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A decent mail notification utility for Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) is something I have been having difficulty finding. I’ve tried a few different apps and plug-ins over the last few months and have never been particularly happy with any of them.

Growl Mail

Growlis a useful utility because it can play with many OS X applications including Adium, Skype, Colloquy, Safari, NetNewsWire, and dozens more. However, all it can do is provide notifications, and with a mail notification system I want a little more than that. I want to be able to be able to click through to the full mail, mark it as read, or delete it without actually opening a Mail.app window.

Growl Mail also seems unfeasibly difficult to actually install. The main Growl application is simple enough to get working, but the Mail plugin requires a seperate installation and even a little bit of playing around on the command line to allow Tiger to work with it correctly. Also, it seemed to break after every software update I did.

iAlert

At first I thought iAlertwas going to be a big step up from Growl. It provides that all important functionality to be able to control Mail.app from outside the actual application. You can open messages in full, mark them as read, and delete them. I was really keen on iAlert for a few hours and installation was much simpler than Growl Mail. It also provides alerts for other common OS X applications such as iTunes and Safari.

However, iAlert is actually missing one quite crucial feature. When the alert initially pops up, there is no preview of the email headers or body text. You have to click on the alert which then expands to show the preview. To me that is no good—if I am in the middle of some work and an email pops up, I want to know instantly without having to move my mouse whether it is something I want to deal with now or leave until later.

iAlert was binned pretty soon after and I actually reverted to Growl Mail because the most important feature of a mail notification should be the instant preview that is avaliable.

Mail.appetizer

I have looked with a muted jealousy at people running Mail.appetizeron their Panther installs for a while now. It always seemed to me that this was a more robust and purpose built application than any of the other solutions I had tried. On July 4th Bronson Beta released Mail.appetizer 1.2 Beta 1—with support for Tiger.

Appetizer comes with an installer, and is an absolute doddle to get up and running. No messing about in Library/mail/bundles directories, and certainly no fumbling around the command line. It just plugs in and plays.

The notification boxes aren’t as customisable as Growl Mail, but I like the default one anyway so that doesn’t bother me too much. However, the key thing is that it provides exactly the right features for dealing quickly with mail when it comes into your inbox. An instant message preview, and then simple controls allowing you to deal with mail as you see fit, without actually switching to the Mail.app window.

The only other feature I imagine being useful, is being able to mark an email as flagged, which is something I often do with mail that requires direct attention, but not neccessarily urgently.

At last I’ve found the mail notification solution I’ve been looking for since moving to Tiger, and I would definitely recommend taking a look at Mail.appetizer if you don’t have a notification system you’re happy with. If you do have one you’re happy with, and it’s not any I’ve mentioned here, give me a heads up as I’m definitely interested in checking out other applications that provide this utilty—they make such a huge difference when your inbox is an important part of your working day.

As the “hype” encircling microformatsgrows, I want to try and clear up some of the confusion over what they are, and what they aren’t. I’m not self proclaiming my expertise on this subject, but there does appear to be a lot of confusion and misunderstanding surrounding these concepts and the potential they hold for the semantic web.

So why all this excitment?

Microformats aren’t that new. Many people have probably heard of the XHTML Friends Network (XFN), which was one of the very early specifications in this type of mould. The reason we’re talking about it now, is because only a few weeks ago, the site microformats.org went live with a lovely shiny Cederholm design, and the hype machine went in to overdrive. Be honest, how many people reading this went to look at that site becuase they were told it was a Simple Bitsdesign? Yep, it’s been hyped.

I’m not really sure what people where expecting when the were hurded over to this new site. My guess is that many were rather surpised to find that this exciting, powerful, change the way we build and use the Web technology was just XHTML with some meaningful class attributes.

However, it is these features that make the technology so appealing. Something I have been reminding people in various blog comments around the web is a Tim Berners-Lee quotation which is cited on the XFN website.

The trick… is to make sure that each limited mechanical part of the Web, each application, is within itself composed of simple parts that will never get too powerful.

—Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving The Web

The simplest concepts of the web are often the most powerful. The web exists becuase of the most basic and simplistic concept of all – the hyper link, and it is often easy to forget this during the excitement of advanced technologies such as CSS and Ajax.

The microformats website introduces microformats in quite a ’speccy’ way. That is to say, there is not so much about the social and communicative implications as there is technical discussion, such as the hcard and hcalendarspecifications. No doubt this will change over time as microformats are adopted by more people, and individuals with different outlooks begin to contribute to the site. All this will go towards opening up the concepts and ideas to the mainstream web development community.

Are they supported yet?

Another misconceived point I have heard is that there’s no point using these microformats becuase there’s no implementations or software that support them. However, although the number of real world implementations of microformats is still low, this is not because of lack of support. Support of what? Remember, this is just pure and simple XHTML, with some extra formatting in the form of semantic class names. It is supported inherently by CSS, Javascript and any other technology that sits alongside XHTML.

It is trivial to write a Javascript that will scan a page for a certain format and pull it out for manipulation in whatever way you see fit. Can you not think of a use for this anywhere? How about marking up events on your company intranet so people can synchronise them with iCal? Marking up contacts so they can be synchronised with an address book or CRM application?

Comments on this site are marked up using the hcard format. Using a bookmarklet pointing to Brian Suda’s X2V implementation I can pull out the names and URL of commentors on this site and have them delivered to me in vcard format with the press of one button. This is a real world use of microformats that I am using right now. Don’t underestimate the power of simplicity on the web. The web is built on the most simplistic formats.