Scott Morrison:
For a number of years we have been working on MailMaven: A new macOS email client that picks up where we left off after Apple killed Mail Plugins.
Today we are opening access to a wider audience than our small group of private beta testers.
Apple made it impossible for MailTags (and SmallCubed’s other plug-ins) to keep working with Mail, and the Mail extensions API remains quite limited, so they wrote a whole new mail client. It’s $75 for one year of updates, with the first year currently discounted to $45 and more discounts if you had already purchased their other products. SpamSieve integration is built-in, and MailMaven really lets you customize how spam messages are handled.
Joe Kissell:
Through six editions of Take Control of Apple Mail, the current title, I said that I used Mail because—and this qualification is crucial—with a long list of customizations and, in particular, the addition of the MailSuite plugin from SmallCubed, it was the best Mac email client I could find (and I’ve tried pretty much all of them). MailSuite added essential filing, automation, and tagging features that made Mail bearable. On its own, however, Mail is so-so at best, and it has been getting progressively worse for a number of years.
[…]
If you used Mail along with the MailSuite plugin in the past, you can picture that combination as a very rough approximation of MailMaven. If you’re unfamiliar with MailSuite, here’s a quick summary of some of its main features that have migrated into MailMaven[…]
[…]
If you’re the sort of person who loves tweaking things and squeals with delight every time you uncover another checkbox in Settings, you’ll be thrilled. Every aspect of the windows and message display, every keyboard shortcut, tweaky attachment options, and even the color, shape, and position of the unread message badge on the icon can be adjusted to your heart’s content.
However, AppleScript support is currently very limited. You cannot get the selected messages, and most of the message properties don’t work.
One of the interesting design decisions is that searching happens in a separate window rather than just filtering what’s displayed in the main window. This was more common pre-iTunes. MailMaven can automatically set the search scope based on what you were looking at, so this doesn’t really add any extra steps. On the plus side, I like being able to easily open multiple searches at once and to adjust the view options to explore the search results without disturbing the view settings for the main window. On the other hand, sometimes it would be handy to be able to just quickly filter the current display in situ [Update: This feature already exists.].
(Apple Mail does make it easy to create new viewer windows, which would seem to offer the best of both worlds. But it’s awkward because new windows don’t retain the context of which mailboxes you had selected. Recent versions of Mail are kind of the worst of both worlds because starting a new search in the existing window no longer filters the current mailbox, either—it jumps you to an All Mailboxes view.)
Scott Morrison:
We’ve toyed with the taglines:an email client for people who remember what email clients are supposed to be like.
An email client for people who think email client should be email clients.
In other words words, it’s not trying to reinvent e-mail, you don’t give their server access to your mail, and they’re not sprinkling AI everywhere. I also appreciate the old school release notes that actually tell you what the changes were. They are also open about the known issues and roadmap.
Previously:
Apple Mail AppleScript E-mail Client Mac Mac App macOS 15 Sequoia Mail App Extensions MailMaven MailTags Search SpamSieve
John Siracusa:
The first release of Hyperspace mitigated these risks, in part, by entirely avoiding certain files and file system locations. I knew lifting these limitations would be a common request from potential customers. My plan was to launch 1.0 with the safest possible feature set, then slowly expand the app’s capabilities until all these intentional 1.0 limitations were gone.
With the release of Hyperspace 1.3 earlier this week, I have accomplished that goal.
[…]
Apple’s APIs for wrangling cloud-backed files mostly seem to work, with only a few oddities. And if Hyperspace can’t get an affirmative assurance from those APIs that a file is a valid candidate for reclamation, it will err on the side of caution and skip the file instead.
[…]
There’s more to come, including user interface improvements and an attempt to overcome some of the limitations of sandboxing, potentially allowing Hyperspace to reclaim space across more than one user account.
The main new feature in 1.3 is support for Library folders, where the files are likely to be in use by running apps but also (surprisingly to me) are likely to be duplicates. It also improves handling of files that change in the middle of a scan.
Previously:
File Provider Extensions Hyperspace iCloud Mac Mac App macOS 15 Sequoia Sandboxing Storage
Anybox:
Quick look extension for folders.
[…]
USD$1.99 to get the app and all of it.
[…]
Preview ZIP files as folders.
It does what it says on the tin. This is a new-style Quick Look extension, so it uses a real outline view and a real path bar, rather than trying to make HTML look-alikes, as was necessary with the old Quick Look generator system.
It works not only in Finder’s sidebar and Quick Look inspector window, but also in other apps that support Quick Look previews. In addition to archives of my own files, I store the original archives of all the software that I download in EagleFiler, for searching and verification purposes. The Folder Preview extension makes it possible to look inside those archives from the main EagleFiler window without having to expand them first. The Folder Preview app, which houses the extension, lets you configure view options: icon size, showing hidden files, and the preview depth (for performance reasons). It’s a bit frustrating that the previews are not keyboard-navigable. I assume this is due to limitations of Quick Look.
Trying out Folder Preview highlighted some other shortcomings of the current Quick Look system. First, there doesn’t seem to be a way to handle conflicts. I have BetterZip’s Quick Look extension installed alongside Folder Preview. It supports more archive formats than Folder Preview, but I prefer Folder Preview for ZIP archives. However, macOS forces me to choose. If I enable BetterZip for other file types, it will override Folder Preview for ZIP archives.
There are also a variety of problems with using System Settings to manage Quick Look extensions:
Searching for “Quick Look” finds no results.
Searching for “Extension” only shows Privacy & Security ‣ Security settings, but that’s not where extensions are configured. They’re actually in General ‣ Login Items & Extensions.
Login Items & Extensions is a mess with way too many different things in it: Open at Login, Allow in Background, and Extensions. Each of these is a long list, with no way to jump between the sections. You have to just scroll, and it doesn’t even let you do that from the keyboard. With the default window size, I have to go down about five screenfuls before I get to Extensions.
Within the Extensions section, there is no way to search for the extension that you want. You have to know which category it’s in.
The categories are not keyboard navigable, either, and you have to click the little i buttons to see what’s in each one. Why couldn’t this all be in a column browser?
Clicking i for a category opens a sheet that only has enough room to show 2–3 apps at a time. It’s not resizable or keyboard navigable, and there’s no search. (Unlike some other areas of System Settings, the list is at least in alphabetical order.)
Previously:
BetterZip Extensions Folder Preview Login Items Mac Mac App macOS 15 Sequoia Quick Look System Preferences ZIP Archive
Juli Clover:
Apple is working with Anthropic on an updated version of Xcode that will support AI code writing, editing, and testing, reports Bloomberg. Anthropic is best known for its “Claude” large language model and chatbot that competes with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Claude is well-known for its coding capabilities, beating out other LLMs on programming tasks.
The new version of Xcode integrates the Claude Sonnet model, and Apple is slowly rolling it out internally for employees to use.
Peter Steinberger:
Wrote a nice Mac menu bar app complete with CI in ~3h vibe coding. Claude is currently checking CI and fixing itself.
Yeah lies, ended up working all day on it and making it wayyyy better. The last 5% always take as long as the first 95%.
Previously:
Artificial Intelligence Claude Mac macOS 15 Sequoia Programming Rumor Xcode
