At the time of writing, the plugin, which is called SignatureProfiler has been updated for Snow Leopard but for the last couple of months, I’ve reverted to using good old reliable text as my email signature — until today.

I recently found out how to spruce up emailing by using my Facebook profile badge as a signature. It’s pretty neat and like all Facebook badges, you can easily customize it to your liking. We’ll go through the steps required to make it in a little while. Right now, I’d like to point out a few things.

Firstly, this trick is meant to be used in Mail, Mac’s default desktop mailing application. It works without the need for any addition plugins but you are required to set up your email accounts in Mail. Secondly, you also need to pair the account with a signature — just text will be fine at this point, it doesn’t really matter since it’s about to be replaced. Lastly, you’ll need TextWrangler, a free HTML-capable text editor or any other HTML editor.

Let’s get started, log in to your Facebook profile then scroll down until you see this link:

If you have never created a badge before, then go ahead and create one. It’s very simple and you only need to follow the on-screen instructions. A horizontal badge works best in this situation. Add whatever you like into the badge: your name, your profile picture, your status, your websites, anything! When you’re done, preview your badge. If you’re happy with your creation, click on Save. On the next screen, you’ll be presented with the sharing options. Click on “Other” and the badge’s code will appear. Click on it once and press Command+C to copy it to the clipboard.

Open up TextWranger or any HTML editor of your choice and paste the code in a new document. It should look something like this:

Notice that I’ve selected a part of the code which is actually not necessary for your signature. It adds a link to your profile and another link for others to create their own badge. It won’t look very pretty so we’re going to delete it. Here’s how it should look like after removing the useless bits.

Alright, now we’re going to add a space above the signature just for the sake of convenience. It’s much easier to add a space at this point, which will go between your email message and the signature; rather than having to press the Enter key several times after composing your email. Add <p>&nbsp;</p> to the beginning of the code, like this:

We’re almost done. All we need to do now is to remove the width and height attributes from the code. By leaving the attributes there, we are telling Mail that no matter what, the signature has to be that width and height. In actuality, the Facebook badge changes in dimension depending on your status, links, etc. So remove this part of the code:

Finally, we’re ready to save the HTML file. Click on File, then Save As. Type in any name followed by “.html” as shown in the screenshot. Select the Desktop as the destination and click Save.

Double-click the resulting file and it should open up in Safari. Check if everything is in order then save it as a Web Archive — click on File, Save As and select Web Archive as the format. Again, make sure that the Desktop is selected as the destination and click Save.

Just a little bit more and we’re done. Remember when I mentioned earlier that you should already have a signature attached to your email account in Mail? Well, if you haven’t created one, I suggest you do it right this instant because we’re going to look for it. Open up a new Finder window and delve down to ~/Library/Mail/Signatures. There should be a minimum of 2 files there if you only have 1 email account set up. One file should be formatted as .webarchive.

To check if it is indeed your email signature, double-click it and it should be displayed in Safari (Snow Leopard users can use Quick Look). Once we’ve determined that this is the signature we want to replace with the Facebook badge, copy the file name. Mine looks like “FED17D3A-AC4C-490D-93CB-80634BD2A114″. Use this to rename the webarchive file which you’ve just saved on the Desktop. After you’ve renamed it, click and drag it into the Signature folder. Finder will ask you if you’re sure you want to replace the existing file, click Yes.

And we’re done. Relaunch Mail and give it a whirl. Compose a new mail and your signature should show up.

How easy was that? No plugins, additional software or expert skills required! For our non-Mac friends who also want to use their Facebook profiles as email signatures, I’m sure Saikat’s post will teach you a thing or two about integrating HTML into Gmail.

What do you use as your email signature?

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But how does it compare with Apple’s Mail client?

I’ve managed to get hold of the latest beta version (beta five) of Postbox and I’m taking it for a spin. Before we begin, I should state for the record that the only email manager I’ve used is Apple Mail and I’m going to use that as the yardstick on which Postbox shall be judged.

So, as that age-old saying goes – without further adieu, I give you Postbox.

