Mac Power Users 488: How We Communicate

I understand. Thanks for the input.

I think that, generally speaking, always-connected technology exacerbates individual neuroticism, and becomes a comforting crutch to avoid boredom or living with one’s thoughts. That’s not a new perspective, of course; Pulitzer-winner Nicholas Carr delved into this in The Shallows in 2011 as well as Utopia Is Creepy, and William Powers wrote about “the distracted life” by Homo Distractus before that in Hamlet’s Blackberry.

The telephone is a good way to talk to people without having to offer them a drink.

I never quite understand all the animosity the telephone engenders, especially among my fellow technophiles. I think the phone is great. Second to face-to-face, the telephone is the most powerful means of communicating we have and we abandon it at our peril. Many times a call will accomplish something that takes a day of back-and-forth emailing, texting, or slacking(?). It remains a powerful tool among the other powerful communication tools at our disposal today.

2 Likes

+1 for message unread, I have to be really careful with this. Though could the answer be to put the task to respond in a todo manager?

1 Like

Hey @MacSparky do you have that Applescript you use to change the From email account handy, I found a couple which work. Though then my email signature does not change and its a real pain (it appears it can’t be done in Applescript anymore, all examples don’t work in 10.14).

Also the script example I have below is only to open a new email, I got the impression from you that it changes it in the current open compose window…

What I came up with was:

set fromAccount to "Your from email address as it appears in mail" e.g. Joe Blogs <j.blogs@mail.com>
    
tell application "Mail"
	set theOutMessage to make new outgoing message with properties {visible:true}
	tell theOutMessage
		set sender to fromAccount
	end tell
	
	tell application "Mail" to activate
	tell application "System Events"
		tell process "Mail"
			click pop up button 2 of window 1
			delay 0.01
			keystroke "M"
			delay 0.01
			keystroke return
			delay 0.01
		end tell
	end tell
end tell

sources: