This is just a small release to fix a few small bugs that had been brought to my attention, plus fix a shortcoming of the version checking. These are the changes made:

• Changed the Oscured Email Address menu value in the Signature preferences which was inserting an incorrect value of {secure.email.address} instead of {obscured.email.address}
• In the Accounts Tab of the plugin’s preferences a couple of the fields were not keeping thier position correctly when the window was resized.
• Changed some internal debugging values that had broke after the last version.
• Modified the version checking process to be able to handle more than x.y versions (i.e. x.y.z)
• Small text change in documentation for manual install.

For more information, visit the site or download it directly.

Although the iTunes integration into signatures is a rather frivolous need, it’s one of the original things that I had wanted to do. After all, we Mac users like to share stuff right? There used to be an even cooler shareware tool that would create an image and upload the image to a server even few minutes of what was playing in iTunes. Then you could link to that image in an email or web site or whatever. I liked that very much and thought it was cool, but they could no longer support the server so the service disappeared. That program (whose name I unfortunately can’t remember) was better because it always showed the current status. I had to settle for showing what is playing when the message is sent.

Anyway, below the fold are some examples of how these signatures can be used and a couple of gotchas to look out for and avoid.

The first thing to get straight when using the iTunes functionality is that there are one set of placeholders that strictly fill in data from iTunes whatever its status. The three placeholders:

• {itunes.playing.song}
• {itunes.playing.album}
• {itunes.playing.artist}

will be replaced with empty strings if iTunes is stopped or not running. This is why the {itunes.display.info} placeholder exists. This allows you to choose four different, but complete signatures to use for each of the states of iTunes (the four states are “Playing”, “Paused”, “Stopped” and “Not Loaded”. This way you can decide that for all states but playing, you’ll have “None” as the signature for the info placeholder. Then when iTunes is in the three other states that placeholder will be replaced with an empty string.

But it also let’s you designate more meaningful signatures for each of the states if you wish. Say, we create four signatures like these:




In the iTunes tab of SignatureProfiler’s preference pane, we’ll set the different signatures for the four states. Assume that we’ll assign the top-left signature, to the iTunes State of “Playing”, the top-right to “Paused”, the bottom-left to “Stopped” and the bottom-right to “Not Loaded”. To set these, choose the state you want to set from the top menu and then pick the signature that you would have created in the bottom menu.

Then once you compose a message and select a signature that uses the {itunes.display.info} placeholder, you’ll get the correct version of the iTunes signature displaying in your signature. Here are what my four look like.




Hope that you enjoy it.

The addition of these two placeholders facilitates the inclusion and editing of images and hyperlinks in a signature. Although the current Signature preferences pane does offer the ability to insert a hyperlink, it’s not as obvious as it should be how to properly format it and editing it is even worse and very error prone. Although the solution that SignatureProfiler provides is not perfect, it seems better to me. I hope to improve it even more in the future.

In order to put a hyperlink or image link into the signature, you simply need to control-click (or right-click) in the signature pane where you want to insert the link. Note that sometime the editor is a little vague about selection when you control-click, so give it a try first to see how it behaves. The menu that you see looks like this:

The last two items in that menu are the ones that we’ll look at. When either is selected, you’ll get an sheet that looks like the one below. Note that the only difference will be that one has text for links and the other for images. The fields are essentially the same however.

The URL for the image or link indicates where to go an get the information. This should be a valid, reachable URL. No checking will be done at the time of entry to ensure that the link is valid. “Description” is the text that will be shown in the case of a hyperlink and is the descriptive text of an image. It is optional for an image.

After you hit the “Insert” button, the text that is entered into the signature looks less than friendly I must admit, but if you stick to editing just the link or description, you should be fine. Here is an example with both a link and an image inserted:

Another pointer for editing: if you want to change the formatting of a link, be sure to select the entire placeholder. Do not select part of the placeholder and apply formatting to it, this will break SignatureProfiler’s ability to find the placeholder properly.

Also, be aware that often Mail will not load the image correctly in the message compose window. You will see the standard icon indicating that an image cannot be loaded (
). However, the image will be seen by the recipient if they don’t have thier client set to not retrieve images. do a test by sending yourself a mail first. You will also notice that the preview of tail signatures in the SignatureProfiler preference pane doesn’t represent these properly. It is not yet capable of displaying HTML, that will come in a later version.

You might be wondering how to best utilize the Tail Signature feature of SignatureProfiler. I’ll give an example here that will hopefully make this feature clear. It isn’t really complicated, but examples are always good to see to give a good idea.

Tail signatures can include all of the other placeholders that SignatureProfiler provides, except for the tail signature placeholder itself. If that placeholder exists within a signature that you use as a tail signature, it will be replaced with an empty string to avoid a loop.

For our example here we’ll start with the tail signature for our example. Let’s assume that the Account that we will use actually has two email addresses attached to it (joe.shmoe@littleknownsoftware.com and john.doe@littleknownsoftware.com) and that we have set one to use the tail signature of the Account, but the Joe Schmoe uses a different tail signature. The configuration for this looks like this:

We can see that the tail for John Doe has been set to use that of the account. We can’t see the other in the image, but it is set to use “Display Tail 2″. With the original “Display Tail” signature looks like this:

You can see that in the Account configuration screen the tail example is udated to show what it will look like. Note that the user name is replaced as John Doe, however the user name of the account (entered in the Accounts preference pane) is set to “Display Account”. The “Name for Selected Address:” field allows us to override the Account settings for each email address if desired.

Okay, so now let’s look at a couple of example signatures for this account and see what the results will be. Here is the first signature as it appears in the Signatures preference pane.

And here you see the resulting mail with the values replaced. Note that the menu for choosing the address to send from shows the Account name (Display Account) and the email address (john.doe@littleknownsoftware.com). However, you’ll see that the replacements are relevant to the email address, with the user name being “John Doe” instead of “Display Account”, as was configured in the SignatureProfiler preference pane above.

As another example, if we start with this tail:

We will get, for the same original signature chosen in the mail composer screen, a message that looks like this, having chosen the joe.schmoe email address:

That’s about it really. Next I’ll do an example using the image and link replacements to show how those are used and why they are somewhat easier to use than the “Add Hyperlink…” menu item in the Signature preferences pane.

With version 1.3 of SignatureProfiler, you can now insert HTML and Web Archive files directly into your signatures through the Signature Preferences pane. Although the process of adding the file is simple, there are some basic things you should know before you try this. See below the fold for more information.

Melvin Rivera has written a tutorial about how to insert HTML with CSS into Mail and the problems concerning the format to use. Much of that article is obsolete now with SignatureProfiler, however the update where he describes the way to make a CSS signature work the best is very relevant (even necessary) here.

To sum up his points:

• Do not include a CSS style sheet
• Use DIV tags instead of HTML, HEAD or BODY
• All CSS styles should be inline
• The styles should even be attached directly to the tag, no classes
• Do not put any image URLs in backgrounds

This will ensure that your HTML can be seen by as many clients as possible. He has a nice example starting point HTML file that he has posted for you to see how that can be done. Here is what it looks like.

In a later version of SignatureProfiler, I hope to include a simpler way to do this type of thing for those who don’t want to learn CSS/HTML. For the moment though you can at least put these in.

Remember that even if you create perfect HTML code and it looks great when you send it, the client that receives the mail may be set to not show HTML or not to load images. It is a good idea to think of this when creating your signature, to be sure that as plain text it will still be, at least, readable!