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Dear Aunt TUAW: Help me customize notifications
Dear Aunt TUAW, I have several Mail accounts. One for work, one personal, and one that gets a lot of junk. I like all of them to come into my Mail app, but I don't need a notification in Mountain Lion every time a piece of junk mail comes through. Is there a way to only enable notifications for certain accounts? Your loving nephew, Billy Dear Billy, Sadly, there isn't a way Auntie knows of to do this with OS X Mountain Lion tools, but why not consider using Growl instead? Growl is the spiritual grandfather to Notification Center. Auntie pinged Uncle Chris from the Growl Project to see what he recommended for you. He pointed Auntie this page, which offers a handy walk through plus an AppleScript that you can customize to your needs. Auntie asked him about Notification Center integration. He replied that the upcoming Growl 2 will be able to forward custom updates to Notification Center instead of using Growl's display. Thanks, Uncle Chris! Auntie brainstormed up with a new motto for the Growl project in appreciation: "Growl: Drinking Notification Center's milkshake since OS X 10.8." Hugs! Auntie T.
Mountain Lion 101: Silencing Notification Center alerts
Mountain Lion's Notification Center is handy. It displays banners and alerts from notification-aware apps to keep you informed of changes, like a new Twitter mention, Calendar event or email message. That last one can get distracting, depending on how much email you receive. Here are some ways to tame email alerts: Disable alerts and banners in System Preferences. Open System Preferences and click Notifications. Select Mail from the list on the right and then click None. You'll no longer see email notifications. Quit Mail. Apple's Mail app won't push notifications if it isn't running. Turn them all of at once. Open Notification Center on your Mac and swipe up to the very top. Move the slider labeled Show Alerts and Banners to the Off position to silence all pop-up alerts and banners (they still appear listed in Notification Center itself). Slide it back to On to restore alerts and banners. If you're worried about a notification popping up when you're making a presentation, don't be. Notification Center is smart enough to recognize when you've got Keynote open and silences notifications on its own. Additionally, it won't display alerts or banners on a mirrored display.
Yahoo confirms Mail / Messenger outage, working on a fix
Google Talk and Twitter had their moments last week, and now it's Yahoo's turn. As noted by a flood of readers -- and confirmed by the company itself -- the exclamation marked mail service is currently experiencing some issues. Yahoo Mail is prompting users to accept its terms and then just sort of conking out. We reached out to Yahoo for comment and received the following response: Yahoo! Mail, Messenger and other areas of Yahoo! may currently be inaccessible or slow to respond to some users in certain locations. We are working to correct the issue and restore all functionality immediately. We know that this may have caused some inconvenience and we apologize to our users who might be affected. We'll update you when things are back to normal. [Thanks to everyone who sent this in] Update: Phew, everything seems to be back in working order.
Mountain Lion 101: Mail VIPs
This Mountain Lion 101 feature is a quickie -- Apple's Mail app now has a new feature called VIPs that gives you one-click access to emails from those very important people in your life. Emails from VIPs have a star next to the sender's name, and a mailbox for each VIP is added to the Favorites bar. With a click on the VIPs tag in the toolbar, a popup showing "All VIPs" and the names of individual VIPs is displayed. You can have up to 100 VIPs identified, but in my opinion, if everybody's a VIP, then nobody's a VIP. I'm using the feature to highlight emails from my boss (Mrs. Sande) and my business partner (Erica Sadun). To make that special someone in your life a VIP, you just move your pointer to the left of the sender's name in a message header. A star appears, and clicking the star makes the person a VIP. You can also click the person's name in a message, then select "Add to VIPs" from the pop-up menu that appears (below). If that person becomes persona non grata in your life, removing them from the VIP list is quite simple. Just click the star again, or you can use the "Remove from VIPs" item that will appear in the pop-up menu seen above. For VIPs that have several email addresses in your Contacts list, messages from any of those email addresses appear in their VIP mailbox. If you're using iCloud Contacts, your VIPs appear on any other Mountain Lion-equipped Mac that is signed into the same iCloud account. To get a special notification in Notification Center when email arrives from my VIPs, I set up a rule in Mail Preferences: You could also theoretically add a special sound to the notification with a rule, or kick off an AppleScript to Tweet you. I leave this as an exercise for the reader. As I mentioned, this isn't an earthshaking addition to Mountain Lion, but it is a surprisingly useful feature that can help you pay more attention to email from special people. If it can help me take notice of one more "honey-do" from my wife and keep me out of the doghouse for at least one day, then the Mail VIP feature is worth the $19.99 Mountain Lion upgrade cost.
