I’m not sure what people’s fascination with making the email process into anything but email, but apparently Google is on board. Gmail wasn’t bad enough, now there’s Google Inbox. I wonder how long it’ll be before they kill this, too.
Tagged: Gmail
Google releases Gmail app for iOS users
Get the official Google Gmail experience for your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. As you may know, Google released the app previously, but it was buggy and was pulled shortly after. The app offers little more than the mobile version of Gmail, but users may be interested in giving it a try anyway.
With the Gmail app, you can:
- Receive notification badges for new messages
- Read your mail with threaded conversations
- Organize your mail by archiving, labeling, starring, deleting, and reporting spam
- Keep track of important messages with priority inbox
- Auto-complete contact names as you type
- Send and receive attachments
- Search through all your mail
The Gmail app is available for devices running iOS 4+.
30 Mac OS X apps and utilities I love: Part 2
Over the years I’ve installed a lot of commercial software, shareware and freeware on my Macs. I love trying new apps. That being said, most of what I install gets used once or twice, then discarded. A few days ago, I shared the first group of apps I use regularly. Today I have another collection of applications and utilities I use on a regular basis.The applications listed below contains some names you’ll probably be familiar with, but there’s a reason for that. They’re just superb at what they do, thus very popular.
Caffeine
If you work on a MacBook Pro, you no doubt have your LCD screen set to dim and turn off after a relatively short amount of inactivity in order to save battery charge. This is generally fine unless you’re doing a lot of reading or watching a DVD. Caffeine is a small application that lives in your menubar that solves this problem by preventing your screen from dimming and the computer from sleeping. A click of the coffee cup icon in the menubar prevents your computer from sleeping for a user-specified amount of time ranging from 15 minutes to 5 hours (or indefinitely). Caffeine is a free utility.
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Google to add social networking to Gmail?
According to an article at Macworld.com, Google is about to make Gmail more social. According to the article, Google plans to make available the ability to update your social status, much like popular social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, right from within the Gmail interface.I’m not sure how well that will go-over with Gmail users. Personally, I feel like the Gmail service already lacks enough features that they should focus solely on email features, rather than adding non-email ones. At the same time, I feel like email is a private thing, and I don’t necessarily want any sign of “socialization” in there at all. Besides, the Gmail interface is already a cluttered mess as it is, I’m not sure how they could work-in social networking without making it completely unusable.
I’ve been longing for a way to update my Facebook and Twitter status in a single location that I’m already using; something that fits into my existing workflow.
There are plenty of services out there that would allow me to update my social networks, but they would require me to visit yet another Web site to do it, and that means yet another set of usernames and passwords to remember. No thanks.
With Twitter having the lock on micro-blogging, and Facebook having 400 million users and an expanding feature list, including the world’s largest photo-sharing service and reports of a full-blown email Web-client coming, you have to wonder just how long Google can afford to sit on the sidelines and watch.
Add Web Search to Gmail
If you use Google’s Gmail service and find yourself a tad-bit annoyed by the fact that you have to leave the Gmail interface to search for something, check you Labs tab at the top of your Gmail page for a solution. 
Rather than leaving Gmail, searching for a link, copying the link, switching back to Gmail and pasting the link in your email – you can turn on the Search Box feature. The feature adds a Google Search box to the left side of your Gmail interface. But that’s not all. When you perform your search, a drop-down menu is available next to the link of each search result allowing you to send the link via Google Chat or an email.
Gmail adds progress bars to attachments
One of the things that has always irked me with regards to Gmail was that it was never painfully obvious when you could actually send an email with all your attachments, or how long it was going to take to attach those files. You either sat and waited for the name to appear, or stared at the sending notification. Neither very productive. 
Thankfully, Google has added progress bars to the attachments area of Gmail. So now you can select multiple files, or one giant one if you wish, and know exactly what the progress of the attachment upload is. Gmail keeps getting better and better!
Google adds more control to Gmail IMAP
Google recently announced the addition of more IMAP control to their popular Gmail service. Gmail IMAP Controls, a Labs feature, now allows you to choose which labels to sync in IMAP-enabled desktop email client software like Apple’s Mail application. You can enable the new features by visiting the Labs tab in your Gmail Settings and ticking the enable radio button for Advanced IMAP Controls. After enabling the feature, visit the Labels tab and checking which Labels you wish to show up in your desktop email client software. 
Turning off “All Mail” in particular will cut down the amount of time (and amount of email) that your email app of choice takes to sync with Gmail’s servers. This also has the desirable result of having less email to search through and keep track of. There are a whole lot of feature additions at your fingertips via the Labs tab in your Gmail Settings, so make sure you check in there every once in a while to see if there’s something new and useful.