iPhone coming to UK, but not for another 7½ agonizing weeks
Well. Most of the rumours have proved to be true. The carrier of the UK iPhone will indeed be O2, and apart from O2 shops (including the recently-acquired The Link shops) the only independent retailer will be Carphone Warehouse. The phone will be identical to the $399 8GB US model.
As of 1pm GMT the only major Mac website reporting on this is TUAW. Some places still haven't got their act together - O2's official iPhone page was briefly visible at 11am GMT but has since been unavailable for over two hours since. Funnily enough Carphone's iPhone page is live and kicking.
The iPhone is priced at a surprisingly reasonable £269 (inc. VAT). Prior to the launch some people were predicting as much as £600! Tariffs start at a not-quite-so-reasonable £35 per month for 200mins/200texts with £45 for 600mins/500texts and £55 for 1200mins/600texts for the heavier users. All plans include unlimited internet usage. There is also apparently a deal with WiFi Hotspot outfit The Cloud, who specialise in providing paid WiFi access in pubs, restaurants, and city centres. The Cloud have a Hotspot finder here. The biggest news is probably the lack of 3G. This is allegedly due to the high power costs of using 3G on a mobile device. So we're all stuck with O2's currently-being-upgraded EDGE network, although for those of us who don't live or work in a major city don't care too much about 3G anyway. O2 have a website to check coverage in your part of the UK.
I can't wait to place my order :D
Rich Text (HTML) signatures in Mail.app
I was recently asked to help with setting up an HTML signature in Mail.app. "No problem", I thought. Unfortunately after a few quick attempts I quickly discovered that Mail.app's signature system is atrocious. Typing in plain text signatures (all I've ever done prior to this) is easy. Entering an Rich Text1 signature is not.
The problem is mainly that the editor window is difficult to use. For one thing it relies on the available-to-all-Cocoa-apps Fonts and Colors floating selection windows - which are elegant but seem to be constantly getting in the way just when you least expect it. Also using images in your signature is a pain because the signature window inexplicably doesn't display images you drop into it.
The line spacing in the signature window is also buggy. On several occasions while switching from one signature to another I saw random increases in line spacing as well as inserted line breaks in the middle of sentences. These random increases were cumulative, so after several switches the gap between two lines of text was several centimetres. I encountered similar problems with the "Always match my default message font" checkbox. Selecting and unselecting the checkbox repeatedly again caused the line height to increase to gigantic proportions.
The bug is difficult to reproduce but you can see a hint of it here:
After taking the first screenshot I selected and unselected the "Always match ..." checkbox. As you can see in the first image the image is at the end of line 1, but in the second image there are two line breaks between line 1 and the image.
In my search for a solution I found this hint at MacOSXHints. The 6-step method is a bit of a pain, but it works - albeit with a little tweaking:
- In step 3 the HTML page you create must use FONT tags to control the text colour and size. Using CSS won't work. Nor will using a BODY TEXT tag.
- In step 6 the easiest way to determine which signature file you need to replace is to modify the signature file you wish to replace and quit Mail.app. Now when you open the
~/Library/Mail/Signaturesfolder you can replace the most recently modified signature file. - And when you eventually send your signed emails, the body of the email must be in Rich Text format, otherwise your finely crafted signature will be displayed as plain text (and also without images).
1 Mail.app's Rich Text format is actually HTML.
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