Google acquires Sparrow, the Apple-focused email app maker
Well, we can't exactly say we saw this one coming. Sparrow, maker of popular email apps for iOS and Mac OS X, has just announced that it's been acquired by Google. Expectedly, details on the acquisition are being kept under wraps at the moment, but company CEO Dom Leca has confirmed in a blog post that Sparrow will be joining the Gmail team at Google to "accomplish a bigger vision." Fans of the company's apps will be glad to know, however, that the team will "continue to make Sparrow available and provide support for our users" while also working on new things at Google. That does sound like most of their attention will be focused elsewhere, though. You can find Leca's full statement on the matter at the source link below. Update: The Verge was able to get some notion of a cost for this deal, with "under $25 million" being a figure assigned to this, a figure that wasn't inflated due to a bidding war. (That should answer those wondering if maybe Google bought this out from under Apple.)
Google launches Gmail SMS for text-based email in Ghana, Nigeria and Kenya
Smartphones and email-equipped feature phones have proliferated in even the most resource-dry areas of Asia, Europe and North America, but for many subscribers in Africa, SMS is the only option for text-based communication on the go. And, to give residents a more consistent method for reading and responding to email from their mobiles, Google just launched Gmail SMS in Ghana, Nigeria and Kenya. To sign up, simply head over to the "Phone and SMS" settings page in Gmail, add your mobile number and complete a verification process. Once enrolled, the service will automatically forward all email to devices as text messages. The service could even be useful for those that do have access to Android, iOS or Windows Phone devices -- data outages can cripple smartphones, forcing users to turn to phone calls and SMS to connect with family, friends and colleagues. Geva Rechav, a Google product manager for emerging markets, confirmed in a blog post that Gmail SMS messages will be free to receive, but standard fees will apply for outgoing emails. You'll find full signup details at the source link below.
Mozilla giving Thunderbird the (effective) axe, leaving its fate to the community
Mozilla's Thunderbird mail client just hasn't enjoyed the same level of stardom as its Firefox cousin. Their developer must be feeling this discrepancy more than most, as the company has confirmed plans to take the organization out of active Thunderbird development. The shift is officially being spun as an adaptation that lets the Foundation center its energy on Firefox OS and the usual browser plans, but when Mozilla proper will only be handling bug fixes and security updates for a client that's "not a priority," we'd say it's putting Thunderbird on ice. Accordingly, leaked details from TechCrunch show Mozilla moving some of the team out of the project at some point; any new features will have to come from the community, which suggests the future upgrade schedule will be more than a bit unpredictable. The writing is on the wall soon enough that existing owners could have food for thought well before a final strategy is due in early September.
Amazon Lockers hit 7-Elevens in Washington DC, let you grab your parcel and a Slurpee
The convenience of shopping at Amazon just got bumped up a few notches in the Northern Virginia sector of Washington DC. Folks who swear their delivery person never rings the bell before dropping off packages will be pleased to know that Amazon Lockers have popped up at multiple 7-Elevens around the region. As Zatz Not Funny notes, Amazon has yet to officially list the market under the service, but at least four locations are searchable -- and the site did find one more that's currently off the radar. If you're eager to get a glimpse of the P.O. Box-esque units for yourself or get access on your account, you'll find more info at the source links below.
Microsoft explains Windows 8's Mail app, promises more changes to come
It's not often that the folks in Redmond get to debut a new operating system as big as Windows 8, so we can't really blame them for going on at length about every feature of it. The latest to get the in-depth treatment on the Building Windows 8 blog is the Mail app, which has already gone through some fairly big changes since the Consumer Preview and is apparently set to receive even more before the final release. As Microsoft's Jeremy Epling explains in the post, central to the latest version is a three-pane view that's designed to take advantage of the 16:9 ratio Windows 8 is optimized for, and make the best use of all the space afforded by the full-screen "window" -- the latest release is now able to display 14 messages at a time at the standard 1366 x 768 resolution, for instance, as opposed to just 8.5 in the Consumer Preview version. It's also, of course, deeply integrated into Windows 8 itself, even taking advantage of a new networking APIs to detect if you're on a metered network and only download the first first 20KB of each message body if that's the case. Unfortunately, Epling didn't divulge much about those promised future changes, noting only that there are "many more features on the way." In the meantime, you can find out more than you may have wanted to know about Mail in its current state at the link below.
