pane for system tweaks, is back.

Developed by Alcor, who is also the brains behind Quicksilver , Secrets makes entering arcane text strings in Terminal a thing of the past.

It lists available tweaks by app. Here is the pane for Mail.app:

Once, in order to work around the minute font size in messages from email clients like Outlook Express, you had to open Terminal and type:

Now, it’s as simple as entering the point size you prefer into the text box of Secret’s “Minimum HTML Font size” option, restarting Mail and enjoying readable text.

The Mail section also lets you set a preferred text encoding for Mail, enable plugin bundles and more.

The Top Secrets pane lists the most popular tweaks:

Here you can (among many other things) set a nice Desktop picture for your login screen, show or hide hidden files in Finder, tweak the Dock and unlock dragging widgets out of the Dashboard.

Of course, this kind of power comes with a hint of danger. As Alcor warns, “Secrets is in Beta and many of these options can harm your system if used improperly.” Nothing very terrible has happened to me though.

Behind the scenes, Secrets allows clever users to create their own tweaks which are stored on the Secrets server and can be downloaded by normal people like you and me with the pane’s “Update Secrets” button, so the list of options is always growing and improving.

Get the latest version (1.0.4, Leopard-only) from Secret’s Google Code page . quicksilver, secrets, preferences, terminal, mail.app, apple mail, leopard mail, productivity, tweaks

Some people are unhappy with the way Mail.app truncates the names of attachments so that you can’t quite see at a glance what you are clicking on.

They think, in turn, that it’s discourteous to do this to others.

Attaché is the utility for them. It is an AppleScript that provides full information in the body of the email for all enclosed attachments.

Put it in your Dock or on your Desktop (or wherever you can find it easily).

Drop some emails on the applet and it packages them up so that it’s clear at once what the recipient is getting:

The applet allows you to set a number of default parameters.

Open up the app and you are greeted with a Preferences pane that let’s you specify a default language (English, German, French, Italian).

I’ve blogged this before, but the author has now added additional preferences. You can now set the account that Mail will use to compose the message and pick a default signature.

Further options allow you to set a default subject and to import text to form the default body of the message.

This will appeal especially to knowledge workers (like me) who spend a lot of time shunting documents and whatnot around from one place to another, although others who want or need to identify attachments more closely in their emails will like it too.

Attaché is freeware. It was created by Martin Michel, who hopes soon to add the ability to zip files dropped on the applet and to set default recipients. It is available from its own page on MacScripter.

mail.app, apple mail, attachments, full text, productivity, civility, applescript

Fluid has just been updated. It’s a clever new app that allows you to make your own site-specific browsers (including the power of Greasemonkey scripts in Cocoa).

Along with a raft of bugfixes, the new version (0.9.2) can now turn the browswers into menubar items for even greater flexibility.

Longtime Hawk Wings readers will remember the small flurry of site-specific web apps two years — Michael McCracken’s WebMail app for Gmail and Chip Cuccio’s GCal app for Google Calendar. With no bookmarks, other windows and other temptations, these apps allowed users to focus on their productivity without distractions.

Fluid works on the same principle. Based on Mozilla’s Prism app , it creates a site-specific app, complete with its own Dock icon, menubars and other individual settings.

Here are some that I made earlier for Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, mint and facebook:

Now, when I want to get the email done, I open the Gmail app, when I want to unwind I turn to the facebook one. I am never tempted to work when I should be relaxing, nor to relax when I should be at work. (That’s the theory; as every “Getting Things Done” fan knows deep in their heart, in the end no app can save you from yourself!).

The ability to run Greasemonkey scripts inside these Fluid apps is very cool. Previously only really available to Firefox users, Fluid now lets me load my two favourite scripts from userscripts.org so that I can use Gmail with killer keyboard macros and some of the noise taken out of the Gmail interface:

Fluid’s free-standing apps can each have their own preference settings. The overall behaviour of the window is also customizable — overlaid on the Dashboard, normal, floating or embedded in the Desktop. Here, for example, is my mint in Fluid’s simple black HUD style:

A Flickr group – Fluid Icons – offers lots of nice looking Dock icons for various web sites. I scored most of the icons in the screenshot above from there.

The possibilities seem enormous, and this article only scratches the surface of the app’s potential.

This updated version lets you turn a browser into a menubar utility, so that clicking on its menubar icon opens its window–instant, roll-your-own to-do lists in a Fluid-generated Remember the Milk or Stikkit app!

Fluid is freeware and available from the Fluid web site . productivity, GTD, Getting Things Done, webkit, fluid, gmail, google calendar, facebook, mint, google docs, web 2.0, web apps, greasemonkey

EasyTask 2.0 has been released, bringing a range of new features and bugfixes to this “mid-range” Getting Thing Done (GTD) app.

Hawk Wings has posted on EasyTask Manager before.

The changelog for the new version seems promising:

•    New 3-panel Preview. View and edit tasks faster.
•    Tasks can have system wide alarms (Leopard only).
•    Quick add system wide hot-key allows to add new tasks from any application (option+apple+right arrow key).
•    Improved Online Sync (fix various bugs with some tasks not syncing).
•    Automatic realtime sync with iCal / Calendar store in Leopard so tasks are visible in Apple Mail and emails can be converted to tasks. (Leopard only. Tiger syncs with iCal but users need to click Sync button).
•    Added option to sync using Projects instead of Contexts as Calendars (Leopard only).
•    New Outline look.
•    Fix problem with Online Sync and firewalls.

But what caught my eye was the claim on the developer’s web site that it can “Sync with the iPhone”.

This turns out to be only half-true (if that). It doesn’t sync with the iPhone at all. What happens is that app syncs up to an online interface accessible through an iPhone.

It’s not a beautiful interface, but will get the job done. However, when you mark a task as completed on the iPhone you are greeted with the screen on the right:

Hmmmm…. This is not the key to a seamless GTD workflow.

If you are looking for a solid GTD workflow that involves an iPhone, Remember the Milk remains a much better solution (although the launch of the 3G iPhone promises lots of new apps, like OmniFocus for the iPhone ).

(UPDATE: According to TUAW Remember the Milk has just won the 2008 Apple Design Award for best iPhone web app.)

With its much more polished iPhone interface (pictured), Dashboard widget , Quicksilver action and whatnot , it’s the best iPhone solution currently around.

The Republic of Geektopia (see all its RTM posts ) and David Chartier have both written fine posts on how they Get Things Done with Remember the Milk and its tools which I won’t repeat here.

I should point out, that in order to use the iPhone interface, you need to puchase a “pro” subscription (USD 25 a year) to Remember The Milk.

See too Bruce McKenzie’s fine post on Getting Things Done using an iPhone.

I’m torn about EasyTask Manager. On the one hand, it presents a fine mid-priced (USD 19.99), mid-featured GTD framework.

On the other, with Things and OmniFocus and others powering ahead, it’s simply falling too far behind the pack. Harsh but, I think, fair.

Check it out for yourself from the developer’s web site . Remember the Milk, RTM, Getting Things Done, GTD, Quicksilver, widget, productivity, not apple mail, not mail.app, iCal

The Hawk Wings plugin and add-on list contains over 140 plug-ins, add-ons, scripts and utilities to make working with Mail.app, iCal and Address Book smarter, faster and better.

Today it gains a new section for Leopard Mail templates.

I’ve managed to round up 122 templates, including the 111 contained in Equinux’s shareware bundle. The others are all freeware and are themed for Christmas, sober business use, New Year’s and the birth of a baby girl (oddly missing from Apple’s default list).

If I have missed any, let me know.

Of course you can always “roll your own” which is more satisfying. Tutorials abound. See The Apple Blog , The Graphic Mac and the tutorial and templates at Technosanity .

I’ve also added Eaglefiler to the section on Archiving.

The plug-in list itself is sadly in need of revision.

Some plug-ins have disappeared, the development of some like the notification utility iNotify has been stopped so that they are not compatible with Leopard and others have moved around due to web site changes. And there are many more new utilities that I still haven’t added.

I’ll work through it slowly. Promise. plugins, plug-ins, add-ons, mail.app, apple mail, ical, address book, html templates, leopard mail, applescript, productivity

Hawk Wings reader Jon Yates emails to ask, “Any idea how to print a list of all your to do headings in OSX Leopard mail.app?”

Good question! I don’t think you can. At least, I can’t work it out (which may not be the same thing).

Luckily because of the new system-wide task database in Leopard, your choices are not restricted to Mail.

You can, of course, do it in iCal. But it takes a lot of stuffing around with the options in the Print dialog to whittle things down to a lean, tasks-only list. And then more clicking to get it to print out as, for example, a PDF.

But in the end you can get there:

You could do it in a GTD app like OmniFocus or Things, but that seems like a hammer and walnut solution for the problem. Jon just want to email a list of tasks.

Fortunately, a quicker, more efficient and free solution is not far away. The task management widget DoBeDo (which also does a lot of other things — see earlier Hawk Wings post) has a print option that can quick spit out a list of tasks in Preview as a PDF or to a specified printer.

After you set the option on the back of the widget, it is a one step operation (mouse-click or ⌘P), and produces a nice list:

It also has a one-click option (⌘E) to send the list to an email address that you specify.

DoBeDo has recently been updated, and now features a “Last Day of the Month” scheduling option and treats “procrastinated” tasks without a due date as due today.

It also has more skins that the last time I looked (selection below):

The Apple Calendar skin looks nice next to the other black widgets in Dashboard:

DoBeDo is freeware. It is available along with detailed documentation of its options and keyboard shortcuts from the developer’s web site . mail.app, apple mail, tasks, todos, ical, printing, lists, dobedo, widget, pdf, productivity, tips, leopard