A Cry Heard Round The World: Kim Sun-Il died desperate and alone, but he did not die unheard.
Looking At And Longing For Mars: Reflections on a childhood dream.
A Robot May Not Harm a Human Being. Is The Opposite True?: Thoughts on the future rights of artificial intelligence.
Long After The Boys Of Summer Have Gone: What makes a relationship work?
Winter Of Our Feline Discontent: What the cat wants, the cat gets. But what DOES it want?
To Tell The Truth: There may be no honor among thieves, but can't we find it even in a few good men and women?
Should The Human Brain Retire?: We know that we cannot win forever. We know that machines will continue to improve. So why don't we let the human brain retire gracefully now, with honors?
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Published: Sep 16, 2005 01:41 PM
Sun - August 1, 2004
Would You Like Fries With That?
Mail Appetizer enhances Apple's Mail application with advanced notification features that let you decide whether to read new mail now, to delete it, or to save it for later. When mail arrives in any mailbox, a single translucent window appears showing each message's contents (and a photo of the senders if you have them in your Apple Addressbook). The software can also wait a user-determined time before automatically displaying new messages in sequence, like a slide show.
By adjusting the translucency, the size, and the position of the notification windows in Mail's preferences, you can make them as subtle or as painfully intrusive as you want. And because Mail Appetizer is smart enough to wait for Apple's spam tools and mail rules to run before announcing new messages, you won't be interrupted very often with ads for Viagra or solicitations from deposed Nigerian warlords.
Your Urgent Assistance Is Required..." Yeesh.
If Mail Appetizer's feature set merely ended with notification, it would be a nice replication of Microsoft Outlook's similar feature on the PC. But the notification capability is only this software's most obvious attribute. You can click anywhere in the subject line to open a message and anywhere else in the notification window to dismiss it and switch to the next new one. Control-clicking the window marks the current message as read, and shift-control-click deletes it.
For a version 1.0 product, Mail Appetizer offers a relatively robust feature set. In future versions, it would be nice to have differently colored notifications or sounds to announce messages from special senders—boss alert!—or in special folders. And it would be wonderful if Mail Appetizer worked with other email clients because the world does not run on Apple Mail alone—at least outside of Cupertino.
Mail Appetizer is donationware. Please consider making one if the software is useful to you.
Credit for blogging about this gem first goes to Alex Hung at Mine Blogging so stop on by and tell him thanks!
All right, that's enough Mac stuff for a bit; there are just too many other great topics to write about lately. Coming soon: My comments on the DNC and on three technologies that could completely change the world. (No, they are not Apple technologies!)