Aaron Harnly has taken an “all-too-welcome distraction from pressing schoolwork” to update his widescreen plugin Letterbox.

He has released the new version as a public beta.

It comes with a stand-alone plugin manager for Mail.app that can inspect, enable, disable, install and remove any Mail plugin:

The new version also features a preference pane with options to tweak the display, by toggling on and off the horizontal lines and/or different coloured backgrounds for items in the middle pane. The preview pane can be set to display on the right or underneath (an option to display the pane on the left has been switched off until some problems are resolved):

It comes with an auto-updater and Aaron promises that a two-line column for the middle pane (à la WideScreenMail, the other Leopard-friendly wide-screen plugin) is on the way.

It is a public beta so can expect a few minor kinks that still to be ironed out. Pick it up from Aaron’s web site.mail.app, apple mail, leopard mail, widescreen, entourage, outlook, plugin manager, tips, plugins

I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again, the lack of options for displaying to-dos in Leopard Mail is disappointing. And frustrating.

A poster in the macOSXHints forums has come up with a good work-around for avoiding that long list of finished tasks.

He has created a Smart Mailbox called “Not Done” which is set up to display all to-dos that are incomplete:

Simple, really. Why didn’t I think of that? mail.app, apple mail, leopard mail, to-dos, tips, productivity, smart mailboxes, workarounds

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:

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

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):

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:

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.mail.app, apple mail, productivity, safari, cocoa, text, html, rich text formatting, tips

Hmmm…. Late to the party on this one, but still worth posting.

Derek Punsalan has posted a comprehensive guide to getting Gmail’s new IMAP service, Apple Mail and the iPhone’s Mail.app working together in perfect harmony.

He explains how to mail the special folders in Mail.app (Sent, Draft, Trash) to the correct ones in your Gmail account, and then how to match them in the Gmail account on your iPhone.

He also provides a summary of several clever tips that were left in the 212 comments to the post, including how to use Gmail without all the Gmail folder hierarchy, and how Mail.app flags and Gmail stars are the same thing.

Curiously, he doesn’t mention a tip for email hoarders. If you like to keep everything, select Gmail’s all mail folder and under Mail.app’s Mailbox > Use this mailbox for… menu option, select Trash.

Then your delete key becomes a quick archive shortcut.

Of course, there are many reasons why this might be a bad idea — See an earlier Hawk Wings post on Why the delete key is your best friend.

[Via just about everyone]mail.app, apple mail, gmail, google, imap, iphone, folders, tips

In the past few days, my macOSXHints RSS feed has churned out an astonished number of interesting tips for iCal, Address Book and Mail.app.

Not all of them are equally useful or productivity-boosting, but all of them are interesting, if only because there are sometimes better ways to get these things done.

1. Use Quickview for Mail.app attachments

One tip explains that highlighting an attachment in a Mail message and pressing the spacebar opens Quickview.

Not much more useful than using the Quickview button next to the “Save” button under the headers perhaps, but in the comments, another poster points out that pressing ⌘-Y when viewing a message opens all the message’s attachments in a single Quickview window, with arrows to move from one to the next.

2. Adding notes and to-dos to individual emails

Another post details a way to add notes to an individual email using Leopard Mail’s to-do feature. This is a “hack” for Leopard Mail’s inability to attach notes to individual emails.

I hardly need to tell regular Hawk Wings readers that there is a more excellent way .

3. Apply filters to Address Book contact pictures

This was news to me. If you click the “swirly cube” button next to the camera button in Address Book’s contact image editor, you are rewarded with 35 different filters that you can apply to the picture.

In effect, this brings Photobooth (my kids’ favourite Mac app) to all your Address Book contacts. There is a lot of fun to be had here, especially with the photos of contacts that you don’t much care for.

4. Use Drag ‘n’ Drop to replace icons in an item’s Inspector pane

From time to time I like to chance the icon of my Mail.app. After all there are more than 450 options and changing the icon under Tiger was easy.

