07 Jun 08 Gmail Labs

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.

Tags: colored stars, custom keyboard, frequent searches, geek, gmail, google, google talk, keyboard short cuts, keyboard shortcuts, left column, military time, mouse gestures, mouse mouse, pop3 accounts, relly, second nature, signature, signatures, superstars, tweaks