Gold Capped: Unlimited long-term storage
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen and Fox Van Allen aim to show you how to make money on the Auction House. Check out Fox and Basil's reboot of Call To Auction, and email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail! Ever see anyone trying to buy or sell a guild with bank tabs? There are people who will stop at nothing to store more stuff, especially those of us who play the gold-making game. One of the biggest challenges of making gold is, in fact, storing stuff. Bags are expensive, guild tabs are even more expensive, and there is a hard limit of 10 (for now) characters per realm. Each character has four bag slots and eight bank slots, as well as some built-in backpack and bank slots. This may seem like a lot, but what if you wanted to, for example, stockpile 10,000g worth of Hypnotic Dust, expecting it to sell for 70,000g in Mists of Pandaria? That could be over 700 stacks. Luckily, there's a simple and virtually free way to store unlimited amounts of stuff and save all your expensive inventory slots.
Google adds spam explanation to Gmail, steers clear of enlightenment
Why is this message in spam? It's a question we find ourselves asking our Gmail boxes almost daily, when messages that really should have made it through to the inbox end up in electronic purgatory instead. So why does Google's algorithm choose to filter certain legitimate messages, while letting the vast majority arrive unscathed? The answer can now be found atop each message filed as spam, presented with the simplest of explanations, that generally fails to provide any actual insight as to the email's assigned delivery. Such worthless gems as "It's similar to messages that were detected by our spam filters," "It contains content that's typically used in spam messages" or "Many people marked similar messages as spam" now await you above each note -- seemingly assigned just as casually as the emails themselves.
Gold Capped: How to deal with AH stalkers
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen and Fox Van Allen aim to show you how to make money on the Auction House. Email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail! Camping and stalking are two different things, and I got an email from someone facing both asking for help. I was wondering if you had any advice on discouraging less palatable AH competition? I'm speaking in particular about obsessive AH campers and their stalking tendencies. I know it's pretty standard for competitors to add each other to their friends (or enemies) list in order to keep an eye on when they're around, but over this expansion I've encountered some behaviours which seem to be pushing the boundaries of what is and isn't OK. Earlier in the year I had one competitor follow me across Stormwind, then to Darnassus, then to the Exodar, and finally to Shattrath where I eventually logged because it was getting beyond creepy to cut a gem and then moments later see this guy targeting me and cutting the same thing. I'm not an AH camper, but when I am on I'm happy to list/relist against the guys that are – this one following me now seems to be the dominant one on the server (or the most persistent), but I wanted to know if you had any advice on how to discourage this?
Amazon lockers come to NYC, no more getting caught by UPS in your PJs
First Seattle, then London, now the Big Apple -- Amazon's delivery lockers are starting to pop up all over. As we've explained before, the lockers are basically giant, automated PO boxes, designated exclusively for Amazon purchases. If you choose to add a locker location to your address book (go check your account settings to see if the option is available to you yet), your package will be crammed into one of these kiosks and you'll be given a code to unlock a particular slot at the location of your choice. So far there are eight scattered around Manhattan in Rite Aides, D'Agostinos and Gristedes. We haven't wandered out of our secret lair to get photographic evidence of the drop off locations yet (we prefer to have our Amazon purchases left at the gate under the watchful eye of a turret), but we think the screen shot we took is proof enough that we're not pulling your leg. Still, if you're afraid the UPS guy might swing by while you're still in your jammies this seems like a pretty nice solution.
