Gmail, the free web-based e-mail service offered by Google is one of the most popular e-mail services all around the world. Although I think still Yahoo mail is a bit ahead of Gmail but with new features and less distracting ads (oh well, at least when compared to Yahoo, yikes :P) + the simplicity... Gmail will most definitely have an advantage in the future.
Recently Google introduce a new look-n-feel to their home page (+ SERP pages) with a certain Blue and Red color combination. And it seems that (makes sense) they'll be applying this "look-n-feel" to their other services GUIs as well. Although it won't happen overnight but according to the Gmail team, now you can "preview" some of these new features in your Gmail account quite easily.
Not the most user-friendliest colors for my taste :/...
In their own words this is an attempt to make...
"...one of the reasons we’re embarking on a series of interface updates to help strip out unnecessary clutter and make Gmail as beautiful as it is powerful..."
Although I do agree that after switching to the Gmail preview feature the account looks more simpler but I'm not entirely sure about the user-friendlyness of the whole GUI as a whole because the white background with the Red color aren't that comforting for the eyes and I personally prefer the old Blue and Green combination.
Anyhow you can easily enable this new look-n-feel (which as said before is not fully implemented, yet) by going into your Themes tab in Gmail settings and then scroll-down until you see two themes called "Preview (Dense) and Preview". Choose one of the themes and you're done.
Standardizing is a great thing. Among many of its advantageous is the "space" it gives for simplicity, from a user point of view anyway. Since, it may look easy and "simple" for us but for the developers writing an API ain't that simple. Anyhow, few days ago Gmail team announced a new feature which enables the loyal Gmail users to chat with their AIM "buddies" directly from Gmail account.
Wait... isn't that kinda old??. Yes, it is.. but in the past you had to log-in to your AOL account to open a "portal". But with this new service that is no longer necessary!. Furthermore, you can add AIM users to your chat list as easy as adding Gmail users (for instance, add "username"@aol.com in your Chat box and you're good to go).
According to Google, not just in Gmail, but you can use this feature in few of their other services such as iGoogle, Orkut, and Google Talk (on Android Phones). Because of the API "collaboration", AIM users can add Gmail users the same way in their accounts as well.
But if you had a massive list of "friends" then adding the one by one is a painful task. In that case, this official AIM Buddies importer is a must. Good luck :).
If you want your GNU Linux distro to give automatic notifications when new mail arrives to your Gmail account, then you'll love CheckGmail app for Linux. It uses very little of you Bandwidth (helps to save some of that MBs.. if you're using a limited usage internet connection especially) and via the notifying window, you can perform things such as ...
*. Open,
*. Mark as read.
*. Report Spam.
*. Delete.
Another thing is that, unlike with many of these so called notifiers, CheckGmail does not bother you much while "notifying". When you click on "Open" or any other button/link on the GUI, it opens your default browser and takes you directly to the proper location on your Gmail account as well.
So, if you want to try it out in Ubuntu, open your Terminal and issue the below command.
Hey it's April's fool's ;-) day!, by following the tradition, Google has introduced a new way of making e-mails (via the Gmail service of course) few hours ago and it is still in beta. The idea is simple actually and when I first heard it, I was stunned, a bit ;-),
More than 80% of our communications are done using "signals" rather than words, (says paralanguage expert Dennis Tooley).
So for a start, if you have a web-cam and a G-mail account, then you can use the predefined motions set by the Gmail engineers to make or reply to your e-mails (including creating words within mails of course). I'm not quite sure even if you're a paralanguage expert, you could use this feature to create a complete set of words using hand/body motions since it is still at beta stage, but when looking at the official video, it looks promising though.
But to be honest, I won't be using this "feature" in front of my friends since in my opinion it makes me look like an idiot (aaah, the power of perception eh ;-) ). For instance, if you want to tell G-mail to send your message, then you have to imagine posting a real world mail, followed by conventional body movements, touching your lips and stuff (see the video below), but in front of a computer, this looks a bit "weird".
Still, I already like the reply to mail signal which is showing your "thumb" and if you use both of them, then it means "reply to them all" according to the designers. And to show your anger, it would be nice if they could assign something to the "middle finger" too, which is another very widely used "symbol" these days ;-).
Anyhow, it should be interesting how people react to this, but according to Google, from a more productive point of view, researches have shown by using this G-mail Motion feature, users have in fact been able to create words quite efficiently when compared with the conventional touch or typing in general (see the below picture).
