Please post below your experiences with this release — I haven’t banged on this as much as I would have liked. The installer especially may not do the right thing under every possible circumstance, so keep me informed.

Download link below the fold.

Please download Letterbox beta 6 for Snow Leopard and let me know how it works for you!

Coming up in later releases will be updates to the two-line view, and an auto-updating mechanism in the Mail Plugin Manager application.

Still a manual install to keep out the unadventurous. Click through for the link and instructions.

Download beta 5 for Snow Leopard: Letterbox-v0.24b5.zip.

As always, your comments, email, and donations are hugely appreciated.

This version “probably works” under 64-bit Mail, but until I get a 64-bit machine myself, I can’t really stand by that claim. It also “hopefully” fixes crashes and hangs, but with all the changes for 64-bit, it could very well have introduced some new ones

Click through for the link and instructions.

Because MailPluginManager is not yet 64-bit savvy, this remains a manual install. Installation steps are present in the included Readme.

Download beta 4 for Snow Leopard: Letterbox-v0.24b4.zip.

As always, your posts, feedback, and donations are hugely appreciated.

This is still a 32-bit beta. Thanks to help from the always polite and kind Scott Morrison, I’m much closer to 64-bit glory. Apple changed pretty much everything about how plugins work in the 64-bit dynamic loader, so this version contains most of the changes that will be needed.

Your generous testing time, comments, feedback, and donations have been invaluable. Tomorrow or Tuesday I think I’m going to buy a 64-bit laptop, which will make the process of getting the 64-bit version working much faster. (Rather than the “Change some stuff, email it to someone kind enough to offer to run it, wait until they get a chance to test it, see what didn’t work” cycle.) Thanks again for all the support, of all kinds.

Click through for the download link, instructions, and changelog.

This remains a PREVIEW, BETA, EXPERTS-ONLY, NOT YET FULLY FUNCTIONAL version for Snow Leopard.

1. Download Letterbox-0.24b3.mailbundle.zip and unzip.

2. Create, if necessary, the folder ~/Library/Mail/Bundles.

3. Copy or move Letterbox.mailbundle into that folder.

4. Quit Mail.

5. Open Terminal, and type: defaults write com.apple.mail EnableBundles 1 and press return. (This step isn’t strictly necessary if you’ve installed Mail plugins before, but maybe you’re at a clean slate in Snow Leopard.)

6. Command-click on Mail to show it in the Finder.

7. CRUCIAL: Select File: Get Info, or press command-I. Check the “Open in 32-bit mode” checkbox. (If you don’t have that checkbox, you may be on a 32-bit machine, like me.)

8. Re-open Mail, and cross your fingers.

Changes with this beta:

Hi folks,

Thanks for your patience (and for your impatient nudges which keep me moving along :P). I’m still at work at a 64-bit Letterbox for Snow Leopard. I’ve made significant progress, but we’re not out of the woods yet.

For you anxious early adopters, I’m posting below a PREVIEW, BETA, EXPERTS-ONLY, NOT YET FULLY FUNCTIONAL version of Letterbox which can be used with Mail in 32-bit mode.

I’m keeping this a manual install to emphasize that it’s only for those who are comfortable mucking with things. Plus, this zipped file doesn’t have pretty icon, to further emphasize that it’s only for the truly ruthless

Steps to install this PREVIEW, BETA, EXPERTS-ONLY, NOT YET FULLY FUNCTIONAL (did I say that already?) version in Snow Leopard:

1. Download Letterbox-0.24b2.mailbundle.zip and unzip.
2. Create, if necessary, the folder ~/Library/Mail/Bundles.
3. Copy or move Letterbox.mailbundle into that folder.
4. Quit Mail.
5. Open Terminal, and type: defaults write com.apple.mail EnableBundles 1 and press return. (This step isn’t strictly necessary if you’ve installed Mail plugins before, but maybe you’re at a clean slate in Snow Leopard.)
6. Command-click on Mail to show it in the Finder.
7. CRUCIAL: Select File: Get Info, or press command-I. Check the “Open in 32-bit mode” checkbox. (If you don’t have that checkbox, you may be on a 32-bit machine, like me.)
8. Re-open Mail, and cross your fingers.

Note that this version will NOT yet work in 64-bit mode. We’re getting there.

This version of Letterbox includes a “Send Feedback” button in the About tab of the preferences. Feel free to send feedback as we work towards a fully functional Letterbox in Snow Leopard!

Much thanks to Alexis Andrews for help with this release.

cheers,

~aaron

Good folk,

Keep keeping those pants on. I’m honored by the deluge of requests for Letterbox on Snow Leopard. I’m sorry I haven’t been able to reply to each of you individually.

I now have Letterbox running on Snow Leopard in 32-bit mode, and expect to have a solution for 64-bit Mail soon. I’ll unfortunately be out of town and offline over the holiday weekend here in the US, but should be able to post an update by Tuesday, Sep 8.

After that, there are a few more items in the backlog I’d like to tackle — resolving an incompatibility with other plugins using Sparkle first, and then ye olde two-line display.

cheers, ~aaron

Let me know if 10.5.3 takes care of this for you, or whether the behavior persists!

I hadn’t bothered to look at the Sparkle update logs in a while. I was surprised to see this:

[aaron@macbookpro] $ cat access_log-2008-03* | perl -ne ‘if (m/UUID=([A-Z0-9-]+)&/) { print “$1\n”; }’ | sort -u | wc -l 108833

i.e., there are 108,000 unique users of Letterbox out there! Hi, all! You are not forgotten! cheers, aaron

Before I tossed it streetside with the rest of the trash, though, I happened to switch to preview-at-the-bottom mode. Ah, I see!

Lesson: Alright, you guys win — I’ll work on a two-line column for Letterbox. (Letterbox work is a Sundays-only deal at this point, but I’ll try to make progress nonetheless).

~aaron

P.S. Yes, comments are broken. I dunno, will look at it when I have time.

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: