October 4th, 2004
Just noticed this:
They’ve made the Contacts page “inline” instead of popping up a new window.
Obviously the Atom feed won’t work unless you are authenticated (so RSS/Atom feed readers won’t be able to get anything). I wonder how this can be used. Hmm… I smell something cool.
We’ll know soon enough when Google updates the New Features page.
August 22nd, 2004
At first there was the Gmail Notifier extension for Firefox. And there was the GMailCompose extension for Firefox (made defunct by the WebMailCompose extension). The first displayed an email notification message in Firefox. The second allowed you to have all mailto: links you click automatically send you to a page to compose the email in Gmail. There was also GTray.
And then there now is the official Gmail Notifier from Google. Purely for Windows, it appears unobtrusively in your system tray when installed.
New message notifications appear as a transclucent pane in the bottom right of your screen. (The icon does look a little cutesy doesn’t it?)
There’s not much more you can do with it.
It’s nice to have an official tool from Google that does what all those other homegrown tools do. It’s also interesting that Google seems to have incorporated the best of all these amazing tools in their app - mail notification and mailto: link manipulation. Thumbs up to the authors of those neat little tools! Google seems to be copying your ideas!
July 30th, 2004
This is a pretty nifty Gmail trick (via TIMELINE via gmailwiki): create a label named “Unread” and Gmail automatically lists all unread email when you call up that label.
Seems very much like a half-hearted, half-implemented feature that Google hasn’t decided whether to give to users. I for one would very much like to have a standard section for unread mail (”standard” meaning it goes into the same place as Starred, All Mail and co.).
July 18th, 2004
Cedric asked for Document-splitting in Web browsers and promptly got it (read the comment by Jeff Mesnil in Cedric’s blog entry).
Jeff Mesnil whipped up 2 bookmarklets in the space of less than one and a half hours that allows you to split a browser into 2 frames. How does it do that? It loads the current URL in a frameset consisting of 2 frames (both showing the same URL). A simple, yet genius, idea.
Here’s a screenshot of a blog entry split vertically:
Notice how it could be useful when cross-referencing something on the same webpage, particularly if it’s a long vertical-scrolling page. A perfect use case would be referring back to a long blog entry when making a comment.
Here’s the same page split horizontally.
There are probably lots of other use cases for a webpage splitter. Cedric’s in particular is this:
Just recently, I was reading an article that showed a figure at the top and which constantly referred to this figure in the rest of the article.
Thanks Jeff for writing the bookmarklets and Cedric for thinking of it.
July 13th, 2004
bitoogle - the BitTorrent file search engine.
It even allows you to see the torrent statistics like the number of seeds and leeches. And it works!
Hmm… I wonder how it works.
Gmail’s new features - Atom feed and “inline” Contact list
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