aaron.harnly.net

Letterbox

Letterbox is a plugin for Apple's Mail.app that takes advantage of your widescreen monitor. It rearranges the interface into three vertical columns.

Letterbox

About

Letterbox was born of this plea and subsequent discussion at Ars Technica.

Download

You can download the most recent version here:

or click below for a specific version.

Versions

10.5.3 might fix the missized-columns-after-search annoyance in Letterbox

In the release notes for 10.5.3, I see an entry for “Mail message list no longer shrinks after search.” This might resolve an annoying issue some people have when using Letterbox, that the message list columns get their sizes scrambled after executing a search.

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

Cracking 100,000 users

Geez, I had no idea. Once I get my research life under control (i.e. not in shambles), I guess I should go ahead and put (a) a combo-column, and (b) a donation button in Letterbox.

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

I guess the subject column is too short sometimes

So I opened up Mail.app to this very spammy-looking message today:

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.

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

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