Somewhere, in recent updates to Safari 5.0 (included in the 10.6.4 update), something went wrong with the way applications pass text to each other.

A post at MacFixIt suggests that the fault lies with WebKit, which is now “using rgb(0,0,0) as the value for the CSS “background-color” property for messages”.

Whatever the cause, emails generated in other apps often arrive in Mail.app with black text on a black background.

Here are some I made earlier: one generated by mailing a to-do from iCal:

Another created by running an applescript over a blog post in Safari:

Suggested workarounds vary in complexity. Some involve dragging iCal appointments to the Desktop and then into Mail, others suggest copying all the blacked-out text, cutting and pasting it into another app like Textedit to turn it into plain text and then pasting it back again.

Unmarked Software, the developer of TextSoap, has even produced a stand-alone Mac OS X Service, FixMailText , as a work around.

In fact, the fix is quite simple. Apple’s technote on the problem points out that all you need to do in most cases is

1. Place the cursor into the body of the email.

2. Press ⇧+⌘+T (Shift + Command + T) to turn it into plain text. Or select “Make Plain Text” from Mail’s Format menu

3. Carry on.

It also suggests a slightly more convoluted workaround for those who need to preserve links embedded in Rich Text:

If you want to preserve links the message might contain:

1. Click in the body of the Mail message
2. Press Command-A to select all
3. Press Command-X to cut
4. Press the Delete key to clear remaining elements
5. Press Option-Shift-Command-V (Paste and Match Style)

This will replace the black-on-black text with text that uses your default Mail font settings.

As others have said, a technote from Apple on the problem is as close as one will get to acknowledgement that something is wrong.

Hopefully a proper fix is not far away.

UPDATE: 6 July 2010 Mail Attachment Iconizer, a mail plugin that is also afflicted with this bug has been updated with a release (2.1.10) that resolves the problem. [ via MacFixIt }apple mail, safari, webkit, mail.app, apple mail bugs, ical, applescript

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

Fluid has just been updated. It’s a clever new app that allows you to make your own site-specific browsers (including the power of Greasemonkey scripts in Cocoa).

Along with a raft of bugfixes, the new version (0.9.2) can now turn the browswers into menubar items for even greater flexibility.

Longtime Hawk Wings readers will remember the small flurry of site-specific web apps two years — Michael McCracken’s WebMail app for Gmail and Chip Cuccio’s GCal app for Google Calendar. With no bookmarks, other windows and other temptations, these apps allowed users to focus on their productivity without distractions.

Fluid works on the same principle. Based on Mozilla’s Prism app , it creates a site-specific app, complete with its own Dock icon, menubars and other individual settings.

Here are some that I made earlier for Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, mint and facebook:

Now, when I want to get the email done, I open the Gmail app, when I want to unwind I turn to the facebook one. I am never tempted to work when I should be relaxing, nor to relax when I should be at work. (That’s the theory; as every “Getting Things Done” fan knows deep in their heart, in the end no app can save you from yourself!).

The ability to run Greasemonkey scripts inside these Fluid apps is very cool. Previously only really available to Firefox users, Fluid now lets me load my two favourite scripts from userscripts.org so that I can use Gmail with killer keyboard macros and some of the noise taken out of the Gmail interface:

Fluid’s free-standing apps can each have their own preference settings. The overall behaviour of the window is also customizable — overlaid on the Dashboard, normal, floating or embedded in the Desktop. Here, for example, is my mint in Fluid’s simple black HUD style:

A Flickr group – Fluid Icons – offers lots of nice looking Dock icons for various web sites. I scored most of the icons in the screenshot above from there.

The possibilities seem enormous, and this article only scratches the surface of the app’s potential.

This updated version lets you turn a browser into a menubar utility, so that clicking on its menubar icon opens its window–instant, roll-your-own to-do lists in a Fluid-generated Remember the Milk or Stikkit app!

Fluid is freeware and available from the Fluid web site . productivity, GTD, Getting Things Done, webkit, fluid, gmail, google calendar, facebook, mint, google docs, web 2.0, web apps, greasemonkey

On Apple Discussions Martin Marconcini has discovered a way to bring Mail.app to a screaming halt in three easy steps.

Frustrated by Mail’s tendency to freeze when he dragged anything onto Mail’s Dock icon, he went back and painstakingly restored his Mail installation step-by-step until the glitch re-emerged.

Here’s what he discovered (you can test it for yourself):

One: Set Mail’s New message default in the Composing preference pane to plain text.

Two: Add a signature to your email account in the Signatures Preference pane. Make sure that you select it at the bottom of the signature pane to be added to every new message by default:

Three: Drag an image or anything else onto Mail’s Dock icon.

That’s a big, 100%-repeatable train wreck for me.

It seems like a common configuration; it’s not restricted to dragging ClarisWorks documents onto the Dock icon when the signature contains a particular accented Laotian character. How does such a thing not emerge in internal testing? Perhaps I am too romantic about internal testing.

Anyway, happily, I am in the clear. All my signatures are just a few keystrokes away in TextExpander.

But Martin suggests some workarounds for those plagued by these freezes:

a) Use Rich Text (not an option if you use Blackberry or need plain text)
b) Use Plain Text but remove the signatures (can be a Pain In the A** if you use different business accounts like me with odd disclaimers that are a “must”).
c) Roll back to Safari 3.0.* and either use it or use Camino/Opera/Firefox/Etc. Could be a problem if you rely on Safari stuff like Inquisitor, 1Password, etc.
d) Don’t drag attachments to the dock icon…

On 8 April Apple acknowledged this as “a known issue, which is currently being investigated by engineering”. mail.app, apple mail, rich text, webkit?, plain text, dock, attachments, bug, signatures

Anthony 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:

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

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!]mail.app, apple mail, gmail, webkit, safari, html, web forms, formatting, mailplane, google

Mail.app’s version number changes from Version 2.1 (752/752.2) to Version 2.1.1 (752.3) after an update to 10.4.8 (Intel , PPC ) on an Intel Mac, but it’s not immediately clear what new features or improvements (if any) the update brings.

Apple continues its campaign to enforce the lozenge icons introduced with Tiger, overwriting any modifications with the default Tiger icons. Luckily, Mail Stamps soon removes them again.

Other plugins appear to be unaffected by the update.

Presumably, Mail users will benefit from added security to WebKit, but I can’t discover any changes in Mail.app itself. Can you? mail.app, apple mail, apple, update, 10.4.8, WebKit, icons

Chip Cuccio’s distraction-free WebKit browser for Google Calendar has been updated.

It now features a new icon and uses less screen space (800×600), which will please people with smaller displays.

Gcal is freeware and available from Chip’s web site .gcal, google calendar, browser, WebKit, productivity