Corvus Consulting

In the absence of the time to write something substantial this week, I’ve opted for a two-part budget blog post.

The first part is for Mac Mail users. I discovered by accident today that you can change the highlight colour of any mail message or entire thread. Just open the colour palette, select the messages to highlight and pick your colour of choice. Voila, instant colour coding.

What’s interesting about this hidden gem of a feature is that it enables a simple form of a process (categorization) that most software would make more involved. It allows for ad-hoc categorization without any kind of setup, much like tagging systems do. Users can easily formulate and recall coding systems of 7 or so items, typically indicating priority or a workflow step, without having to articulate that system to the software in some kind of category setup. It’s the perfect example of ‘just enough’, and reflective of some deep thinking on the part of Mail’s designers (but not too deep).

The second part of this budget post is to let you know that I’ll be at Web Directions North on behalf of Ma.gnolia, and joined by Larry Halff, Ma.gnolia’s founder. If you see us around be sure to say hi.