As everyone knows, it has long been possible to add a very fancy signature to your mail.app emails, using the excellent tutorial provided by Melvin Rivera.

It’s complicated, involving some digging around under the hood. It also requires a measure of HTML and CSS coding ability.

However, when the process is over the result is impressive (provided that you don’t hold a faith position on plain text in Internet communication):

Now a poster on macOSXHints has discovered an easier way. It is possible to add hyperlinks to your signatures in Mail’s Preferences without the pain involved in the first option.

All you need to do is type text into the signature field, highlight it and press Command-K (⌘-K). Up pops a dialog into which you place the URL, and you’re done. In a minute you have a hyperlinked signature, not as polished as Melvin’s, but easier on the eye than a sig full of long URLs:

Rob Griffiths comments that the tip didn’t work for him in 10.5, but it’s working fine for me in 10.6.1 (mail.app 4.1).

Of course, Command-K (⌘-K) also works in the body of any (rich text) email you are composing.

[Via macOSXHints ]

Mail.app has a curious feature, which is interesting if not immediately useful.

If you put a URL in the Subject line of an email, and some text in the body of the message, Webkit (or whatever handles the text in Mail) turns it into hyperlink.

As pointed out in a tip on MacOSXHints , it doesn’t work if you leave the body of the message blank.

The result is a clickable subject in the delivered email:

It’s not clear to me how users could make use of this behaviour, especially since you need to put text in the body of the email to trigger the parsing, text which might as well be the URL itself.

Still, it’s something to blog about ;-) mail.app, apple mail, webkit, text, url, oddity, trivia

The current “Tip of the Week” from Apple describes how to email a URL from Safari.

It’s as easy as pressing ⇧⌘I and then sitting back while Mail.app creates a new message containing the link.

That’s it.

I hesitated about posting this, but sometimes tips aren’t as well known as you might think, like using ⌘] and ⌘[ to cycle through the available HTML, Rich Text and plain text views of an email, or using Gmail-like “Conversation” views in Apple Mail.

If you use some other browser, you will have to make your own arrangements. OminWeb users can use a bookmarklet to send a link, Firefox users can customise their toolbar by adding a “Send Link” button and Camino users can uses ⇧⌘L. url, safari, camino, firefox, mail.app, apple mail, keyboard shortcuts, gmail, tips, emailing a link

Pukka is a posting client for del.icio.us that can be activated quickly by a bookmarklet on your browser toolbar.

It automatically loads the URL and title of the active web page into its interface. All you have to do is tag it, type a description if you want and post it. Highlighted text on the page is added to the description field. Very quick. Very smart.

And it has just got smarter. Version 1.3 released over the weekend adds support for private bookmarking through a new option in the app’s preferences pane:

Holding down the option key when posting now prevents the app from resetting.

The new version also adds full AppleScript support.

See it in action in a screencast. Pukka is shareware (USD 5) and available from codesorcery’s web site .delicious, URL, bookmarks, posting, bookmarklet, applescript, private posting, web 2.0, social

High Priority is a System Preference Pane that brings the management of your iCal ToDos to the menubar.

An updated version, released today, contains some significant improvements and bugfixes.

The display of ToDos has been improved. It can now display the Due Date in the menu title and show only ToDo items due within a specified number of days. URLs can now be launched from a ToDo dialog.

You can now assign a global hot key to open the menu and choose to display the menu in a small font size.

The update also features new and improved status labels – Cancelled, In Process, Needs Action – for your ToDos, which are now displayed in the tooltip information.

Some bugfixes make it more stable.

High Priority is shareware (USD 6) and is available from the developer?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s web site.

Apple has updated its tech note about syncing URLs in Address Book via .Mac.

It warns that only three URLs of any one type (home, home page, work or custom) in any one Address Book card can be synced in OS X 10.4.3 or later.

Not only will any extras not sync, they will be erased. In Mac OS X 10.4 to 10.4.2, all URLs are ignored. (Put them in the Notes field).

So, if you have lots of contacts with more than twelve URLs, you have been warned.

CuteClips is an expanded clipboard utility.

It can store up to twelve recently copied elements — images, URLs, text or files — in a nice smoked glass dialog, complete with preview.

Hitting a hotkey (Shift-Command-V by default) brings up the utility’s dialog:

Clicking on one of the stored entries, pastes it at the current position of the cursor.

You can also create “sticky” clips, by holding down the Option key while clicking on a current entry.

I like little productivity-enhancing apps like this because these helpful apps help me work faster in Mail.app and elsewhere.

A demo limited to three slots and with no access to the utility’s preferences is available from the developer’s web site. The full version costs 5 euros (c. USD 6).

CopyPaste, another extended clipboard utility, offers far richer features, but is also far more expensive (USD 30).