Betalogue

It’s a small detail, but I find that it’s much more important than it initially seemed to be. I realize that I have quickly become quite dependent on the “wushhh!” noise that Mail makes whenever an email has been successfully sent out.

I have always had customized sounds for incoming mail in Mail: a short, non-intrusive sound for all incoming mail, and more distinctive and louder sounds for mail coming from specific group of people (or specific accounts). In order to get Mail to play these various special-purpose sounds, all I had to do was to create rules (filter rules) in the program’s Preferences dialog, and choose “Play sound” as one of the actions to execute whenever a message matches the criteria.

The main “New mail sound” could simply be defined in the “General” pane in the Preferences dialog.

Now Panther’s Mail comes with its own built-in sound effects in addition to the regular “New mail sound”. These sounds can be enabled by checking the box “Play sounds for other mail actions” in the same preference pane.

And the “wushhh!” noise made when a message has been sent is one of these other sounds. It’s not very intrusive, and the fact that it’s made of something close to white noise helps reduce its acoustic impact. But it can definitely be heard, and I find it quite reassuring. Since I am on a dialup connection, it can often take a while for a message to get sent, and I usually have switched to something else already by the time the sending process is complete. With this noise, I no longer have to switch back to Mail to make sure that the sending process was successful.

And if I have to use a pre-Panther computer, I notice that it’s missing — a sure sign that this sound has already become indispensable.

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Friday, November 14th, 2003 at 5:11 am and is filed under Macintosh. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.