I found quite a simple example on Macosxhints.com. All very nice, but I needed to know how my signature would look across various email clients and services, such as Hotmail and Yahoo etc.

I’ve created one that works and I’ve also taken some screenshots of how the signature is rendered in five of the most comment email clients/services.

OK lets jump right in

First of all we need to decide on how we want the signature to be built. Initially I thought about using tables to contain the signature, but upon a little bit of research I discovered that the vast majority of email services are compatible with xhtml / css. So that’s that set. Next I needed to decide how I wanted the image to be included. There’s one thing that really annoys me when receiving an email, it’s when they contain useless attachments that come from the email signature itself. Especially annoying when it comes to saving multiple attachments to a folder, I simply don’t want someone’s nasty background line image added to the list of important files.
OK I know, it’s not really important, but I believe that a signature should be as unobtrusive as possible.
I opted to have the image load from my server, with only a simple image reference within the HTML. I chose this because all email applications that I’ve used all cache the images that they download, so it’s not a problem if your email is viewed offline.

With all that in mind, set out and design / build yourself a gorgeous signature in your favourite editor. Make sure you keep all hrefs absolute, relative simply wont do.

Once you’ve designed yourself a tasty signature, the next part to creating it is incredibly easy. Here’s what to do:

• 1. Make sure you already have a signature set up in Mail. Anything will do, as long as it’s something.
• 2. Close Mail
• 3. Load the signature you’ve created into the Safari browser
• 4. Save it Apple+S as a Web Archive into: ~/Library/Mail/Signatures and replace your desired signature
• 5. Reload Apple Mail and create a new message. Voila.

~/ = your user name within OS X.

If you have multiple signatures for different accounts and don’t know which .webarchive to replace. Simply open the SignaturesByAccount.plist and find the < array > < string > VALUE < / string > < / array > that relates to the webarchive.

You may find that when you first create a new message the image doesn’t load, and instead displays the Safari question mark ?. Don’t fret, simply send yourself a message so that Mail can cache the image. From then on it’s plain sailing.

Example

This is what I designed for use as my signature: Hopking Design Signature.

Please feel free to take it and customise it as you see fit. One thing I must emphasize in my code is:

< div class=" clear " >< /div > (and the corresponding style)

It’s essential that you use this, or else when you reply to an email with your new signature, the ‘original message’ text will stick to the right side of if like a magnet.

How it renders

Here’s how it renders in the various email clients / services.

Apple Mail:

Microsoft Outlook:

Yahoo’s online service:

Hotmail’s online service

Gmail’s online service

As you can see here the signature renders pretty well across the various services. To my surprise though, Google’s Gmail doesn’t render it at all properly. I looked at the generated source code, it left the DIVs intact, but had striped away the class names?!
I imagined this kind of behaviour from Hotmail. So far, I’ve had no success. If anyone has ideas of a fix, please yell.

That’s it. I hope this helps someone somewhere.

Update: Here’s a great resource for modifying and making the most of Apple’s Mail

I created this site over two years ago now, and I haven’t updated the design or the backend since then. It’s still running on a WordPress 1.3 Alpha installation for god sake! So to say it’s old and falling apart is an understatement.

The reason why I haven’t upgraded the backend is quite simple really, when I first created the site I wanted it to do something similar to rion.nu. At the time there simply wasn’t anything that could do this, well not available off the shelf at least. I found a way around the problem in the form for leaning quite a bit of PHP and hacking a gallery plugin for WordPress. It therefore didn’t work with the subsequent upgrades of WordPress.

Well the time has come for a re-design, it’s been a long time coming and I’m sick of how it looks these days and the constant spam messages that it accumulates… just been through 1800 messages to save 3 legit comments. I need WP 2.0.

I need some help!

Basically the purpose of writing this post is to ask you for your help and ideas on the subject in hand…

I want the same or similar functionality as I have now. i.e. Simple, automated thumbnail creation from uploaded images. Automated linking to the large images from the smaller preview. I would ideally like to use WordPress, it’s familiar to me and I don’t really have time to learn something else. Unless of course what is on offer is amazing or is something that could benefit my professional skillset.

I would also like the ability to have some kind of shopping cart facility… it would be nice to offer any of my photos as prints. I would also like to sell some of my design work on there: Small posters / postcards / badges… you get the picture (no pun intended).

You scratch mine, I’ll scratch yours

If there is someone out there who perhaps would like to do a deal with me, I for instance could provide you with full design / template and you could customise some backend application for me. If this is something of interest to any of you, please drop me a line so we can discuss ideas.

Anywho, I would really appreciate any ideas on this topic. It will be great to hear from you.

Thanks.

Although these are great, and of course I appreciate them. The icing on the cake came from being showcased on CSS Beauty.

CSS Beauty in my opinion is probably the best showcase site on the interweb at the moment. It has a smashing design, great community and an air of prestige and quality that I find lacking on other galleries.

To say I’m honoured is an understatement, I never imagined I’d have my humble slice of the internet shown on such a resource. Thanks, it means a great deal.

