Archive for October, 2007

Sometimes simpler is better.

Especially in business settings. For personal use, most of the templates included with the new Mail application in Mac OS X Leopard are great. But they’re just too “cute” for most business use.

In an attempt to quickly create Mac OS X Leopard Mail templates that are more appropriate for business use, I offer up two more “not cute” versions. I’ve creatively named them “White 1″ and “White 2.”

Download White 1 & White 2 OS X Leopard Mail Templates here.

Screen captures of White 1 and White 2, based on the existing “Doodle” Stationery template.

This didn’t take as long as I thought it would.

Here is a very simple, non-cute, customizable letterhead template for Mail in OS X Leapord that is suitable for business use. It my first attempt and very simple, but it works. Your logo will be centered in the page. Here is the download link.

Letterhead Templates For Mail.

Once the file has been downloaded. Put it in the “Resources” folder in whatever category you would like it to appear. Library> Application Support> Apple> Mail> Stationery> Apple> Contents> Resources> Stationery> Contents> Resources for example. To use it, simply drag your logo into the image window and resize.

I’ll work on some more designs later.

Enjoy!

Also… you can download:

The Missing Pink Baby Template For Mail.

I love the new Mail templates that came with Mac OS X Leopard.

But the first thing I said when I saw them was, “why are there no business templates?” It continues to befuddle me. It would have been simple for the Apple dev team to throw the business community a couple of bones and at least create a template that would allow you to replace a logo and edit some styled address and contact fields. I don’t think that’s asking too much.

The second thing I said was, “there better be a way to create your own templates.” Well, there is.

It will help to know a little HTML, but it’s actually quite simple. The image on the right is a screen capture of a quick first attempt on my part. I edited the existing “Fun” template to include an icon in place of the flowers at the top and company logo and address information to replace the flowers at the bottom. In this case, the only editing of the actual HTML document was to change the default color on the font in the email. The rest was done by simply editing the jpg files.

You get to the Stationery templates by going to the Library> Application Support> Apple> Mail. From there you’ll need to drill down until you get to the resources folder that contains the different Stationery templates. In this case I dragged the “Fun.mailstationery” file to the desktop and renamed it RES.mailstationery. Then I Control clicked on the file to Show Package Contents. All of the files are there for your editing.

To rename the template inside Mac Mail, open the English.lproj folder and edit the template name in the file, “DisplayName.strings.” Content.html contains the meat of the HTML for each template.

Make your changes. Save the new graphics files into the resources folder of your edited Stationery file and then copy that file into the place with the other files in the category you’ve chosen your template from. When you fire up Mail again, your edited template should be available. Like this:

The thumbnail on the far right was easy to generate. As you can see, it was created before I moved the logo box to the left on the template.

I still feel strongly there needs to be some good, easy to edit business templates for the program. But it’s 2am right now, so that may have to wait for another day.