Letterbox 0.22 - Leopard public beta

After a long wait, we have in our clutches a Leopard-friendly (actually, Leopard-only) build of Letterbox. It also rolls in some other nice improvements. Full deets below the fold.

This version adds Leopard compatibility, a spiffy auto-updating mechanism, a simple preference pane, and menu items for quick switching. It does not yet have a two-line column, which will wait for another day. I’ll probably push out a very minor update by today or tomorrow, just to test the auto-updating mechanism. Any and all feedback is appreciated.

Also: Some of you are probably making use of Dane’s Harnett’s excellent work on WidescreenMailPlugin. I welcome cross-fertilization of ideas or even code. Feel free to let me know what’s working better in one or the other, and hopefully we can keep making our Mail.app experience a little more pleasant for everybody. This go-round I really will make Letterbox’s source code, as well as the underlying improvements to the Mail plugin template, available.

I do suspect, though, that it’s a good idea to have only one or the other enabled at any one time. You can use the MailPluginManager application included with Letterbox to temporarily disable WidescreenMailPlugin — or Letterbox — for the sake of testing.

cheers, Aaron

Full changelog:

Letterbox 0.22

Released Dec 04, 2007

First public release for Leopard.

Details:

Added preference for hairline or normal divider.

Actually runs on PPC machines, those poor red-headed stepchildren.

Choosing a preview pane position in the menu now also updates the sticky preference. Let me know if this is sensible.

Dropped the “Left” preview pane position until its bugs can be worked around.

Possibly still some weirdness in there, especially around closing windows. Lemme know!

Letterbox 0.21

Released Dec 04, 2007

First limited beta release for Leopard, with support for auto-updating and a preference pane.

Details:

Minor bugfixes to prep for limited beta.

Left-side position can cause extreme weirdness.

Letterbox 0.20

Released Dec 03, 2007

First release for Leopard, with support for auto-updating and a preference pane.

Details:

Leopard compatible (in fact, Leopard-only).

Preference pane to fiddle with options.

View menu item lets you switch the preview pane instantly between right, left, and bottom.

Added options for alternate-row coloring and horizontal divider lines.

No longer eats your children.

Annoyances with searches throwing the column width akimbo seem to be resolved; this is Apple’s doing, not mine.

Uses a wider divider between the message list and preview pane, with a gradient modeled after the builtin Mail.app divider.

Sometimes causes the dead to reanimate.

Outlook-style two-line column put off for future release.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 4th, 2007 at 3:17 pm and is filed under letterbox. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

         

12 Responses to “Letterbox 0.22 - Leopard public beta”

1. Carlos Says:
   December 4th, 2007 at 4:59 pm

   Agh, that download link is not working. 502 error.

2. Connie Says:
   December 20th, 2007 at 12:03 pm

   Can’t seem to get the plugin to work. I click on the bundle to install and instead of getting the install page (step two) I get a mail message opened with letterbox plugin as an attachment.

   thanks in advance for any help

3. aaronharnly Says:
   December 20th, 2007 at 12:09 pm

   Connie, try dragging the .mailbundle directly onto the MailPluginManager application — that should get the installer working more happily.

4. Eli Ruggles Says:
   December 21st, 2007 at 1:20 pm

   Aaron, I don’t seem to be getting a “Subject” column in Leopard running .022…

   Not even an option to turn the subject column on…

   I am likely overlooking something insanely obvious.

   Thanks,

   -Eli

5. aaronharnly Says:
   December 21st, 2007 at 1:25 pm

   Eli — that’s likely due to this Widemail bug. You’ll have to reinstall Widemail, enable the Subject column, then remove (if you so choose) Widemail again.

6. Jeff Roberts Says:
   December 22nd, 2007 at 7:34 pm

   Aaron,

   Can’t get Letterbox to work without creating major problems with Mail. Here are the issues I keep facing once Letterbox is installed:

   1. When Mail starts up, it will not start the viewer. This has to be initiated manually from the menu.
   2. Unable to quit Mail. I have to Force Quit to exit the Mail app.
   3. Mail won’t send messages with Letterbox installed and enabled. Nothing appears to happen when you send an email. If I disable Letterbox and restart mail, the missing sent mail gets sent off upon starting the app.

   Any thoughts on what may be causing this behavior? Using Letterbox vs. 0.22 for Leopard, Mac OSX 10.5.1, and Macbook Pro.

   Thanks,

   Jeff

7. Chris Says:
   December 25th, 2007 at 11:31 pm

   If I could only merge the two plugins, Widemail, and this Letterbox plugin, I think I would be completely satisfied. I think you’ve got the backend of this plugin integrated better, but the fact that yours is still missing the customizable 2-line integration really sets it back on the front-end. You CANNOT display all you want on one-liners with the preview on the right. So I know you’re working on that, but until that’s in, Widemail is probably going to have to be my temp.

   Otherwise, the thing that Widemail does well is the customizable 2-liner interface. Drag-drop method is great, it just isn’t perfect yet. If you could build upon this, allow more options to add to Widemail’s list of 2-line options, but I think at this point getting the 2-line feature to look more and more like Entourage’s method would be perfect. Having the column separate emails by day with a “bar” marking the day like in Entourage would be extremely handny, as well as being able to have the options chosen justify to BOTH the right and the left separately would be nice, as it makes the most sense as implemented in Entourage. Entourage has this whole thing integrated very nicely, and I believe it to be a perfect model at this point.

   I know reading this, most of you are probably like, “why not just use Entourage?.” Frankly, I’m tired of Entourage, I’m tired of Microsoft’s lack of support (it’s still PowerPC and it’s slow and unstable now), and I would much prefer to use Mail/iCal/Address Book despite the tight integration of the three features in Entourage. Plus it would save me $400 on the upgrade cost if I can just use built in apps the way I want them to work.

   So otherwise, thanks for the great plugin and keep up the hard work!

8. Caspar Harmer Says:
   January 11th, 2008 at 6:37 pm

   This is for Jeff Roberts - try quitting mail before installing the plugin. I had the same symptoms as you and this caused it to run fine. Casp

9. Charles A. Patrick Says:
   January 23rd, 2008 at 3:31 pm

   When I installed version 0.16 under Tiger, it was active for all users. In contrast 0.22 under Leopard is active only for me, and not for any other users. I have an administrator account. Is there a way of activating letterbox for all users? Certainly the installer does not ask whether the installation should be for all users or not.

   Otherwise, thanks for the great plugin.

10. aaronharnly Says:
    January 29th, 2008 at 11:46 am

    Charles — you’re right, the installer simply installs for the current user. To activate it for all users, just move the Letterbox.mailbundle file from ~/Library/Mail/Bundles to /Library/Mail/Bundles (creating the folder if necessary).

11. lte.cc » Blog Archive » lte.cc blog Says:
    February 13th, 2008 at 6:29 am

    [...] schafft das Letterbox Plugin, dass in der aktuellen Version 0.22 auch die neueste Raubkatze von Apple unterstützt. Tags: [...]

12. Francis Says:
    April 5th, 2008 at 11:16 pm

    I absolutely love this program! The prefs are a big plus - love the line dividers. Keep up the great work!

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