Do HTML messages sent from Outlook users appear too tiny in your Apple Mail inbox? You can use the following trick to force Mail to always use a larger minimum font size on received messages - some HTML messages might not look exactly as intended but at least you can now read them.

1. Quit Mail
2. Open the Terminal and type in the following:
   defaults write com.apple.mail MinimumHTMLFontSize 12
3. Restart Mail.app and your HTML messages are readable.

Of course, you can set the point size to whatever you like.

If you’re like me, your iTunes music library has grown over the years to considerably more than your iPhone or iPod Touch can hold at any one time.

Rather than settling for syncing limited selections from your music library, Simplify Media enables you to access your entire iTunes music library remotely and then stream your music to your iPhone or iPod Touch via WiFi, EDGE or 3G.

You can navigate your music library by artist, album or genre, and instantly view cover art, artist bios and even lyrics for the current song selection! Plus, you can share your library with up to 30 friends.

Took me less than 5 minutes to donload the desktop application, install the iPhone player app, login to my iTunes library and begin listening to my music.

You’ll want to get this app now; it’s FREE for the first 100,000 folks to download it. After that, it will cost $3.99 in the iTunes App Store.

Check out Simplify Media for your iPhone & iPod Touch.

Over the years, I’ve assisted many of my clients in setting up email marketing newsletters. I’ve had the opportunity to test the most popular ones, including Constant Contact, Ezine Director, iContact and others. Today, I happened to stumble across what I feel is the best email newsletter application on the web!

OK, so once you get past the quirky name, you’ll discover a simple, intelligent and powerful email marketing utility that anyone can use. Featuring some truly innovative technology, Mad Mimi is the simplest way to create branded, well-designed newsletters and promotions.

Mad Mimi is web-based, which means there is nothing to download or configure. All you need is a web browser and an internet connection. Here’s how it works…

1. Create Your Account
   The best way to see how Mad Mimi works is to complete the 1-minute sign-up for free, and then kick the tires. No credit card, no obligation, and it’s not a trial. It’s fully-functional right away!
2. Add Some Addresses
   Copy and paste your email address list(s) into Mad Mimi. Duplicates and common spacing issues are auto-corrected. Later, you can store, target and organize your list in every way imaginable.
3. Design Your Newsletter
   One of the best parts of Mad Mimi is the instantly-intuitive, uber-simple design interface. You can easily add, modify and move things around in a WYSIWYG environment. It even has an “Undo” feature, which I’ve never seen elsewhere. No design skills necessary!
4. Send Your Emails
   Mad Mimi tracks and displays the viewing and clicking behavior of your mail recipients in real time! Track opens, bounces, and every metric imaginable. Use this data to modify your marketing approach to improve results.

Within five minutes, I had already created my first test newsletter (see right). Images are placed by simply dragging them from the tray on the right into the body of your newsletter. Across the bottom of the editor is a row of handy buttons that enable you to create new sections in your newsletter, including:

• Text with an image to the right
• Text with an image to the left
• Standard text block
• Plain image
• Section Title
• Divider

Just click one of these buttons and Mad Mimi inserts the section into your newsletter, with a WYSIWYG editor, ready for you to start typing your content! Create a custom header if you like, to make the newsletter look even more polished. When you’re finished, Mad Mimi will guide you through selecting recipients from your list and sending your email campaign.

Track your campaigns

Stats are delivered in real-time, and you can track bounces, opens, untraced emails, clicks, forwards and unsubscribes. If you want even more accurate tracking, Mad Mimi also integrates with Google Analytics, intelligently automating your link tags so you can measure your promotion’s success.

Custom sign-up forms

Mad Mimi will let you create your own customized HTML sign-up form as well, adding custom fields as you see fit. When you’re done, Mad Mimi will generate a block of code for you to copy and paste into your own site to add a simple sign-up form for your visitors.

Unbeatable pricing!

Perhaps the best part of Mad Mimi is the price. The most frequent complaint I hear from my clients is how expensive it can be to send regular email campaigns to large lists of subscribers. As I mentioned before, Mad Mimi is completely free! A free account will allow you to send unlimited emails to a contact list of 100 or less. Want more?

There are three upgrade levels available to subscribers. For just $12/month, you can increase your mailing list to a whopping 5,000 contacts! $49 increases your audience to 15,000, and doubles the sending speed of your newsletters. And for you power users, $199/month allows unlimited audience members, and quadruples the sending speed!

Try it out for yourself!

The best way to see if Mad Mimi is right for you is to simply sign up for the free account and give ‘er a test run. I think within a few minutes, you’ll agree that Mad Mimi is simply the most intuitive, easiest to use and best-priced email marketing tool you’ve ever used.

Click here to check out Mad Mimi for yourself!

Photoshop guru and author, Deke McClelland, recently produced this entertaining—and arguably educational—video, containing 101 Photoshop tips (really). Take 5 minutes to kick back and enjoy, and if you feel guilty about skipping work to do so, pull out a pen and pad to jot down your favorite tip. (Yes, there were even a few I didn’t know!)

