Hawk Wings » SIMBL

Flagit!: Customised flags for Mail.app

Tim Gaden — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 12:17:14 +0000

Ever felt that the red flag in Mail.app doesn’t offer you enough flexibility?

Flagit! is a plug-in that offers Mail.app users customisable flags of as many different colours as you like, as well as question and exclamation marks.

It is packaged as a plug-in for SIMBL , an Input Manager that allows application-specific hacks for Cocoa apps (like Mail.app).

It is not heavy on documentation. Pay close attention to the installer screen, because it offers you all the information you will get on how to use its new features:

Once installed, you can access its features through the “Mark” option in the contextual menu. Highlight the email you want to flag, Control-click (or right-click) on the email and choose the flag you want:

The Customize option opens a preference pane with room to edit the default flags and create as many new ones as you need:

It also provides the option to colourise the text of the email that you have flagged. Combined with the option to colourise the backgrounds of emails (which I do through Mail Act-on — Leopard users this way ), it can produce a riot of colour in your inbox.

If I wasn’t very happy about marking emails done or needing attention or waiting for a response with the keywords feature of MailTags , I could imagine using this, and benefitting from the additional visual help of coloured flags.

Flagit! works with Tiger and Leopard and is shareware (USD 8). You can download a 15-day free demo from the developer’s web site .

UPDATE: Users report in the comments that Flagit! doesn’t play nicely with the WideMail plugin. The comments also contain some tips on uninstalling Flagit! mail.app, apple mail, flags, productivity, hacks, simbl, pluginsSimilar Posts:

Get extra focus with full-screen TextMate

Tim Gaden — Wed, 05 Jul 2006 12:37:08 +0000

Merlin Mann recently posted about a nifty new full-screen word processor called WriteRoom, which by filling the whole screen removes many distractions and helps you to focus on the task at hand.

Very clever and most excellent for plain text work. But sometimes you need the textual grunt, coding smarts, snippets and features of an app like TextMate .

Help is to hand! On the TextMate mailing list , Martin StrÃ¶m posted a note about a utility called Megazoomer , which can zoom many apps including TextMate to near-as-dammit full-screen mode. It requires the SIMBL plugin , also used by PithHelmet and other enhancement apps.

Intel Mac users might want to get a version which has been recompiled as a universal binary .

It adds a menu item to the Window menu. Click in when you are working in TextMate for the extra focus that full-screen mode provides. It doesn’t have the polish of WriteRoom’s layout but it does offer you the full power of TextMate’s features.textmate, productivity, fullscreen, SIMBL, text, hacksSimilar Posts:

Scalp: Share iCal over FTP, SSH or SFTP

Tim Gaden — Thu, 15 Jun 2006 15:11:52 +0000

Scalp is a bundle for iCal that enables the sharing of calendars over FTP, SSH or SFTP connections.

The developer created it, he explains, “because .Mac is expensive and WebDAV can be hard to come by”.

It depends on SIMBL (Smart InputManager Bundle Loader), the same Cocoa application hack that powers the Safari plug-in PithHelmet , iAlert and other useful apps. A copy of SIMBL in included in the disk image and must be installed first.

Full instructions on how to install and run the app (some fiddling with URLs is required) are included in the disk image as well. Note especially the known bugs section.

The hack, which only works with iCal 2.0.3, gets its name from “the unfortunate result” of combining cal and scp, the SSH copy command.

Donations from grateful Scalp users are not refused by the developer. You can get Scalp from his web site .ical, ftp, sftp, ssh, calendars, sharing, weddav, .Mac, dotmac, hacks, SIMBLSimilar Posts:

iCalFix 0.3.1: Automatic alarms for iCal

Tim Gaden — Tue, 11 Apr 2006 14:16:28 +0000

iCalFix is an iCal plugin that adds an alarm by default to any iCal event you create.

A new version released a while ago adds some neat new features:

The last alarm settings you have entered are re-used for bulk settings.

You can specify message-only alarms by setting the alarm sound in the plist file to an empty string.

It has fixed a compatibility problem with kGTD (Kinkless GTD).

Alarm sounds can contain strings so that you can customise them even more.

The plugin requires SIMBL (Smart InputManager Bundle Loader), the same Cocoa application hack that powers the Safari plug-in PithHelmet and iAlert , a Mail.app (and more) notification system. Instructions are included in iCalFix’s readme file.

iCalFix 0.4 — not far away — will be a universal binary and will feature a preference pane of its own.

The developer Robert Blum has also written a piece on The Making of iCalFix which is like James Eagan’s Guide to writing a Mail.app plugin (except that it is about iCal and not really a guide). Good reading.

ICalFix is freeware and is available from Robert’s web site .ical, plugins, events, alarms, SIMBL, kGTD, productivitySimilar Posts:

Automatically add an alarm to an iCal event

Tim Gaden — Tue, 27 Dec 2005 21:49:28 +0000

By default iCal requires you to add an alarm manually to any event you create. That takes precious time. It’s tedious. And sometimes you forget to do it at all. All in all, that’s not a win for productivity.

Robert Blum has created a plug-in for iCal that adds an alarm automatically, set to remind you 24 hours before the event.

It requires SIMBL, (Smart InputManager Bundle Loader), the same Cocoa application hack that powers the Safari plug-in PithHelmet and iAlert, a Mail.app (and more) notification system.

Robert seems to plan more features in the future, but you can get the current version from his blog.

[Via 43Folders]

UPDATE: Newer version (0.2) released 17 January 2006.

UPDATE: Newer version (0.3.1) released in March 2006.Similar Posts:

iAlert 6.3

Tim Gaden — Sun, 20 Nov 2005 21:39:25 +0000

iAlert, the notification utility that runs on top of SIMBL, has been updated.

The new version fixes a bug which prevented changes in an alert description taking effect and resolves a few minor problems with some Mail.app alerts.

iAlert is freeware and is available from the developer’s web site.Similar Posts: