message posts

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Odds and ends, Internet, iPhone, App Store, iPod touch

Smule's Zephyr sends snowy messages around the world

by Mike Schramm (RSS feed) on Dec 29th, 2008

As much as I hate to do it, I'm always willing to admit when I'm wrong, and I was wrong about Ocarina. Not about the app itself, per se -- I still think it's one of the silliest, most pointless apps I've seen on the App Store. But it has been nothing but popular since its release, so apparently lots of people out there are into it. That's fine -- I'm willing to accept that there are best-selling apps out there that I think are dumb.

And maybe this will be another one: Smule, the company behind Ocarina, has decided to follow up with a new app called Zephyr (not to be confused with the MacBook cooling system) that seems just as silly to me. You can draw out messages with an airy sound-and-snowflake interface, and then send those messages blowing around the world (represented, in the official video above, by Las Vegas) to random people who, if they like your messages, will pass them on around the Internet. "What's the point?" you might say, and in that opinion, I'd agree with you. There are lots of ways to send messages around the world, and more than a few of them are quite free and will let you be clearer than drawing snow with wind sounds in the background.

But then again, I didn't see a point to Ocarina, and that made plenty of money. Zephyr is available on the App Store right now for 99 cents. And if you do jump in and buy it, make sure to tell us exactly why in the comments below.

Tags: app-store, holiday, iphone, las-vegas, message, ocarina, smule, snow, world, zephyr

Filed under: Software, Tips and tricks, Internet Tools

A Mail.app rule for catching image spam

by David Chartier (RSS feed) on Aug 4th, 2006

It seems that I'm not the only one being inflicted with a new wave of image spam, as Bill Benson, a MacInTouch reader, has posted his rule solution for this junk that seems to so easily elude Mail.app's filters. Tim Gaden at Hawk Wings, also a victim, elaborates on how to set up this rule, as a trick is involved. To summarize:

for the first condition, select 'Edit Header List...'
in its accompanying option, chose 'Content-Type' (or create it if you have to)
The Content-Type option will then take first place in the rule (or you might have to select it from the criteria list), allowing you to finish building the rule as pictured

The rule is based off of Bill's observation that these spam emails always come from a different address, and the content type header (as you might now assume) begins with multipart/related'.

Since I have been receiving around a dozen of these messages on a daily basis, I think I can say that, so far, this rule has been a success. Three cheers for the power of community -based spam filtering. If you aren't using Mail.app, however, I would imagine this trick can be adapted for other email apps. Anyone else try it outside of Mail.app?

Tags: content, filtering, image, mail, mail.app, message, rule, spam

Filed under: Software, Internet Tools, Books and Blogs

Details of upcoming Thunderbird 2.0 release

by David Chartier (RSS feed) on May 29th, 2006

Hawk Wings has tracked down some details on a tantalizing v2.0 update to Thunderbird, Mozilla's email client. New features at the top of my list are message tagging, a tabbed message viewer and a built-in notification system. It's great to see more developers bringing the tagging paradigm to email, as Scott Morrison has done with his MailTags plug-in for Apple's Mail.

Check out Mozilla's Thunderbird development blog for the full (and lengthy) post of what's coming in this major release for Thunderbird, including plenty of Mac-specific features and fixes.

Tags: DLS, email, feature, features, message, messaging, Mozilla, tab, tabbed, tag, tagging, Thunderbird, update, updates

Filed under: Software, Cool tools, Internet Tools, iTunes

iChat Extender - tweak iTunes status message, chat bubbles

by David Chartier (RSS feed) on May 15th, 2006

iChat Extender is a little app that lets you tweak various settings of iChat that unfortunately don't have a pref pane of their own. Features such as the format of the 'iTunes now playing' status message and the style of chat bubbles can easily be adjusted with this handy and free app.

For more fun with little apps, check out the developer's other utilities such as illis, an iTunes controller and Growl notifier, as well as Star, a menubar utility for rating your iTunes tracks and notifying you when a track is un-rated.

All of these utilities are free and Universal Binaries.

Tags: bubbles, feature, features, iChat, iChat Extender, IchatExtender, illis, iTunes, message, option, options, smileys, star, status, style

Filed under: Software, Cool tools, Productivity, Internet Tools

Gmail-Growl Utility 1.7

by David Chartier (RSS feed) on Apr 29th, 2006

The Gmail-Growl Utility that adds some seriously handy features to Google's official Gmail Notifier has been updated with a functionality face-lift and some fixes. It now has an option to toggle on/off Growl notifications for those times when you just need silence, and in Mac OS X Tiger you can now drag and drop notification field elements such as sender, subject and date, to build the actual notification you want to see (Panther users can still copy/paste text blocks to customize this notification).

Gmail-Growl Utility has also gone fully universal as long as you're using Google's latest Notifier version (1.8.2). It is also donationware (bonus points: the dev donates 10% to charity) and available from Waffle Software.