It isn’t often that I come across a company that truly “gets it” in every possible way. But the forward-thinking folks at Behance have struck a chord with me.

Behance is a company that designs products and services designed to serve and empower creative teams and individuals to make their ideas happen. With their clearly defined Action Method™, they have come close than anyone else at defining the creative process that works best for me.

Behance is founded on the principle of ‘Productive Creativity.’ Too often, great ideas never materialize. Creative people are rarely lacking inspiration; rather, they lack effective processes and tools to make their ideas happen.”

In addition to providing networking opportunities, inspiring articles and tips, advisory services and even a “think tank” for fostering research, they have also developed a truly beautiful line of products that reinforce and enhance this simple—but potent—model for productivity.

Behance, I’m hooked.

I was a few minutes early for a meeting with a client the other day and since I was early, I decided to check email on my iPhone. There was a message from another client asking if I could make a quick change on the WordPress website I had just designed for her. My first impulse was to wait until I returned to my desktop computer at the office before making the change, but since I had a few extra minutes to kill, I decided to pull up the WordPress dashboard on my iPhone.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that the new WordPress dashboard looked great on the iPhone’s display, and within a few clicks, I had pulled up the edit window, made the change and saved the page.

The newly-redesigned tabs at the top of the dashboard are perfectly positioned, with room to spare. The buttons are also perfectly suited to the “touch” interface of the iPhone, and I never hit a function accidentally. When I clicked the text within the edit window, the iPhone keyboard popped up and the screen zoomed in nicely on the text I was editing.

I’m sure it’s no accident that the new WordPress dashboard looks and functions so nicely on the iPhone. So hats off to the incredible design team of Happy Cog — Jeffrey Zeldman, Jason Santa Maria, and Liz Danzico — on their innovative redesign of the WordPress interface!

As a one-man web design shop, it’s a relief to know that I can provide support to my clients from anywhere, using just my iPhone.

(And no, I didn’t create this post from my iPhone. But I could have!)

My family uses Twitter to share quick updates about what we’re doing. With a family of nine, plus spouses, in-laws and grandkids, it’s a challenge to keep up with everyone.

Twitter enables us to post a simple one-liner in answer to the question, “What are you doing?” Best of all, you can update it via IM, SMS text message, or online via web browser. Simply post a new update, and everyone who “follows” you will see what you’re up to.

There’s even a great iPhone app that works with Twitter.

Twitter feed not displaying properly in your WordPress RSS Sidebar Widget?

Solution: Add a question mark to the end of the RSS feed, when you add it to the Sidebar Widget. For example:

http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline/14091920.rss?

This will force the RSS Widget to always grab the latest version of your Twitter feed.

Enjoy!

There’s a reason that web developers refer to Microsoft’s web browser as “Internet Exploder”. In addition to being the only web browser that is NOT standards-compliant, it also has countless rendering problems, including the annoying habit of causing background-image styled elements to flicker when moused over.

But here is a terrific article that outlines several fixes for eliminating that flicker. GO »

Let’s face it. Google is the “Holy Grail” of marketing on the web. Everyone knows… if you rank well in Google, your profits are pretty much set.

But there is so much bogus information out there, often coming from the “gurus” themselves.

On January 9th, 2008, Jonathan Leger is releasing a FREE report that completely obliterates the following myths about Google (and then goes on to show you what DOES work):

The site is in pre-launch now, but you can sign up early and get a sample chapter full of proof and details completely FREE! I just downloaded my free sample chapter and I can’t wait for the launch of his site.

You can download your sample chapter for free in less than a minute from:

http://searchenginemythsexposed.com

Update: The 10.5.2 Update now lets you control the Translucent Menu Bar in the Desktop system preference pane so there’s no need to hack your System file anymore.
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If you’re like me, you love Apple’s latest operating system, Leopard, but one of the quirks is the new translucent menu bar, which reveals your background photo through it, making menu items a little difficult to read.

Steve Miner has posted a tip that involves changing an environment variable by editing a plist to make Leopard think it’s running on an older Mac that doesn’t support the translucency. Once done, it will make your menubar solid white:

This tip is only for experts who understand the risks of editing system config files. (Obviously, this is not approved by Apple.) By the way, make sure you preserve the permissions on this file.

Edit the following file:
/System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.WindowServer.plist

Add an entry like this:

EnvironmentVariables

CI_NO_BACKGROUND_IMAGE
1

Restart you Mac and you’ll get a plain white menu bar. This hack forces the window server to act as if it were running on older hardware that didn’t support fragment processing. I hope Apple gives us a configurable option (at least a dwrite) in the future so that people can rely on it. It’s a shame that law-abiding citizens like myself can be driven to commit crimes against system integrity over minor look-and-feel issues but that’s what happens when people get desperate.

You can accomplish the same thing in Terminal by using this code:

sudo defaults write /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.WindowServer 'EnvironmentVariables' -dict 'CI_NO_BACKGROUND_IMAGE' 1

If you prefer an opaque gray menu, change the “1″ at the end of the line of code to an “0″.

Thanks, Steve, for solving this annoyance for all of us!