Analogism

Google announced yesterday that they are rolling out some Google Labs features for Gmail, which is very exciting! The gadgets include Calendar, Docs, Mouse gestures (like the famous All In One Gestures for Firefox), Signature tweaks (to place your signature above the quoted text when replying, very much wanted by many Gmail users) and many more.

A few gadgets that truly offers more usability are “Navbar drag and drop“, which simply allows you to rearrange the gadgets on your left hand side. This gadget, or more of a plugin if you ask me, is a true miracle worker. At least in my opinion. Being able to choose what gadgets to sit where makes all this so much better. Another gadget that offers more customization for your Gmail inbox is “Custom Label Colors”, which allows the users to personalize Labels, making it slightly better from a usability standpoint.

Lastly, “Mark as Read Button”, here to save the day! Or at least 1.8 seconds of your life. Per click. This gadget places a Mark as Read button right in your inbox. So instead of hiding under the More drop down, you can access it directly, saving you one click. This may sound dorky to some, but it actually make sense from a productivity standpoint, and I can honestly say I’ve wished for this a number of times.

In their announcement they mention a possible performance loss using these, as they are still working on optimizing the gadgets, but that they are keeping a close eye on the performance as they move forward. Well, the last thing we want is a slow email application. They also say that some of them does not work with https, which could introduce some issues for some. You’ll see some error messages if you run in to this.

They also say they are aware of the lack of scalability of gadget real estate: “We’re not tied to the left-nav as a primary way to extend Gmail — in fact we think it is relatively limited and doesn’t offer scalable real estate.” which is nice, that they approach this publicly. Adding in the ability to stretch columns, or maximize them, or possibly pop out a gadget could be cool. But let’s just be happy they finally allows us to implement Calendar huh?