The Eye

There’s a new tag in my Gmail. Exploring it igves me up to 13 items I can choose from. Some I think are much less than useful, some I don’t relly need, but are nice, and one or two are just what I wanted.

I chose seven out of the thirteen myself.

1. Quicklinks – Adds a box to the left column that gives you 1-click access to any bookmarkable URL in Gmail. You can use it for saving frequent searches, important individual messages, and more.
2. Superstars – Useful, in that it gives you the option to have different colored stars for different uses. I have my “star click” in Gmail set up in connection with “Remember The Milk”, but it’s still useful.
3. Pictures in Chat – It’s a nice little feature, and I find myself using the Google Talk pop-up in Gmail more and more – in fact, I’ve not installed the client at all.
4. Custom Keyboard shortcuts. As a old DOS geek, I’m more than happy with keyboard short-cuts, and usually prefer them to a mouse.
5. Mouse Gestures – having just said what I did above, I thought I’d install this to see what I could make of it. Use your mouse to navigate with gestures. Hold right-click and move the mouse left to go to a previous conversation, move it right to go to the next conversation, and move up to go back to the inbox view. I’ll see.
6. Signature Tweaks – allows me to place the signature above the quote of the message I am replying to. I think this could be useful. I wish I could have different signatures for different accounts (I’ve got 5 pop3 accounts running through my gmail).
7. Custom Date format – as someone who spent many years on the railroad, I find military time, or the 24 hour clock comes second nature to me, and I in fact prefer it, as it’s less ambiguous. Definitely a must have – it’s great to see 16:30 instead of 4.30pm.