Apple Mail Is Not Perfect
I like Apple Mail. I’ve tried the rest, but I stick with the one that serves my needs the best. But that doesn’t mean I’m blind to Apple Mail’s faults.
For one thing, I have to go out of my way to use the MPW font for plaintext messages. Which is annoying, but hey now I know how to switch in whatever font I want and everybody’s happy. For the last couple of days I used Hermes as my plaintext font. It was an entertaining change. I’ve switched back to MPW now.
But this isn’t about fonts, it’s about icons. (You know you like an app when your main complaints are purely aesthetic.) Specifically the toolbar icons. In Tiger, the toolbar icons got ‘lozenged’. This is not to my taste, nor do many people think it was a good idea. (I’m not going to link anything specific here, just Google a bit — you’ll see.)
I stumbled across the Hawk Wings blog this evening. It’s been a while since I’ve discovered a blog and instantly started working backwards through the archives. But that’s what I’m doing. (Plus, it gives me a chance to run my back-up scripts in the background. Multi-tasking OSes are a privilege, not a right.)
And, to finally get to the point, Hawk Wings pointed out Mail Stamps. I downloaded it, used it. And then about 5 minutes later, I changed the icons back. It seems I’ve become used to the new look. And now the Panther icons just seem a little off — and huge, I usually set toolbars to ‘Use Small Size’, but since Mail thinks it has lozenges, it lacks that option. It’s not that I like the lozenges, I don’t, but I do prefer the artwork on the icons inside them.
Luckily Hawk Wings also mentions Cage Fighter and Debuttonizer which keep the Tiger artwork but remove the lozenges. So I downloaded Debuttonizer, partly because I prefer the name but mostly because the root of 512k.org warms the cockles of my heart. And I am now quite satisfied with Mail’s toolbars.
So there it is: read Hawk Wings and use Debuttonizer, that is my advice to you.