Even though it is still in its beta stages of development, it launches very quickly. Compared to Apple Mail, this thing fires up like a rocket! The general view is pretty decent. Everything is sort of laid out nicely. Actually, to be brutally honest, the interface does look a bit like Apple Mail. There are several new additions, though.

One of them is the built-in Inspector on the bottom-right hand corner. It displays all inline links and attachments (if any). Although, I don’t quite see the point of having the Inspector – if there are any links within the email, I would know to click on them. I don’t need to be shown the links again. I know they’re there. Same goes with the attachments. Moving on.

Open in new tab

Another new addition which catches my eye is the tab bar along the top. Double-clicking on an email opens it in a new tab. This gives the email client a browser-y feel. One could say that it feels slightly cumbersome. I would rather prefer for it to pop-up in a new window.

On the right side of the tab bar are shortcuts for quick searching. Attachments, Images, Links and Contacts will bring about separate new tabs to show you all of the said items. I’ll cover these views in slightly more detail as we move along.

I was set up!

Setting up my IMAP GMail account was a piece of cake compared to Apple Mail. Postbox only asked me for the type of account (GMail POP, IMAP; Yahoo Plus or MobileMe), my name and email address. Then as it logged into my account, it asked for my password.  Then boom, it showed me all of my mail.

Here’s where it differs from Apple Mail. Apple Mail will automatically download and store all of my mail for offline reading as soon as it manages to log into my account. It doesn’t care if there are 3,000 or 30,000 messages, it will download everything by default.

In Postbox, I get to choose which mailboxes get downloaded for offline viewing, if any. To be fair, Apple Mail only does that to improve searching through the messages. That said, it is the same scenario in Postbox – it can only index messages which have been downloaded.

You’ve got mail

When composing new mail, I noticed several nice implementations.

To the right of the Compose window, there are five interesting icons: Find Attachments, Find Images, Find Links, Find Places and Find References (plainly a dictionary).

The first three are pretty useful. It allows you to search for attachments, images and links used in previous messages and import them into the one currently being composed. Find Places is a neat addition – it lets you input a destination and attach that into the message. The recipient can then click on it, which brings up Google Maps and is able to find driving directions to that place.

The Crown Jewel

One of the many key features which makes Postbox so anticipated is its ability to manage media i.e. attachments and images. Let’s head back to the tab bar which plays host to the quick searches.

Attachments, quick search. Clicking on this will bring up the attachments viewer. It’s just a list of all the attachments in every email, provided all the messages have been indexed.

This is even more impressive – the images viewer.  It lays out all of the images in every email as thumbnails, allowing quick browsing of all the pictures and photos that have been sent and received. At the moment of writing, the images viewer doesn’t live refresh even after new images are indexed. The viewer has to be closed and reopened in order to be refreshed.

Next, the links viewer. Postbox grabs all the links from all my messages and displays them as a list with a short excerpt of the message body.

And finally, the contacts viewer. Postbox collects all of the email addresses from the mails which have been sent and received and lists them out like a contact sheet. The context menu within the contact viewer is the unsung hero, really. Right-click on any contact and you’ll be able to bring up all of their messages, attachments, images and links in separate tabs. That’s miles quicker than searching in Apple Mail.

Speaking of context menus, right-clicking a highlighted part of any email message brings up a very different and rather sophisticated menu.

As you can see, you can easily share the highlighted text on Twitter, Facebook or FriendFeed; or search on a variety of search engines and Wikipedia. In my opinion, it’s not as much a necessity as it is an accessibility.

Now, what I don’t like about Postbox

It’s too complicated. Is it a browser? Or is it an email client with an identity crisis? A simpler application that works well will be heaps and bounds better than a complicated one which does everything mediocrely.

The Inspector shows previews of images but not documents. Maybe it’s something the developers overlooked and hopefully they implement it in the final version.

At a certain speed, scrolling through messages becomes very jerky. Also, there isn’t a unified mailbox which shows all of my mail. That’s very possibly a deal-breaker since I have 5 email accounts to deal with on a daily basis.

Lastly and surely the most saddening – my beautiful email signature cannot be used with Postbox. It only accepts text signatures.