My site is also going to appear in the Web Design Index 06 book, which is a collection of the 1002 most outstanding websites of 2006, which I assume wouldn’t have happened without the CSS Beauty showcase. Wow.

Thanks to everyone who has left nice comments both here and on the respective galleries, I really appreciate your feedback.

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For me this is the very best web browser available today and, in my opinion, the entire history of web browsers. It’s flexible, robust, stable, cross-platform, fully customisable and can render a web page in the way it’s meant to… all of which aren’t offered by the piece of crap that Microsoft offers in the form of IE.
I wish people were more technologically savvy and didn’t just stick with the default and usually sub-standard options and choices, but that is for another topic of discussion and not here.

As usual I’m getting sidetracked by my annoyances of peoples’ ignorance.

Back to the topic in hand. Extensions. For Firefox. OK.

If you’re not aware, Firefox offers the ability to fully customise the functions that your browser can perform, from adding great features like Advert blocking and RSS readers to FTP managers and variously good tool bars. These add-ons are called Extension (update: from Firefox 2.0 they are called Add-ons) and you can get 100s here.

Here is my list of Extensions or Add-ons:

Adblock

My most used and probably most forgotten extension is Adblock Plus. It sits in the background blocking all those horid banner ads, be they images / flash or text.

It can block anything you like it to. It synchronises it’s blacklist every now and then, to block all the new fangled ways advertisers try to entice you, so you don’t have to… don’t worry if you like some ads, you can of course add them to your ‘Exception list’.

Session Manager

This was until version 2.0 of Firefox my favourite, and in my opinion, the best extension available. Sadly Session Manager has ceased development as of version 1.5x, someone has hacked the .xpi to work in version 2.0, but unfortunately it crashes my system… you can try it here.

This extension allows you to save the current state of Firefox (history, text data, cookies, tabs) and return to that state at any later moment. Besides the manually saved states, Session Manager automatically stores the current state in case of a crash. Also very useful if you’re in the middle of some serious research, with a million tabs open… just save it and come back to it later. Please Zeniko (the developer), please update this to work in 2.0. It’s so useful, that I’m in two minds about whether to go back to 1.5.0.x.

Web Developer

The Web Developer toolbar is an essential extension for any web developer, can save you hours in your development time… especially in times of troubleshooting (real time CSS rendering, just for starters).

Web Developer adds a menu and a toolbar with various Web developer tools to the browser. The tools allow the user to disable, view, and edit cookies, CSS, HTML, forms, and images; validate pages; and much much much more.

Download Statusbar

Manage your Internet downloads from a tidy toolbar with Download Statusbar, without the download window getting in the way of your Web browsing. Despite its compact size, Download Statusbar packs in more useful features than the standard download window.

The fully customizable interface auto-hides when not in use, allowing full control without interruption.

Focus Last Selected Tab

Pretty simple, but very useful extension this, FSLT can really save time searching for the last tab you had selected… simply click on the current tab and it takes you back the last focused tab. Genius.

Duplicate Tab

Pretty self explanatory this. Duplicate Tab adds to the right-click context menu of the tab a few options for copying.

Foxmarks Bookmark Synchroniser

Bloody useful extension if you use multiple machines or systems. Foxmarks Bookmark Synchroniser keeps all your tasty bytes of web synchronised and handily backed-up.

Once you’ve created an account, which is free, it sits silently and happily in the background.

Reload Every

Reload Every adds an item to the right-click menu & the reload button, offering you the option to update any tab at any set interval of time. Useful if you’re watching an ebay item, for instance.

Auto Copy

Auto Copy does exactly that. Automatically copies selected text and allows you to paste it easily with a middle click, if of course you have a mouse with a wheel.

Well there you have it. I had a few more extensions in 1.5.0.x, but they, like session manager, no longer work. If I’m missing some vital extension action, please enlighten me. I like enlightenment.

For comparison, and this is going to be a basic and maybe unfair comparison, I’ll be using my old Acer Windows XP based laptop to do some crude benchmarking. It’s a 2+ year old workhorse Acer Aspire 1502LMi which comes with, sorry I’m breaking my rules of geekyness already, but I think you ought to know:

• Acer Aspire
• 2GHz AMD Athlon 64bit cpu
• 768MB PC2700 DDR SDRAM
• 60GB 7200 RPM HD

• Apple MacBook Pro
• 2.16GHz Intel Core Duo cpu
• 1GB PC2-5300 (667MHz) DDR2
• 100GB 7200RPM HD

So you can see that they are fairly equally matched in terms of numbers. The MB (I will be using these meaningful acronyms for the rest of the review. MB = MacBook & AA = Acer Aspire) is only clocking in at 160Mhz more than the AA, but it’s a Core Duo so it’s running with two processors, so in theory doing twice as much work in the same time, but software has to be written or updated to take advantage of this. It’s called Multi-threading. Apps such as Photoshop and all the Apple Universal Binary apps take advantage of this. (I’m writing all this from memory, so please SHOUT at me if I’m getting it wrong).