Now it is even easier. A macOSXHints tip explains how to change an icon not by opening two Inspectors and cutting and pasting between the icon field in each, but simply by dragging and dropping an icon into the icon field of the target app’s Inspector. That’s much quicker.

5. Unlearn words you learnt by mistake

Mac OS X’s spell checker is a wonderful thing, surpassed only by Spell Checker X, now in the process of private Leopard-friendly beta testing and soon to reappear.

But is is possible to learn a word too quickly, a tipster on macOSXHints points out , adding a misspelt word to your dictionary which the spell checker will never again pick up. Now unlearning it is as simple as right-clicking (or “Command-clicking” in the old language) on the offending word and selecting “Unlearn Spelling” from the contextual menu.mail.app, apple mail, address book, tips, macosxhints, icons, spell checking, contacts, mailtags, notes, to-dos, productivity

I’ve been using Leopard for long enough now to collect five tips that save me time and effort. Let me pass them on to you.

Find emails faster in Leopard Mail

Before Leopard it was possible to find emails in the list view of a mailbox faster by using the Mail Type Select plugin. With this installed, Mail.app jumped to the first message that matched your keystrokes, just as Finder does. So typing “Ros” quickly found the first email in the mailbox from Rosemary.

Now this feature is built into Leopard Mail by default. Try it out. It makes a difference.

Do your sums faster

Now that I am a Dean and need to set and manage budgets, I need to do sums more than ever before. A nice new feature in the Spotlight window, does your sums for you.

Just type in an equation, say, “12 * 34″ and Spotlight goes to Calculator and does the sum for you, giving you the answer in the Spotlight results. Nifty.

Edit iCal to-dos and events faster

In Tiger you could edit events and to-dos from the information pane. Now, iCal’s sidebar has gone to God. To edit an iCal item, you need to double-click it, wait for the details pane and then click again on the edit button on the bottom.

These extra clicks add up over time. Especially if, like me, you live in a fluid world in which tasks and meetings are always changing.

Luckily, there is a short cut to get straight to editing an event or a to-do.

Click once on the iCal item to highlight it. Then press ⌘-e (Command + ‘e’) and you launch into an edit dialog straight away.

Create better iCal events in Mail faster

Hovering the mouse over a name or details of an event in Leopard Mail activates Leopard’s Data Detector and produces a drop box with the option to add it to Address Book or iCal.

That’s pretty smart, but there is something even smarter lurking here.

If you block all a contact’s information before you hover over the name, for example, or details of an event for iCal, the data detector pastes all the information into the new contact’s or event’s notes field.

Get more out of iCal’s Dashboard Widget

The iCal Widget in Leopard has a secret up its sleeve. If you click on it once, it displays the monthly calendar we all knew and loved in Tiger.

Click on it once more, and it pulls your events for the day out into a third pane:

I get this information more easily from MenuCalendarClock, but if I didn’t have it, I’d value it here. UPDATE: Thirty seconds after posting this I found a smarter Dashboard solution.

[Via macOSXHints , TUAW , trial and error and poking around]mail.app, apple mail, ical, leopard, productivity, tips, dashboard, events, to-dos, calculator, spotlight, apple, widget

GrowlMail, the Mail-specific notification bundle for Growl doesn’t work under Leopard, although the next version (1.1.3) will work. If you are missing it and can’t wait, this applescript workaround will help.

Kevin Way posted an AppleScript on his web site two months ago that can be attached to a Mail.app rule.

It passes notifications of new messages directly to Growl, and since it is rule-activated, you can use conditions to make it tell you only about emails from particular people. Of course, you could also set it to match on particular words in the subject of the mail, or only for emails from a particular account, or for whatever other condition you set in the rule.

I found that the latest beta of MailTags stopped me creating a rule with an applescript attached, but uninstalling it, creating the rule and then loading MailTags again seems to work fine.

The end result is a nice Growl alert:

A thread on the Growl forum contains more tips and tricks for tweaking the script.mail.app, apple mail, growl, notification, tips, applescript, rules