I don’t know why, but Apple didn’t give users the ability to customize the view of their OS freebie email app Mail. Anybody who has used the latest Outlook (as of this writing) or the excellent open source Thunderbird has seen the beauty of a 3-column email view.

Over on the Ars Technica forums, there is a thread about Mail and widescreen displays. A talented developer ran with it and the result is Letterbox, a sweet plug-in that gives users a 3 column view.

Even if you just have a 1024 x 768 monitor resolution, the three–column view is nice for reading more of the message. The subject lines get squished, so shrink the message list font to 9 and get even more info on the page. Plus, it’s nice to be able to read the whole message.

Thanks to Merlin Mann and his flickr stream for showing me this awesome plug-in. o

About 13 years ago, I purchased a great set of utilties for the Mac called Now Utilities. All of them were overkill, but there were a couple that saved my life day in and day out. They had a great dialog box add-on that gave open/save dialogs huge boosts in functionality.

It looks like PiquantMenu might be the Now Utilities of today. I haven’t had a chance to play with this utility much, but it looks like even if a fraction of it is useful, it’s gonna be a great addition to power-users’ machines. And it’s universal.

Apple Matters writes it up here. o

Can be read here. Link goes to xlr8yourmac.com.

The results look promising. And I’m jonesing a MacBook Pro.

They have posted some initial thoughts and speed tests over on CNET.

Apple does it. Very interesting for Apple to come at it this way. Windows users are used to a little more pre-announcements than Mac users. Quite a development.

According to a Techworld.com report, a Russian company is planning to release software that will allow Linux, Mac OS X and Windows to run on a machine at the same time:

“This is not simply a “dual-boot” but instead gives our users the ability to use Windows or any other operating system at the same time as Mac OS X, enabling users to enjoy the comfort of their Mac OS X desktop while still being able to use critical applications from other OSes.”

Could be interesting, more details later this week.

Here’s Macworld’s take on getting your Intel powered iMac to boot Windows. It’s not all candy and happy times.

Great article on permissions wrangling on Macworld.com