One of the casualties of Leopard were a number of pieces of software that extend the functionality of Mail.app. Among those was a personal favorite of mine, a plugin called Letterbox that allowed you to view your mailbox in a widescreen format: rather than putting the message list and preview panes stacked horizontally, it turned them into vertical columns. Extremely useful if you’re more interested in reading longer messages without having to scroll, as well as wanting to see a longer history of your mailbox (and, with almost 12,000 messages in my mailbox, I find that pretty useful).
Letterbox hasn’t been updated for Leopard yet—developer Aaron Harnly is still working on it—but to tide you over in the meantime, Dane Harnett has concocted a replacement called, appropriately, WidescreenMailPlugin. Restoring widescreen view to your mailbox will require a couple of Terminal commands (you can copy and paste them from the plugin’s Read Me file). It seems to work fine (though one tip: if you’re using GrowlMail, you’ll want to manually remove it from /Library/Mail/Bundles, or it’ll just crash Mail every time).
I do have one question for Mr. Harnett, though: Letterbox weighed in at a rather svelte 148k whereas WidescreenMailPlugin is a hefty 16.1MB. What the heck’s going on there?
[via Hawk Wings]
It looks like WideScreenMailPlugin is implemented in Python and then bundle includes the Python runtime.
I was waiting on this...Yay..
I replaced my mail preferences folder from my tiger user and system library for a swift change over and (having installed letterbox in tiger) without installing or changing anything it was already in widescreen mode...
They updated it to 0.3 which includes an installer and uninstaller package that sidesteps any Terminal action. Yes!
Hi Dan,
Ken is correct, my widescreen plugin is implemented in python and the python framework gets included in the mailbundle.
I created this plugin for my personal use (and a development exercise) as the letterbox plugin has a couple of glitches on leopard that im sure Mr Harnly will be correcting.
I figured i would release it because it could be some use to everyone else.
Im also currently working on implementing a two-line message list similar to entourage, however its pretty difficult.
Thanks for the review
Dane Harnett
The size discrepancy has to do with the code used. The current version of WideMail (as it's now called) is written in Python, which requires extra overhead and makes the package quite large. The developer was aware of this and has rewritten the plugin in native Obj-C which makes it much more light weight. This new version thats being worked on also has some fantastic new features, check out the sneak peak on the site:
http://www.daneharnett.com/widemail/