|Gestural emai l and findyo ur mouse
Full-screen email
1 In El Capitan, Mail lets you “juggle all your email conversations”, which means you can hide the email composer in full-screen mode, and switch between in-progress messages by using tabs. Airmail (£7.99, airmailapp.com) keeps things simpler – replies and new messages in full-screen mode are standard windows, which can be positioned wherever you like (and moved very rapidly when using a window manager).
Gestural controls
2 The next version of Mail takes a cue from iOS, supporting touch gestures for managing email. Swipe right to mark emails as read or unread, left to delete them. Airmail matches Mail’s leftwards swipe to delete an item; swiping the other way, though, is for archiving. Note that if you swipe too far, the action appears irreversible unless you quit the app before releasing the trackpad.
Email reminders
3 Mailbox (free, mailboxapp.com) is also big on gestural control, but has more tricks up its sleeve than Apple’s updated Mail app. Swipe right to mark an email as read, but swipe further and a green tick becomes a red cross for deletion. Swipe left to define a reminder to deal with the email, ranging from a specific date, to the procrastination-oriented ‘Later Today’. Our favourite option: ‘Someday’.
Mouse Locator
4 In El Capitan, you’ll be able to wiggle the cursor to find where it’s hiding. We couldn’t find an existing app to mimic that, but some utilities do make locating the cursor a simpler task. Mouse Locator (2point5fish.com) isn’t elegant, but it’s free and works fine. Once activated, press a user-defined hot key to surround your cursor with green circles, or optionally display them after a pre-set delay.
More mouse tools
5 In many ways, PinPoint (£3.99, lagentesoft.com) is a refined and feature-packed version of Mouse Locator. It still can’t ape the upcoming OS X ‘wiggle to find’ gesture, but you can choose from a range of pointers and sizes. Handily, it also offers a shortcut to move the pointer to the centre of the screen. Mouseposé (£7.99, boinx.com) is another option; it’s geared towards presentations, with mouse-click highlights and a ‘virtual laser pointer’ mode.
Giant cursors
6 If you just fancy a bigger cursor (albeit a permanently ‘always on’ bigger cursor), you can get it using System Preferences. In Accessibility, select Display and drag the ‘Cursor size’ slider to the right. The ‘Large’ setting is in fact more like ‘enormous’, but you might find a notch or two along helps you locate the pointer more easily, which should be a decent stopgap until El Capitan arrives.