Spring finally comes

I’m willing to overlook most of the shortcomings of Postbox since I’m only testing out a beta version of this application. I hope that the final product is not as disappointing (email signatures, please) and at the same time, is less complicated and more to the point.

Postbox will be available for Windows and Mac starting February 9th as they launch their public beta. Sign up on their website to be notified when the public beta is ready. You can also get to see some higher-resolution screenshots over there.

Impressed with Postbox? Are you eager to try it out? What do you think – will it ruffle some of Apple Mail’s feathers? Comment it out.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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There are a lot of plug-ins out there. A few of them do some pretty cool stuff, and others you probably wouldn’t need. I’m going to focus on four Apple Mail plug-ins which I find to be very useful.

Mailappetizer

The first is Mailappetizer. This little plug-in lets you preview incoming messages as soon as they are downloaded, without opening Mail. It works pretty much like GrowlMail but a little better. In the notification window, you can choose to mark the message as read or delete it. You could also customize what you would like to see in the notification window, how many levels of quotations to show, which mailbox the messages are coming from, and whether or not to display any headers in the notifications.

Clicking anywhere in the notification window dismisses the current preview and displays the next one. Closing the notification window, well, dismisses all outstanding notifications. Mailappetizer actually rises up from other notification plug-ins in a sense that it allows you to mark your mail as read or delete them on the spot while the preview is showing. It saves just a bit more time since you won’t have to open your mailbox to do it later.

Keep in mind that Mailappetizer for Leopard is still in beta, and you should backup your mail folder and preferences before installing it.

Letterbox

Next up is a nifty plug-in called Letterbox. I guarantee that you’ll enjoy this one. It re-arranges the conventional interface of Apple Mail to show 3 columns, which really takes advantage of wide-screen monitors. It opens up the message viewer to a separate vertical column so reading mail is much easier and quicker.

Since I installed this plug-in, my Mail application window stretches across my screen, and I love it because I can see everything at a glance.

Attachment Scanner

Moving on, have you ever sent e-mails without the attachments because you clicked ‘Send’ too eagerly? Attachment Scanner Plugin detects words like ‘attached’ and ‘attachment’ in your e-mail message. And now, when you click ‘Send’ it will scan to see if any files have been attached and will warn you if there aren’t any attachments. It’s pretty useful for those who are forgetful and will help to reduce sending empty/unattached e-mails (and any follow-up apology messages), not to mention avoiding embarrassment if it is a company e-mail.

Mail Act-On

Lastly, Mail Act-On allows assigning keystrokes to Apple Mail Rules. This plug-in achieves two things: it lets you use keystrokes to activate Rules; and allows you to manually apply Rules to messages. I had to clean the cobwebs off my Rules preferences since I started using this plug-in. How it works is pretty simple. New Rules have to be named with a certain prefix – this will determine the key which will execute the rule.

For example: “Act-On: r | Color Message Red” means pressing the default Act-On menu-key (backtick `) and ‘r’ will change the background of the message to red.

With this plug-in, properly arranging mail into different folders, flagging messages, marking as read/unread, changing message text colors and their backgrounds and possibly any other Mail Rule is as simple as activating the keystrokes.

(By) Jackson Chung is a full-time med student attempting to perform a juggling act with relationship, studies and his future. He also manages a Mac news site, Macnifying.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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1. Organize your Mac

Having a cluttered workspace takes up precious time when you’re trying to find certain documents which you might have misplaced. The first step in using your time wisely to do work is organization – knowing where everything goes. There are several ways to accomplish this.

I’ve seen some desktops with over a hundred files on it. Some people like to show how busy they are by leaving all their documents right where others can see them. A messy desktop can only be more time consuming when you’re trying to figure out which was the last file you were working on, a hassle to look for a certain file and will only increase the tendency to accidentally move things about (especially into Trash). Also, clearing your desktop will indirectly clear your mind psychologically, so you’ll probably think better. For instance, check out the screenshot below.

2. Organizing files into folders and labeling

Most of my important document files are in my Documents folder and within that folder, there are about twenty sub folders. Each one has got a very clear title to describe their content. And since I have so many folders, I add color labels to the ones which I frequently open, so that my eyes zone into them before I know it.