There is obviously more RAM in my MB than my AA, 256MB more and it’s running at blazzing speeds and there’s two years of technological progress between them and that’s a veritble lifetime. The hardrives are practically the same, as I upgraded the AA a few months before I bought my MB.

Pheeew, that was a bit of a mouthful but I think necessary for me to continue with this review.

I’m a graphic designer / web developer and as such I use all the obvious and essential software:

• Adobe Creative Suite 2 - Illustrator & Photoshop
• Macromedia (Adobe) - Dreamweaver & Flash
• Microsoft Office Word & Excel (for business needs)

Herein lies my first problem with my MB, these ESSENTIAL applications aren’t running natively in the OS X environment. What I mean by this is that these and all applications that were originally written for the PowerPC processor won’t run on the new Intel processor. There are my many reasons for this, but put in it’s most simple terms means that the instructions written for the PPC are not understood by the Intel x86 processor. To combat this, Apple wrote a translator or emulator, which they have called Rosetta (after the Rosetta stone) that sits in the background of OS X and only loads up when it’s needed.

Because of this, performance within these applications is SERIOUSLY hit and NOT in a overstated ‘I just want to make a point’ kind of way.
Here are some examples of speed. Launching of what I consider some essential software. Here are the times:

• Photoshop CS2: MB 48.5 sec. AA 20.1 sec
• Illustrator CS2: MB 44 sec. AA 30 sec
• Bridge CS2: MB 25 sec. AA 17 sec
• Dreamwaver 8: MB 25.5 sec. AA 17 sec
• Microsoft Word: MB 12 sec. AA 21 sec

Here you can obviously see the differneces in performance. They may not be massive, but for Photoshop on the MB it takes 2.4X longer. This on a machine that is over two years younger, with two more processors and double speed memory.

Things get even worse when you’re using more than one application in emulation mode. One of the most common combinations for me is to use Dreamweaver and Photoshop, as I’m sure it is for most web designers. When photoshop is loaded my mouse does a strange and bloody annoying thing, it’ll randomly left click whenever it wants.
Overall, the system speed feels sluggish and un-responsive, much like how I used to think the AA was.

I’ve overcome the degrade in performance in photoshop by buying an external USB2 HD, this makes it speedy, but only about 10-15% faster than my old AA and I’ve had to pay a premium for this privilige.

Here are some more tests: This time I’m using a couple of Photoshop actions to test performance. (Bare in mind that I’m not using my external HD, all tests here are executed on the bare machine). I’ll be using the DIY Photoshop torture test. Please feel free run the test yourselves and post the results here, I would be very interested to see them. Download the files directly from here 2.27MB .zip.

• Test 1 (Rotate)
• MB 1 minure 41 seconds. AA 1 minute 48 seconds.
• MB with EX HD 1 minutes 21 seconds

• Test 2 (Scale)
• MB 7 minutes 30 seconds. AA 8 minutes 20 seconds.
• MB with EX HD 9 minutes 37 seconds

These times are actually in favour of the MB (apart from test 2 with the external HD), but I would bloody expect them to be, and as I mentioned above this machine is 2 years 7 months younger, so it should be faster. I’m deeply anoyed by the bollocks his royal arse Steve Jobs and his marketing army sold me “The fastest laptop ever” & “Push the envelope of pro performance”, when it actually turns out to be just fast enough to keep me from ditching it and returning to the PC. What pro wants this kind of performance?! I’m unhappy and I want an appology.

OK, this isn’t Apple’s fault I hear you Apple avangelists scream, BUT and it’s a J Lo sized but, Apple and the OSX operating system are known to be used by creative professional the world over. I’m very dissapointed with Apple for allowing the creative community to buy newer inferior products for higher unjustifiable prices when the software we all use is below acceptable performance levels. They are a big enough corporation, surely they could have funded the transition for Adobe.

That leads me to Adobe and I shouldn’t let them get away with this either, without at least a small telling off too. It’s totally unacceptable for them to not release Universal Binary (sofware that is written to run natively on PPC and Intel) updates for their flagship applications, when almost everyone else is. I suppose that’s the beauty of having a monopoly on the market: where else can we go? Back to the PC and Windows are my initial thoughts.
I can see that this transistion would cost, and that taking resources away from the CS3 development team doesn’t make financial sense to Adobe at least, but for Apple the cost of subsidising them would have been benificial.

I’m a fair person and I would have even quite happily paid a crossgrade fee of say £50 for the whole suite, just to cover costs to Adobe. But sigh, no such luck.

These are my only major gripes with my transition to the Mac OS so far, but they are pretty big ones and at times of heavy workload I really think twice about my purchase. Things are looking up, Adobe has announced that the Universal Binary of CS3 should be with us by Q2 2007. This is when I will be able to really test and hopfully verify Apple’s claims. Until then we all wait, disgruntled and bitter.

That’s it for Part one of the review. In the next part I will looking at the better and more enjoyable sides of my transition.