iOS 5 features: Mail
Of the many new features in iOS 5, some of the most subtle changes came with the Mail app. iCloud now brings a free email account to anyone who wants to snag one, and that email account is accessible from any device -- Apple or not. First, text can now be formatted using bold, italic, or underlined. To apply formatting to a word or paragraph, select it using a double-tap, and use the handles to extend or shorten the selection if needed. The standard cut/copy/paste/suggest... menu will be floating over the word, with an arrow pointing to the right. Tap on that arrow, and it reveals a second menu displaying BIU for bold, italic, and underlined. A tap on BIU brings up the individual buttons for Bold, Italics, and Underline. Next, you can now create indents in your message -- actually what you're doing is changing the quote level. To do this, tap any place in a line to display the select/select all/paste menu. Once again, there will be an arrow pointing to the right. Tap the arrow to reveal a button that says Quote Level. Tap once again to show two buttons, Decrease and Increase, which allow you to increase or decrease the quote level of a specific paragraph. %Gallery-136444% Addressing messages just became a bit easier as well. You can now drag names around in the address fields. Let's say that I address an email to Doc Rock and Uri Kelman, but decide that I want Doc's name to be in the carbon copy (cc) address field. I can just place my finger on the "bubble" containing his name, then drag it to the cc field. If you have ever wanted to flag a message so that you know it's important to respond to it, you're in luck. iOS 5 Mail now lets you add flags to those important messages. When looking at an email in the Inbox, you'll see the word Mark in the subject line. With a tap, two buttons appear -- Flag and Mark as Unread. Tap Flag, and a small orange flag appears next to Mark in the subject line. You can now use Mail on your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad to create or remove mailbox folders. This could be useful in a situation where you're on the road for work and need to create a new folder for a specific project. This is done through the list of Accounts on the Mailboxes screen. Search has also been improved in Mail in iOS 5. For the first time, you can search in the body of email messages for a specific word, name, or phrase. While all these features have been around in Mac OS X and Windows for quite a while, it's nice to see that they're now available for iOS users as well. It's one more bit of polish on an already nice mobile operating system.
An end to mailing heirlooms?
If you're an altoholic, you've no doubt experienced the joy of schlepping your heirloom items around via the mail system (along with claiming all your pets and mounts for every new character). With Cataclysm and the focus on all the earlier content, many people are still running alts through the old world, soaking up all the different changes. A recent blue post by Zarhym hints at a potential design change to the heirloom system. Zarhym So, after making a trip to the doctor and having some blood stolen, I stopped by Ghostcrawler's office to discuss this and other topics with him. We talked about some of the feedback in this thread, as well as the developers' latest thoughts on BoA and heirloom items. Rather than potentially having my statements in this thread come back to bite me at some point in the future, I'm going to risk being confusing or sounding dumb. :p In short, they agree that the process of mailing heirlooms around constantly is a little annoying. We'd prefer to try and work ourselves away from the method of mailing out BoA items in the future, like pets, mounts, etc. To that end, we have some design goals in mind that would improve this sort of item distribution system. And with those design goals have come some ideas for changing heirloom mechanics. This is sort of contrary to the idea I stated in this thread about just designing the system to allow players to mail their heirlooms all around their accounts without realm restrictions. That's all of the information I can share at the moment, but I feel like it's worth pointing out that the design philosophy I stated earlier isn't so set in stone -- we're reevaluating these types of systems as we look toward the future. I apologize if I've caused any confusion. source This sounds great. Perhaps a BOA/heirloom vendor in each city who will sell you anything you've unlocked for a nominal fee? Time will tell!
Fallen Earth devs answer your F2P questions
You've got questions about Fallen Earth's free-to-play conversion, and the dev team's got answers. The latest Fallen Earth blog entry spills the beans on everything from what happens to existing subscriptions to character slots to various functionality limitations. Surprisingly, GamersFirst is allowing free-to-play customers to make use of the auction house, mail, and trading systems, but this may change "if gold farmers get totally out of control." There's also good news for pre-existing Fallen Earth subscribers who would like to convert to a free-to-play account but are worried about losing access to their alts. "If you had ever bought the game or paid for a subscription, those character slots were included with your game, so they belong to you regardless of the change in business model," writes Joseph "Linus" Willmon. Head to the official Fallen Earth dev blog for more.
Amazon's 7-Eleven lockers are very real, very gray, slated for Friday activation
After an arduous expedition that must've lasted hours, an intrepid frontiersman in the Seattle area has finally unearthed the Holy Grail of convenience store cubbies -- Amazon's elusive delivery locker, at 7-Eleven. GeekWire's John Cook discovered the prototype lockers at a 7-Eleven in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood, where store clerks told him that the system wouldn't be activated until Friday. According to Cook's description, the setup consists of about 40 different sized containers, centered around a keypad and monitor (neither of which was illuminated during his visit). All told, the array of P.O. Box-style cabinets stands about seven feet tall and is completely devoid of Amazon branding. The in-store pick-up program may roll out of a nationwide basis next summer, but you can check out a photographic sneak preview at the source link, below.