Tags: alarm, alert, email, Gmail, growl, message, notification, notify, utility

Filed under: Software, Productivity, Internet Tools

Gmail Notifier does message tooltips

by David Chartier (RSS feed) on Apr 17th, 2006

This is certainly a minor tip at best, but I thought it was handy enough for a mention: the official Gmail Notifier does message tooltips, as you can see in my screencap. Hold your mouse over a new message in the list and you'll receive a little tooltip containing the first line or two of the message. Nice.

Tags: email, Gmail, message, notifier, popup, tooltip

Filed under: Software, Internet Tools

Make a Delivery Automator app

by David Chartier (RSS feed) on Apr 7th, 2006

I haven't tested this yet, but Make a Delivery sounds like a handy little Automator action that will create a .dmg file from the Finder items you have selected, then attach that .dmg to an email. One quirky thing, however, is that you have to move a resource folder into your Applications directory; it isn't just an action that you can use or turn into a right-click Finder plugin.

In any case, if you prefer an easy way to create .dmg's for emailing (instead of zip archives), Make a Delivery might be just what you need.

Tags: action, app, application, attach, Automator, disk image, DiskImage, dmg, email, mail, message, plugin

Filed under: Internet Tools, TUAW Tips

TUAW Tip: keep a Mail.app message open when replying

by David Chartier (RSS feed) on Feb 2nd, 2006

Today's tip involves a Mail.app hint I found that I thought was just too handy not to mention. If you use Mail.app and you open some messages in their own window, you might have noticed that if you hit reply, the original message disappears in favor of your new message composition window. Understandably, this is a source of frustration for many a user.

Fortunately, Rob Griffiths over at Macworld has discovered a simple way around this: hold the option key when hitting Reply, Reply All or Forward, and the original message will stay put while a new, separate composition window opens. This makes it a little easier to refer back to the original message, especially if it's lengthy.

This works on Tiger's Mail.app, but I don't have any older versions of Mac OS X to verify this on. Feel free to sound off in the comments if you've tested this on Panther or even Jaguar. My one complaint about this trick: it doesn't seem to work if you use the keyboard shortcut for Reply. Holding option when hitting cmd - r results in that Funk/hault sound, informing me that the shortcut is a no-go. Either way, this should still be a handy trick for you chronic Repliers using Mail.app.

[via Hawk Wings]

Tags: key, Mail.app, message, option, reply, shortcut, window

Filed under: OS, Rumors, Hacks

The Hidden Message to OSx86 Trawlers

by Fabienne Serriere (RSS feed) on Jan 16th, 2006

In the MacBook Pro's version of OSx86, in /System/Library/Extensions lies a little message in a kernel extension for would-be readers:

<key>_name</key>
<string>Dont Steal Mac OS X
[...]
<string>Copyright (c) 2006 Apple Computer, Inc. All rights reserved.

<string>The purpose of this Apple software is to protect Apple copyrighted
materials from unauthorized copying and use. You may not copy, modify,
reverse engineer, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense,
transfer or redistribute this file, in whole or in part. If you have
obtained a copy of this Apple software and do not have a valid license
from Apple Computer to use it, please immediately destroy or delete it
from your computer.

Given this message, I have a hunch that perhaps Steve has encouraged his team to implement other forms of copy protection into the production copies of OSx86, perhaps in the form of watermarking. Also, I haven't seen any mention of this in the Intel iMac's version of OSx86. Feel free to pontificate in the comments. Is this a warning that perhaps there are stronger measures coming to find users running OSx86 on non-Apple hardware?

[via OSx86 Project]

Tags: DontStealMacOSX, hack, message, OSx86, osx86project

Filed under: Software, Cool tools, Internet Tools

Gmail Notifier updated, offers opening of Gmail messages

by David Chartier (RSS feed) on Jan 8th, 2006

Growl is a utility that, like the drunkenbatman, has become a necessity in my daily work. As far as email is concerned, even though I can't bring myself to ditch Mail.app and Address Book completely due to device synchronization issues, Gmail has certainly found its place in my daily tool-belt as well. To my delight, the email notification utility by the name of Gmail Growl (which we've covered before) has been updated with a slick feature: the ability to click on a Growl message notification to be taken to that specific Gmail message in your favorite browser. The nice part about this is that you can specify which browser to use; you aren't simply limited to the system's default browser - handy, when you consider the fact that Firefox supports all the rich text editing options Gmail has to offer, while Safari is still lagging behind (disclaimer: I don't know if that's a WebKit or a Gmail issue, so don't flame me).

Gmail Growl can be had, for free, at the author's site. As usual with great freeware like this, I encourage you to make a donation to help keep great utilities like this alive.

[via Hawk Wings]

Tags: email, gmail, growl, message, notification, notifier, utility

Tip of the Day

Holding the Command key (aka the Apple key) and pressing Tab will cycle through your open applications. It's easier to Cmd-Tab if you are Copy (Cmd-C) and Pasting (Cmd-V) to and from various applications.

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