Oliver, another Ars Technica reader, has taken Mithras’ MailWideScreen bundle and tweaked it some more, following the advice of Malacoda.

He added alternating background colours for the rows in Message Viewer, vertical lines and small scrollbars.

He has posted screenshots of the result in the Ars Technica thread .

These tweaks are done by editing the nib files in Mail.app’s Resources Package with an app called Interface Builder, which is part of the Mac OS X Developer Tools.

These tools are not installed by default, but you can find them on your installation discs, where they live in a folder called “Xcode Tools”. After installation you will find them in a folder called “Developer” in the root directory (this may not be the right word, but a hangover from pre-Mac days) of your harddrive.

If you have them installed, you can navigate to the MessageViewerContents.nib file in your Contents/Resources/English.lproj/ folder of Mail.app’s package, click on it and it will open in Interface Builder.

At this point, I should confess that I have absolutely no idea what I am doing in Interface Builder, so if you want to read on and fool around with the way Mail looks (as I did), it’s at your own risk.

I recommend backing up Mail.app at the very least, or creating a duplicate of Mail.app and dragging it to the Desktop for safe keeping. Closing Mail first seems like a prudent step too.

It’s easy enough to create Oliver’s extra tweaks. When the nib file opens, click once on the Column view of the main window to select it:

Then bring up the Inspector, pictured above on the left, by pressing Shift-Command-I or Window > Show Inspector. All the options are there. Save your changes, quit and you’re done.

But once you start, it’s hard to stop. There’s lots more MailWideScreen-independent fun to be had. You can slim down the scrollbars whether you use the hack or not:

Or you can give the message viewer a once-over all your own. Here it is with alternating colours and horizontal lines:

I decided to stop before I busted something. But you don’t have to.

UPDATE: The MailWideScreen plugin has a new name: Letterbox Apple GUI, mail.app, apple mail, hacks, widescreen, bundles, nib, interface builder, mods

Yesterday, I sent off an email with a link to my post on Mithras’ three-paned plugin for Mail.app to a shadowy figure within the Mail Development Team at Apple.

I got a reply, something I wasn’t expecting.

From the email, I learnt two things.

First, they had already seen the post. Hawk Wings’ RSS feed (along with many others, no doubt) is read by someone in the Development Team. That surprised me and obviously signals the end of any future cranky posts about what is universally acknowledged to be a most excellent app :)

Secondly, “Deep Throat” implied that there might be some level of interest in user feedback on the widescreen plugin.

So, if you have a view, positive or negative or both, post it in the comments (the screen resolution you are using and some comment on whether it feels “squashed” or not to you would be great too).apple, mail.app, apple mail, plugins, widescreen

Screenshots have been floating around for a while with mockups of a three-paned Mail.app à la Outlook.

But now there is a hack that actually works.

A member of the Ars Technica Open Forum, Mithras, has posted a hacked binary of Mail.app, which displays the preview screen on the right, giving Mail a “widescreen” form factor.

And it actually works:

Click image for a full-sized view

Mithras’ binary has a different name (MailWidescreen) so you can copy it into your Applications folder without fear of overwriting your default copy (although backing up is always, always wise. UPDATE: Always!). Then just open the one you want each time.

Unfortunately, you cannot yet manually resize the middle column, although Mithras promises a fix for this within the week.

There is however a work-around. The middle pane of the hack takes its size from the depth of the Message List in your normal copy of Mail.

So, if the middle column is too small, open your default copy of Mail.app and increase the depth of the Message List. Then the middle screen in MailWidescreen will be correspondingly wider. Make it wider than you want. Then it will reduce to the width you actually want as you resize the whole window from the bottom right.

You can read the whole thread on the Ars Technica Openforum or cut to the chase and… download the binary.

UPDATE: Mithras works fast. He has now packaged it in the form of a classic Mail.app bundle , which you can drop into your ~/Library/Mail/Bundles folder where MailTags, Mail Act-on, Mail.appetizer and the rest live. And just as easily take it out again. Extra bonus: the middle column can now be manually re-sized as normal.

[Thanks, Nick]mail.app, apple mail, hacks, three panes, Outlook, preview pane, widescreen, Apple GUI, tips