But the thing is, you may have folders within those sub folders. And sometimes it may even be several folders deep before you reach the file you want, making it more of a hassle to get to. Another problem is, not all files can be distributed to only one folder. For instance, if I have a PDF file about Multiple Sclerosis (i am a med-student), it could go into my PDFs folder and also my Medicine folder. In order to tackle this problem, I use tags.

3. Tagging made easy with Punakae

The idea of tagging is to add one or several keywords to a file, making it easier to find files relating to those keywords. It may sound like a hassle to tag every file you have, but trust me it’s easier than it sounds, and more rewarding. Tags can essentially eliminate having multiple folders since files can be found much easier this way. This idea of tagging is not new, even iPhoto uses it and allows you to add keywords to each of your photos.

To find out more about Punakae and how it works, check out this video screencast. But be warned, the guy narrating might not be a native English speaker and it may sound a little funny.

4. Doing more with Safari

Tabbed browsing is extremely useful. Nobody denies this. But if you’re like me and have 15 tabs opened at the same time every morning when I browse through all my favorite sites, it gets a little tedious clicking the X on each tab to close them. Mastering the Safari shortcut keys are very helpful in making your browsing experience a pleasure.

• Command-T: Open new tab
• Command-N: Open new window
• Command-click link: Opens link in new tab
• Command-W: Close tab
• Command-Alt-W: Close all other tabs
• Command-Shift-W: Close window
• Command-R: Refresh current tab
• Command-Shift- { or }: Switch tabs
• Backspace: Back
• Spacebar: Page down
• Command-D: Add bookmark

By default, Google is Safari’s search engine. However I recommend installing Inquisitor. It is a search engine plug-in which extends the capability of searching by giving you suggestions and showing you some possible results even before you hit Return. Clicking on those results will take you directly to that site bypassing Google’s results page.

5. Use To-do lists

Reminding yourself constantly that you have a list of work to be done could be stressful so you might as well forget them! I’m not saying that you needn’t remember anything at all. I’m only emphasizing that thinking about the task at hand will make life easier. Jotting down your list of things to be done somewhere, organizing your thoughts and assigning due dates to each of them is the easiest way to accomplish this.

Getting-things-done applications (GTD) are widely popular so I won’t cover them again. A few good ones have already been elaborated on this site, which are Things for Mac, Remember The Milk, Simple GTD, Task Toy and a few others covered by Daniel.

6. Integrating Apple Mail, iCal and Address Book

There are several new features in Apple Mail 3.0 and a very prominent one is the addition of Data Detectors. Place your cursor over an email address and you have the option of adding that person as a contact into Address Book. It will also highlight dates, times, and certain keywords like ‘tomorrow’, ‘later today’, ‘15th of March’ which can be added into iCal as appointments. Addresses will also be detected and mapped into directions. Since Apple provided us with these features, we might as well make use of them.

7. Use Automator for repetitive tasks

I basically use Automator to save time on little tasks such as batch renaming, automatically sending birthday emails to friends, properly re-capitalizing song titles in iTunes, watermarking my PDF files and batch-resizing images. If you would like to know how I do all this, shout out in the comments and I will consider writing a tutorial solely on Automator.

8. Enlarge your screen estate

The easiest way to do this is to get a larger screen, of course. Or have 3 of them like Al Gore. Another way is to use Spaces. By default, Spaces extends your desktop up to 4 times (4 desktops). However, if you notice its preferences more carefully, you will see that you’re actually able to have up to 16 desktops! That’s a whole lot of estate to play with, and pretty troublesome to maneuver too.

Warp is a preference pane that will allow you to use your mouse to switch between Spaces, rather than using the keyboard shortcut. By moving your mouse cursor to an edge of the screen, you will see a small preview of the neighboring desktop, and clicking on it will ‘warp’ you there. It’s a pretty cool application to help you navigate if you can’t remember what’s running on each desktop.

If you would like to see how Warp works, check it the screencast at the bottom of this page.

That concludes my two-part article on increasing productivity on your Mac. I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I have writing it.

(By) Jackson Chung is a full-time med student attempting to perform a juggling act with relationship, studies and his future.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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