Zoom-in Online

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A couple of months ago, I was at a client's office and I was looking over his shoulder as he was taking me through some Photoshop comps that he was preparing for a web design job we were collaborating on. While we were working, I heard the familiar mail chime, and he Option-Tabbed (*oops!) Apple-Tabbed over to his Mail application, Mac OS X Mail, and while he was seeing who had emailed him... I noticed something really intriguing: it looked like Mail.app - but then again it really didn't. His mailboxes and In and Out and Sent and all that were on the left like normal, but instead of his message subject list being at the top of the main part of the window and the text of each message being displayed beneath that in the message detail area... the message list ran the whole vertical length of his mail applicaiton window and the message detail pane was to the right of that - sort of in a third column - also running the vertical length of the window.

My first thought was "What the hell app is this?!" and my second thought when I confirmed it was actually Mail was "My Mail app can't do that, my message detail window is at the bottom. How'd you get it on the right?!"

My client looked at me and said, "ahhhh, Hawk Wings." After I saw the web page he took me to, I couldn't wait to get back to my office to start experimenting. Hawk Wings.net is a website that has a blog and all sorts of articles all dedicated to tips and tricks pertaining to Apples MAc OS X Mail.app. "Tips and Add Ons to make Apple Mail even better." The three-pane hack is called Letter Box and it works marvelously.

The central highlight of the Hawk Wings site is the ever growing "Hawk Wings: Plug Ins and Add Ons List" With categories like Notification, Added functionality, Integration with other apps, Spam Tools, Interface tweaks, Archiving, Switching, Address Book, iCal, and Miscellaneous if you use Mail at all, you will be able to find at least half-a-dozen add ons (including instructions for installation and set up) that will make your email life a better place to live.

Who is Tim Gaden?
The author of the pay-pal donation only supported site, Tim Gaden, is Research and Executive Officer to the Warden (President) of Trinity College within the University of Melbourne, and Stewart Lecturer in Theology in the College's Theological School where he teaches Greek (and that kind of thing) and tries to have interesting thoughts about the transactions between early Christian thought and Hellenistic philosophy and ethics. The rest of the time, he writes as a freelance journalist, mainly at Hawk Wings and for APC Magazine where he writes on general IT news, Apple matters and broadband.

Please Backup Your Mail!
NOTE: As always, please be sure to backup your mail folder before you make any modifications, it's always good to do so whenever you start introducing third party software plug ins. In fact, it just makes good sense to do this every couple months or more often if you're into protecting yourself and your business from the madness of Losing All Your Emailâ„¢.

How To Back Up Your Email
Before messing with plug ins or anything of the kind, please make a copy of your mail folder, keep it on another hard drive, or burn it to a CD-R or DVD-R. What I like to do is right click (or CNTRL-CLICK) on your mail folder itself and select "Create Archive of Mail" which will make a nice neat compressed and encoded zipped copy of your mail folder (now called Mail.zip) which you can burn, copy, FTP somewhere.... back it up, then screw around to your heart's content. Your Mail folder is located in your Home folder inside the Library folder Home/Library/Mail).

* [Saturday March 3, 2007, 12:35 PM - CORRECTION]
I spend too much time playing WoW in a guild full of Windows users and they are always referring to their way of minimizing the screen as "alt-tabbing-out" and I've been infected by this phrase, such that I automatically wrote "Alt-Tabbed" above, and then corrected myself by translating this into Apple-ese and said Option-Tabbed, when in fact the keystroke for cycling through your open applications in Mac OS X is in fact "Command-Tab" or "Apple-Tab." Thanks to Digg.com user Wiihuck for the correction.