Widescreen Email

Widescreen monitors are quite popular these days. Instead of the "old school" 4:3 aspect ratio which resembles a square, they're designed with a 16:9 aspect ratio which is rectangular. I'm guessing that one of the big reasons for the prevalence of widescreen monitors is the rising popularity of watching movies and TV shows on your computer. And, well, everything else just seems wider these days, no?

I have a pair of widescreen monitors both at home and at work, and I love them. For me, it's not just about 'fun and games' either - I find them very useful in my actual work. If you've ever built a movie in Final Cut Pro or iMovie, or edited a song in Garageband, or worked in any other application that's uses a timeline, you know what I mean. They're probably great for Flash developers. That extra space from left to right comes in handy - you can see more of your project at once, and jump to various points without a whole lot of horizontal scrolling.

A lot of software, however, is designed for the 4:3 world, or not really designed to consider aspect ratio one way or the other. A good example is Apple's mail program. Fortunately, there's a great (and free) plug-in called WideMail which gives you extra configuration options for Mail that leverage your widescreen.



(I know the capture is small, but I didn't want you to be able to read my email!)

WideMail is based on the three-column view that's always been present in Mail, but with a few twists beyond the Mail program's default settings. For starters, it lets you have a two-line mail list (center column) so that you can see the Sender or Subject on one line, and the other mail details such as date and attachments, on a second. This really is an improvement over Apple's layout. I can easily fit my folder list on the left, message list in the middle, and message preview on the right. And now, I can almost always see the ENTIRE message.

WideMail also lets you turn on borders for the message list view, and use different colors for the subject and/or sender. There are other settings you can play around with, but these are the main ones I'm using. The plug-in adds its own tab to the Mail preference applet as you can see below:



It took me a few minutes to figure out how to get the two-line message list to show. Tip - WideMail treats this as a "view" so you have to right-click the column header and select WideMail as a column, and then turn off the standard, default columns.



Little tip for Mac users with widescreens (and that includes any flat-panel iMac): because you've got so much more room horizontally, you come up a little short vertically. Putting your dock on the left or right, instead of bottom, makes better use of your screen real estate.