Make the most of mail

Web apps such as Firefox and Safari seem to have inspired people to both create and use a wide range of plug ins that are designed to customise the users experience to help specific browsing styles, but maybe because it's such a workaday program most people seem to use Apple Mail as it comes, straight out of the box. While basic mail (and particularly Leopard Mail (mail3) makes a pretty good job of your e-mail there are a few ways to make the mail experience more useful. So here are a few additions to mail that you might find useful.

First off, Letterbox. This plug in changes the standard mail view to three side by side columns ratehr than stacking the preview window under the mail list window. On wide screen monitors (and Mac Book Pros) this makes much better use of your screen real estate and can save lots of time, particularly when scanning long lists of mail.




Growlmail is part of the hugely useful Growl suit of plug ins and add ons that allow a range of notifications of events happening on and to your Mac. Growl mail will notify you via a pop up window of new incoming mail, and give you a heads up on who it's from.

Similarly, MailAppertiser is another flexible mail notification plug in. A dark smoked effect pop up window displays new incoming maeesages plus their content for a specified amount of time allowing you to decide wether to ignore or deal with any new messages. Mail Appetiser is available for both Tiger and Leopard mail.

With many more plug ins available to fulfill specific tasks, it should be worthwhile investigating how you could improve your mail experience.

10 hidden gems

OK so you;re getting the basics but you can always learn a wee bity more. Here (quickly) are ten handy hints that you might not know you can do with OSX Leopard (or other versions of OS X)

1) Time Machine. It works great on files but did you know you can use it from inside apps such as iPhoto. If you've deleted a needed photo it's no problem. You can entrer the time machine interface while running iPhoto, navigate back to the missing image and restore it right back into your library.

2) Application switcher. I love it but almost no one I speak to seems to even know it exists. To switch betwen running apps simply hold the command (or apple) key and hit tab to cycle through each app via a big icon bar in the middle of the screen. Holding the shift key reverses the direction of travel through the apps.

3) Spotlight as an application launcher. Thanks to the speed boost in spotlight under Leopard you can now youe it as a great application launcher without cursing the speed. Click on the spotlight icon. Type the first few letters of teh application you want to launch (three or four letters usually does it) and hit return. Bingo open application.

4) Create quick and easy movies in Photobooth. Need to send a video message to a friend. Open Photobooth, select the video button and away you go. Short videos that you can send via e-mail or share on the web are just a single click away.

5) Summarize text. One of the little used system wide services in each applications pull down menu. Select a large body of text in any application or on th einternet and select summarize. OS X will present you with a short summary of the contents of the text.

6) Screen zoom. Eyes getting tired. Need to see what that tiny dot in the corner is. Just hold the control key down and move your mouse up ( or use 2 finger scrolling up on newer Mac portables) and teh screen wil magically zoom in. Reverse process to zoom out.

7) Quick clean up. Need to close everything in a hurry. Don'rt waste time clicking on the red close button on every window. Just click on one button while holding the option key and all open windows will instantly close.

8) Colour code your window backgrounds. Sounds odd but it can help differentiate project windows. Open a window and select icon view. Then select view options and select colour (or even picture) from the buttons at the bottom of the menu

Enjoy!