When it comes down to it, convenience and functionality is what makes many jailbreak applications and tweaks useful. Anything that makes what is done easier and more efficiently is key and popular. Of all the areas of iOS, a component that is generally focused on is the Mail.app.
There have been recurring complaints from Mail.app users as features are extremely limited. There is not much customization or settings that enhance and revamp your mail experience. One such application, Mail Enhancer, aims at fixing this issue.
Mail Enhancer, created by Stefan Mollenkamp (@stm_dev), is a comprehensive tweak that gives your Mail.app a ton of new features. Anything that a person could ever want or use in the Mail.app is made available by this application. Here are a few of the many features that are provided by Mail Enhancer:
- Multiple signatures (Custom)
- Notifications
- Quiet Hours
- Highlighting
- Much more
One particular component that I thought was a staple feature was the Quiet Hours settings. In Quiet Hours, you can set times where you do not want to be disturbed by notifications. This is useful especially if you have your mail set to push (non-manual fetching). Each feature has a multitude of settings within each making this application very thorough and well worth it. It is highly recommended.
It is compatible on devices running iOS 4.0+ (not iOS 5) and is available on Cydia now for $4.99.
Name: Mail Enhancer
Author: Stefan Mollenkamp (stm)
Version: 2.2-1
Price: $4.99
When conducting this review, I also had the opportunity to interview Stefan about his work on Mail Enhancer. Our conversation is below:
JOSH: What gave you the idea to create Mail Enhancer?
STEFAN: The lack of functionality of the original MobileMail got me thinking if there was room for improvements. And there definitely was. Since I myself have 3 mail accounts set up on the iPhone, I asked, why Apple only provides a single signature? It just doesn't make sense at all. My best guess would be, they added the "signature" only from a marketing perspective, so that everyone could add "Sent from my iPhone" to their mails - which is very annoying by the way. I don't care what device you sent your mail from. Additionally I'd love to make MobileMail more clear and provide a better overview. With Mail Enhancer, this can now be done with the "unread only" button on the lower right of your inbox view, which toggles "show all mails" and "show unread mails only" and a highlighting feature to distinguish the accounts by color.
JOSH: How long did it take you to develop it? What component of the tweak was the most difficult?
STEFAN: Hard to say. I can only say that I haven't had much sleep over the weekends for the last few months. Additionally, I worked on it almost every day. An estimate would be that it took about 2 1/2 months (just for version 2). The most difficult component was / is the settings bundle. Since I like the idea of giving the user as much room for customizations as possible, the settings became very complex and it's hard to find the right way between ease of use and ability to provide customization.
JOSH: Are you pretty satisfied with the current release are do you have upcoming features soon (or in the future)?
STEFAN: Actually, I'd love to add new features to it. Because of iOS 5, I'll first have to wait what the new iOS brings in terms of changes in the frameworks. Also, I'm waiting to see if any components of Mail Enhancer become obsolete in iOS 5. Additionally, I'm studying law which leaves me little time to work on other things, but I will do my best. From what I've seen of iOS 5 so far, there is still much Apple did not think of (maybe intentionally left out, to have stuff for major releases in the future (marketing again)).
JOSH: Are you working on any other projects or tweaks/applications? Can you speak about them (if applicable)?
STEFAN: The above being said, I have no time to work on other projects. I'll focus all the time I've got on Mail Enhancer.
Follow Stefan (@stm_dev) on Twitter for more information about Mail Enhancer and possibly other projects he may start in the future.
Source(s): Stefan Mollenkamp (@stm_dev)
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