Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
something, hiding the controls to do it is Just Wrong. Although this isn't the only sense in
which Mail contains hidden interface elements, it's the most egregious.
I can't convince Apple to stop hiding controls, but I can at least point out what's hidden and
where:
•
Hide/Show:
In
Decoding the Mail Sidebar
,
I mentioned that the controls to
collapse and expand the list of mailboxes for each account are hidden—hover
over the account name in the sidebar to display Hide or Show.
•
Incoming message controls:
If you hover your pointer over (or near) the
header portion of a message, a block of controls appears (
Figure 2
). The four
leftmost controls (Delete, Reply, Reply All, and Forward) are for actions you can
accomplish in several other ways. But the pop-up menu on the right, which ap-
pears only if the message has attachments, contains an Export to iPhoto com-
mand that doesn't appear anywhere else in Mail. Well, that's not
exactly
true. It
does appear on the contextual menu that pops up if you right-click (or Control-
click) a graphical attachment—but that menu is hidden too!
Figure 2:
This group of controls appears only when your pointer ap-
proaches it, and the rightmost control (only for messages with attach-
ments) contains an Export to iPhoto command that's found nowhere else.
Tip:
For considerably more control over how attachments appear in both incoming
and outgoing messages (inline or as icons, depending on format and size), try the
At-
tachment Tamer
plug-in from Lokiware.