Dear Aunt TUAW: Help me expand Mail's tracking-fu
Dear Aunt TUAW, I really like Mail 5's shipment tracking feature, but it only seems to look up shipments in USPS. What if I have a package arriving from some other service? Is there a way to change what site Mail looks up for tracking info? Your loving nephew, Bob V. Dear Bob, Those features that automatically connect to shipment look-up are called data detectors. OS X Mail has built them into Lion, allowing you to track packages sent by UPS, FedEx, and the US Postal Service. They work like this. When Mail detects shipping information, hovering your cursor over a tracking number produces a dotted outline and a small button with a downward arrow. Click that arrow and choose Track Shipment from the contextual pop-up. Mail opens a QuickLook window populated with your shipping information. You can enable and disable data detectors by issuing a command-line defaults request, e.g. defaults write com.apple.mail DisableDataDetectors YES, or NO. What you can't do is change what detectors there are, or add to them. As far as Auntie can tell, data detectors seem to be built into apps via the underlying programming system rather than specified through defaults. Data detectors are actually quite complicated things. They are based on regular expressions that match the characteristics of the item they are detecting. Apple provides built-in detectors for tracking numbers, phone numbers, dates, addresses and for URLs. A simple web search for regular expression and, say, phone number shows how deeply complex the problems are -- and how little suited they are for end-user expansion. GummyDev offers an interactive regex checker. Its relatively simple regex for UPS is /\b(1Z ?[0-9A-Z]{3} ?[0-9A-Z]{3} ?[0-9A-Z]{2} ?[0-9A-Z]{4} ?[0-9A-Z]{3} ?[0-9A-Z]|[\dT]\d\d\d ?\d\d\d\d ?\d\d\d)\b/i. If UPS is simple, FedEx is less so. FedEx apparently keeps updating their number system based on their internal corporate structure and the number of packages delivered. In Apple's SDK, the NSDataDetector class derives from the NSRegularExpression class and basically works the same way. Class instances can enumerate through matches found in a string and applies property updates based on those matches. Here's a quick example of a custom data detector that matches against any occurrence of the string "auntie", marking it in orange. So to sum things up, here's what Auntie has believes is likely going on. (Although if she got any of this wrong, do correct her -- as usual -- in the comments.) As an end-user you can enable or disable all data detectors for mail. You cannot add new data detectors, say, for the Canadian postal service. Developers can build detectors into their own apps as needed, but these detectors and the regular expressions that power them are not shared between apps. Regular expressions can be really, really ugly. Here's hoping that helps. Hugs and kissies, Auntie T.
The Daily Grind: Do you mix up game mechanics?
The other day I was chatting with an EverQuest II guildmate who was looking to mail some resources to my crafting character. Save your coin, I told her, and I'll just come pick up the stacks of mats since they numbered close to 200. She raised a quizzical eyebrow and asked me in no uncertain terms what the heck I was talking about, as EQII charges a flat 50 copper per mail no matter how many items are attached. I've played so many fantasy games over the years -- a fair few of which up the postal charges depending on the quantity and rarity of your attachments -- that I had forgotten how user-friendly EQII's implementation really was. Today's Daily Grind is all about similar senior moments. Do you or have you played a lot of similar MMORPGs, and do you occasionally mix up their mechanics? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
Snail Mail My Email outsources your emotions to foreign hands
We bet the Britney Spears' classic Email My Heart would take great offense (and potential intellectual property beef) to Ivan Cash's startup, Snail Mail My Email. The 25-year old entrepreneur and lover of the quaint, soon-to-be anachronistic form of communication quit his advertising day job in favor of an out-of-pocket, handwritten transcription service. That's right, Cash and his global network of volunteers painstakingly re-create your digital salvos with the flourish of awkward and potentially illegible penmanship for free. Before you rush to overwhelm his servers with epic, misspelled ravings, pay close attention to that 100 word limit -- do-gooders' hands get tired, ya know. It's a quirky approach to letting that special someone know you care, and a great way to say, "I hope while you're reading this you're no longer drooling or pooping in your pants." (Their words, we swear!)
