Automator request, can you help?

[one1]

Both here and at apple support forums people are complaining about the mail not showing the send receive activity in Leopard when you hit the get mail button. Where in Tiger mail it would show a spinning wheel by the inbox, it now shows nothing. If you have your sound off you have no idea if it run the action or not.

I figure we could solve this by creating an Automator action to do basically the following:

-open mail
-open activity window (needs to also stay on top of other windows, might not be an issue)
-get mail
-close activity window

The Automator scripts I have done have been very small for things like resizing photo's and such. I am not sure how to create the action "open activity window", nor am I positive on how to make all this happen when simply clicking the mail icon to open mail.

It would be a great benefit to the community if someone would create this workflow. There have been a good number of threads at apple support forum on the mail activity issue and this is an idea I figure can help fix the problem well enough to satisfy.

Any takers?

 

[samh004]

If you show Mail Activity in the bottom left it does.

 

[one1]

If you show Mail Activity in the bottom left it does.

Incorrect. It does not show activity status. http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=5759715&#5759715

Yes it looks like like yet another half hearted band-aid solution. The difference appears to be that the small activity window built into the interface only shows mail being retrieved or sent. Whereas the normal activity window, which you need to manually display with a key command, shows status of all the activity - ie contacting the server etc.

I wonder if any clever folks out there know of a way to tweak the code in mail so that the small activity window can display the full status information?

Those who used Mail previous to Tiger will recall that the Mail program used to always display the status when you checking/sending mail. Why on earth did Apple remove it?? Now you sit and wait and wonder without any user feedback beyond an obscure spinning wheel.

Edit for screen shot:

 

[samh004]

Incorrect. It does not show activity. http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=5759715&#5759715

It shows up when something is actually being received. I guess Apple thought you didn't need to see a spinning wheel if there's nothing to be found. And you know it's working anyway, because if there was an error it'd pop-up and say so.

Why don't you just keep the activity window open ? Leave it in the top right of your screen or something, after all unless your using a very small display you don't need windows taking up the entire screen.

 

[one1]

I'm not looking for a reason not to use it. Myself and about 20 other threads of people are looking for a way to use it and I believe this will do the trick.

As stated before, you do not know of the action is being ran or not since there is no visual feedback. I still can't believe Apple made this move.

 

[pjrobertson]

Wait till tomorrow, after MacWorld. Lets hope it gets fixed...

 

[one1]

nada, ........anyone?

 

[numlock]

Can try this.

http://sunki.quickshareit.com/share/test11456.zip

Not sure how to make it run when you start mail but you could just put this in your dock and start it when you want to launch mail and get new mail

You will have to go to system prefs and universal access to enable access for assisted devices.


Its not glamorous but it seems to work in my extensive 5 minutes of testing