Posts Tagged ‘Safari’

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Growl 1.1.3 brings Leopardised GrowlMail

Sunday, June 8th, 2008

Growl IconGrowl 1.1.3 has been released, bringing with it the official Leopard-friendly GrowlMail Extra.

Long-time Hawk Wings readers will remember that a beta-version of the GrowlMail Extra emerged on the Internet late last year. This new release is the real thing.

The main Growl app gains a number of improvements, including the ability to show notifications in every one of Leopard’s Spaces, the option to set a unique sound for each app’s alerts, and some bug fixes.

GrowlMail itself has been rewritten to remove the conflict with Leopard, and can now be installed on other start-up volumes.

Likewise, GrowlSafari now works with Safari 3.0, and other Extras get bugfixes and enhanced compatibility with Leopard.

growlmail_alert.jpgThe alerts looks nice, and now seems to drag a picture from Address Book for the sender if one is available, but uses the default Mail stamp icon if not.

This screenshot features an “iPhonesque” display style from MacThemes.

GrowlMail adds a preference pane to Mail.app in which you can set the way it reports alerts for more than one new email, the mailboxes it should monitor and more:

Growlmail Prefs

Growl and its Extras are freeware and available from the Growl web site .

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Posted in Apple Mail, Apple Mail Plug-ins | 8 Comments »

Zimbra’s Mobile Phone interface on an iPhone

Sunday, January 20th, 2008

ZimbraAfter complaining that the IT Department has more important things to do than upgrade our Zimbra installation, I am forced to eat my words.

It was updated this morning, and the new features (see Zimbra’s press release ) are just as sweet as they promised to be (Thanks, Mark. You IT guys are the cat’s pajamas.)

I no longer have to dive into Firefox to use its web interface, and it does feel blisteringly fast in Safari 3.0.

Dialling up the Zimbra 5.0 web interface in Safari on the iPhone now automatically launches its “mobile” interface. It looks good:

zimbraiblurred.jpg

It lets you select emails by folder, via Zimbra’s saved searches or by tag. In a nice touch for MailTags users, you can set a Zimbra filter which will pick up a particular plain-text MailTags tag in the x-mailtags header and label it with a corresponding Zimbra tag.

The only downside I can find is no auto-completion of email addresses, which is a pain if you need to compose a new email or forward an existing one.

ZimbracalendariphoneThe calendar on the iPhone is even better than the built-in one.

It respects the colour choices of each calendar so that it is easier at a glance to see if the event is home-related (blue) or work-related (green). In iPhone’s default calendar everything is steely-blue. Stylish but not as informative.

No auto-completion puts iPhone’s mail client ahead for email, but Zimbra’s calendar is now my first port of call for seeing what’s coming up next.

[Hawk Wings readers who are unfamiliar with Zimbra's power, reliability and general open-source goodness can read about it on Zimbra's Product Page .]

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Posted in Not Apple Mail, Productivity | 9 Comments »

Zimbra gets friendly with Safari 3.0, CalDAV, iPhone

Thursday, January 17th, 2008

ZimbraA new version of the Zimbra collaboration suite has been released, which will make Leopard users smile with its support for Safari 3.0, integration of Leopard’s CalDAV features and an optimised iPhone interface.

The update was announced on the same day as Steve’s MWSF keynote, so it seems to have sunk without a trace. That’s a shame, as Zimbra is not only the closet thing that I have ever used to a Microsoft Exchange killer, but also works seamlessly with mail.app. It even plays nicely with MailTags.

I use it at work and it is rock solid. With its iCal-syncing Preference Pane, it also provides the platform-independent email and calendaring interface between me and my PC-using PA.

According to the press release , the Zimbra Team are cock-a-hoop about Leopard. CEO and co-founder of Zimbra, Satish Dharmaraj, says that, “The amazing speed of Safari 3 has blown the Zimbra team away and we are excited to be the first major collaboration platform to support the calendaring standard CalDAV.”

I will admit that I began to drool (a little) at the mention of the iPhone interface:

Additionally, ZCS is now available to iPhone users via the Zimbra Mobile HTML client. The iPhone’s Safari browser enables fast access to the full-featured AJAX interface, and the Zimbra Connector for Apple iSync allows users to sync not only their email but also their address books and calendars to their iPhones.

Unfortunately, the IT Department where I work is currently enjoying some personnel restructuring and doesn’t have the resources to commit to upgrading our installation to the new version anytime soon. Perhaps you will have more luck.

Although it is now owned by Yahoo!, Zimbra retains its open-source roots. An Open Source Edition is available for free. Other, more expensive options including product support are also available. All of them can be explored at the Zimbra web site .

The company is also hiring .

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Posted in Apple Mail, Not Apple Mail, Productivity | 4 Comments »

Leopard Mail’s clever HTML formatting

Wednesday, November 21st, 2007

A poster on macOSXHints points out how much smarter Leopard Mail is at handling content from the web which is pasted into its messages from web browsers.

