Pinoy Tech Guy

Mail just keeps getting better and better. Some time today, you’ll be getting this little new Link within your gmail account:

Gmail Labs?

Yep. Gmail Labs is an experimental area of new Gmail features that will be familiar if you’ve used the Better Gmail Firefox extension.

However, before you dive into the 13 new and experimental features, Gmail was kind enough to give you a disclaimer:

About Labs

Gmail Labs allows you to try out experimental new features in Gmail and send feedback to us so we can improve them. If you’re going to brave the Labs world, it’s important to keep the following things in mind about these features:

• They may break at any time
• Similarly, they may disappear temporarily or permanently
• They may work so well that they graduate and become regular features

So if you’ve decided that you’re ready to play with them, simply login to your Gmail account, click Settings then Labs and not the little guy pictured above since he’ll be taking you to the FAQ page instead.

Here’s a quick peek and review of the 13 new features that Gmail Labs adds:

Note that I had to resize my browser so the screens don’t eat up my blog’s theme.

• Quick Links

Taken from a Greasemonkey user script, Quicklinks adds a small box to the left column (where your chat contacts and labels are locate) where you can store links like frequent searches, important messages, etc at just a click away.

Go to the view you want—like all messages that have PDF file attachments using the has:attachment PDF Gmail search—then click “Add Quick Link” to save what’s essentially a Gmail view or message bookmark there

• Superstars

Gmail’s built-in star icons are rather boring so with superstars, you get up to 12 different colored and shaped icons to mark your icons. After enabling this feature, you can choose which icons you wish to use in the “General” Settings page.

• Pictures in chat

Add some pictures to gChat. Faily self explainatory.

• Fixed width font

Adds an option to the reply dropdown menu that lets you view a message in fixed width font.

• Custom keyboard shortcuts

Lets you customize keyboard shortcut mappings. Adds a new Settings tab from which you can remap keys to various actions.  It’s not as robust as most gmail-related plugins but it’ll give you some ease in navigating your gmail account at your preference of keys.

This works we with….

• 

• Mouse gestures

Opera users (and some people who use the Firefox Plugin for it) are already used to this functionality. You can use your mouse to do pretty much of the mundane tasks related to your mail like going back and forth through messages with the left or right click of your mouse, etc.

• Signature tweaks

Places your signature before the quoted text in a reply, and removes the “–” line that appears before signatures. You can’t use this and the “Random signature” Labs feature at the same time though

• Random signature

Add a random quote to your email pulled from an RSS feed by enabling Random Signature. Sounds great for Internet Marketing doesn’t it?  By default, Random Signature uses a feed from BrainyQuote.com, but you can set it to the feed of your choice in the signature settings.

Can’t use this and the “Signature tweaks” Labs feature at the same time.



• Custom date formats

Again fairly self explanatory.  This just gives you the option to change the date and time format to be independent of language. For example, you can use a 24-hour clock (14:57) or show dates with the day first (31/12/07) and so on.

• Muzzle

Conserves screen real estate by hiding your friends’ status messages.  A simple yet very useful tweak especially if you still use those 15″ screens or browse your emails with your UMPC

• Old Snakey

One of the good old time wasters managed to get inside Gmail!  You need to enable keyboard shortcuts and hit ‘&’ from the main page to play it.

This is bound to get you delayed when sending or even reading your mail!



• Email Addict

Lets you take a break from email and chat by blocking the screen for fifteen minutes and making you invisible in chat.
When you activate the break, you get this:


• Hide Unread Counts

If you’re like me and you have THIS much amount of unread mail, you’ll be thankful for this feature.

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