It’s almost eighteen months since I first posted about the noticeable “Rise and Rise of the Mail-like Look” in many apps. Yojimbo, SOHO Smart Notes, ecto and many more have since followed suit, so that Fraser Spiers’ “Exposé confusion” is a greater danger than ever.

If you fancy an even more unified GUI across all your apps, UNO is the utility for you.

An updated version has just been released which brings the Mail-like look of a unified Toolbar/Titlebar and lighter metal look to all the windows in your system. Its aim is “to enhance aqua interface consistency, by making all elements look and feel as one.”

UNO 1.5 has been completely rewritten. Some annoying glitches (the QuickTime window, for example) are now fixed, and the developers have produced a wider range of skins for iTunes.

The app’s main interface offers a preview of how your system will look after applying the tweak:

Notice also the Uninstall button which allows you to unwind the changes easily if you want to return to vanilla Mac OS X.

In this version, Mail.app gets some special treatment. After applying UNO, the lozenge-shaped buttons are replaced with Safari- or Finder-like rectangular buttons and the unread mail icon is “aquafied”:

This is only an option though. If you like UNO’s consistent style and the default lozenged-up look of Tiger Mail you can choose that combination in the interface option drop-down boxes on the left of the main screen.

You can read more about UNO and view the entire 1.5 changelog on the developer’s web site.

UNO is free-ware (donations not refused) and is available from the app’s website .UNO, unified toolbar, lighter metal, apple interface, GUI, brushed metal, hack, tip, mail.app, apple mail

David Chartier over at TUAW has hit upon a Mail.app productivity tip that will be useful for some users.

He points out that it is possible to open a second viewer window via the File menu (or ⌥⌘N if you are that kind of person), so that you can process your email twice as fast. Or at least, attack it from two different angles at once.

He suggests one possible use:

This is particularly useful if you have a folder (or perhaps a Smart Folder) which you keep checking throughout the day; this way, you can simply keep one viewer open to your inbox (or whatever default location that suits you), with the second viewer set on that other fold.

Nice one.mail.app, apple mail, productivity, viewer window, smart mailbox, tip

Here’s is a simple tip that was new to me.

There are two ways to add a vCard with your contact information to a Mail.app signature.

An old post on macOSXHints details how to add it as a hyperlink to a remotely-stored vCard file, so that recipients can download it into their Address Books easily.

The end result is nice and clean and saves bandwidth:

If you don’t give two figs about bandwidth, you can simply export your card from Address Book.

Then drag it onto a signature in the Signature pane of Mail’s preferences, and your vCard goes out with every signed email:

Of course, it is possible to share more information than you mean to or more than your recipients want. It might be a good idea to create a special Address Book card for this before exporting it. Address book, mail.app, apple mail, vcard, signature, contact information, tip, hyperlink

I had an email from a Hawk Wings reader today, asking how to do something that I am surprised to discover I’ve not posted about on Hawk Wings before.

Mail.app offers an optional field in the Compose window for specifying a different Reply-to email address:

This is fine if you only need to do it now and again. But it’s a pain if you want to do this regularly, because you need to enter the email address each time you compose an email.

(Now former?) Mail Team Developer Cricket has created an applescript which will add a form of this header to every email by default. It also lets you add a default bcc: address (useful for quietly copying your emails to Gmail perhaps).

Running the script presents you with a list of options:

Select the Reply-to one and a dialog appears into which you can enter your desired Reply-to address:

Cricket provides another script to undo the change later on if you want to.

The scripts are freeware, unsupported by Apple and available from Cricket’s web site .

A poster on macOSXHints provides some Terminal commands to add a Reply-to or Bcc: email address if you prefer to do things that way.

[Thanks for the prompt, John!]mail.app, apple mail, tip, default reply-to address, Bcc, gmail, applescript, terminal

Today Apple’s Pro Tips web page carries a hint that was news to me. It tells you how to use Mac OS X’s built-in Disk Utility to burn multiple sessions on a single CD or DVD.

It describes how to create a burn folder, open Disk Utility, select “Image from folder” from the New option in the File menu, then highlight the new image, select burn and then — here’s the magic part — make sure that the expanded options (blue arrow button in top right) are showing in the next dialog.

Check the “Leave disc appendable” option:

Then you will be able to append further burn sessions to the same disk by following this process at each burn.

A bit of a pain in the butt perhaps, but it saves discs, saves money and saves the environment.not apple mail, CD-ROM, DVD, burning, multiple sessions, append, tip

A slightly esoteric tip, but very useful for the people who need it…

Jacob Rus has created a list of multi-stroke keybindings that allow for the quick insertion of Apple-centric glyphs like ⌥⇧⌘V or ⌥→ or ⌫ or, when all else fails, ⎋.

If you write documentation for applications or give advice on how to do things in Mail.app or any other Apple app or just prefer ⌥⇧⌘V to Option-Shift-Command-V, this collection of keybindings is for you.

After installation, it will work in any relaunched Cocoa app—ecto, Mail.app, TextMate, Yojimbo, WriteRoom, whatever.

Head over to the TextMate blog, where Allan Odgaard has posted instructions on how to install the keybindings in your ~/Library/KeyBindings folder.Apple, keyboard shortcuts, productivity, apple-centric glyphs, keybindings, tip, not apple mail

A tip on macOSXHints points out a short-cut for text entry in Address Book.

Pressing Option-Escape in a text field, opens an autocomplete dialogue with options from previously entered cards.

Like all these tips, it makes perfect sense when you think about, but who ever thinks about it?

For example, type the first two or three letters of the name, hit Option-Escape and then just choose from the options that appear:

This is especially useful with spouses or large numbers of employees from one company or those English Fotherington-Smythe cousins.

Unfortunately, Address Book Quick Entry (now my preferred faster way of entering contacts) isn’t as smart about this. Hitting Option-Escape here brings up a general autocomplete list rather than previous values from Address Book itself.productivity, address book, text entry, keyboard shortcut, time saving, tip