For example, say you want to share someone’s overall top artists from Last.fm:

Lastfmwebsite

Block the content you want to send, and then drag it to a message in Mail.app, and behold:

Lastfmdraggedto Mailapp

Mail does a pretty good job of preserving the HTML formatting, even keeping the links and tool tips alive. It even provides a “widget-like” black boundary and cross for quick removal of the HTML block if you change your mind about sending it.

There are two things to note here. First, this works much better if the message is set to Rich Text Format. I live in a Plain Text world, so didn’t notice this at first. But perhaps only fuddy-duddies like me think it is more polite to send a link to the page.

Secondly, it works even better if you apply the “quicker text dragging” hack. Of course, this speeds life up all across Mac OS X, but also in this case.

Cocoa-based apps (Mail.app, Safari, etc) require by default that you hold your mouse down over the selected text for a second before dragging.

You can reduce the built-in delay with a simple Terminal hack. Open Terminal and type (exactly):

defaults write -g NSDragAndDropTextDelay -int 100

This will reduce the delay to a tenth of a second in all your Cocoa-based apps (’-g’ stands for ‘global’).

It modifies a string in the .GlobalPreferences.plist file in your ~/Library/Preferences folder:

Nsdragand Drop

You could edit it manually in Plist Editor, as seen here, if you have an aversion to the Terminal, although you will need to use an app like Leopard Cache Cleaner to reveal Leopard’s “hidden files” first.

You will, of course, need to restart the apps for the change to take effect.

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Posted in Apple Mail Tips, Productivity | 3 Comments »

Better Gmail 2.0 for the new Gmail

Sunday, November 11th, 2007

BettergmailGmail’s new interface is gradually spreading through its user base. I have it now.

It brings mysterious backend changes which enhance “the performance and the usability” of Gmail, as well as new features for contact management and more.

Two things will strike Hawk Wings readers at once.

First, the new interface breaks the Better Gmail Firefox extension. Its keyboard macros, quick navigation, coloured labels, advanced composing options and more make Gmail a pleasure to use.

Luckily Gina Trapani (a productivity goddess) is quick off the mark, and Better Gmail 2.0 is already available, although with a vastly decreased feature set, as she waits for the developers of each feature to update their code. Still, it already contains the keyboard shortcuts which are the key feature for speeding up your Gmail experience.

Secondly, Safari 3.0 is not fully supported. For example, on a cosmetic note, compare the contact manager layout on Google’s blog (top) with how it looks in Safari 3.0 (below):

Contacts Googleblog

    

Newgmailsafari

Other early adopters of Leopard may agree that it is possible to spend too much time on the bleeding edge of innovation. Gmail OlderversionLuckily, you can opt to use the old interface instead by clicking on “Older Version” next to the Settings.

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Posted in Not Apple Mail, Productivity | 6 Comments »

WebKit nightly builds now offer Gmail rich text

Friday, April 27th, 2007

Web kitAnthony Baker emails to tell me that the new nightly builds of WebKit (which will be used for Safari 3.0) have fixed the WYSIWYG form editing problem that bedevils users of current Safari versions.

This means, he says, that “you can now hit Gmail and get the same kinds of rich-text editing capability provided to IE, FF and other browsers. You can also access Google Docs.”

And it’s true. Using Safari 2.0.4 (419.3) the formatting bar in Gmail’s basic HTML view doesn’t appear:

Gmailsafari 2

But WebKit displays the HTML formatting bar in all its glory (as it also does in Google Docs):

Gmail web kit

Not only that but some basic formatting keyboard shortcuts work too. So ⌘B and ⌘I toggle bold and italic text, making it easier for die-hard keyboard users to format their emails without fingers leaving the keyboard.

Not all the shortcuts work though. Tab+Enter doesn’t send a message and ⌘U doesn’t produce underlined text.

The latest beta of the much-hyped Desktop client for Gmail, MailPlane which I have been fooling around with for a few days also offers the option to use WebKit behind the scenes to give users this added functionality (but that’s a topic for another longer post.)

WebKit scolds you for daring to use extensions, but that’s a small price to pay for a user in love with Gmail’s HTML features.

[Thanks, Anthony!]

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Posted in Apple, Not Apple Mail | 14 Comments »

What to do after deleting Mail.app by mistake

Thursday, January 25th, 2007

EmbarrassedNick Flood posts a problem in the user forums at HEXUS:

I stupidly deleted mail.app and I now need it. I can’t find the download anywhere on the internet.

Can anyone help me out?

Once upon a time, you had to get hold of Pacifist , a neat little app that extracts applications from packages, disk images and archives.

You could use it to navigate through your original OS X discs to find Mail.app, extract and install it.

But now (and not everyone knows this) there is an easier way.

Tiger allows for the “custom installation” of individual apps without the need for third-party helpers.

Just insert your installation disks and follow the instructions in this Apple technote, “Custom installs in Mac OS X 10.4″ :

Custominstalls

This custom reinstall option can also be used with Address Book, iCal, iChat, iTunes and Safari.

Of course, sometimes Mail.app is so buggered up with hacks, scripts, plugins and add-ons that you may want to delete it and re-install on purpose.

An earlier Hawk Wings post (see “The Final Solution: Reinstalling Mail.app“) covers the steps to do that successfully.

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Posted in Apple Mail | No Comments »

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