Gadgetopia

Gallina: This programmer from Mexico turned his Gmail account into a blogging platform. Uses GMail messages as "entries" (the message star is the publish status), Replies to conversations are the "entry comments", Uses libgmailer (gmail-lite project) to connect to GMail

Use Gmail Generate Unlimited E-mail Addresses: Here's a feature in Gmail I didn't know about. Gmail has an interesting quirk where you can add a plus sign ( ) after your Gmail address, and it'll still get to your inbox. It's called plus-addressing, and it essentially gives you an unlimited ...

Gmail for your domain: Probably old news, but it looks like the rumored Gmail for Domains has happened. This special beta test lets you give Gmail, Google's webmail service, to every user at your domain. Gmail for your domain is hosted by Google, so there's no hardware or software for ...

Google bans Gmail swaps and sales: Domain squatting is so 2001. The new trend, it appears, is Gmail account squatting. If you managed to get a good Gmail name, there's apparently a black market for selling them. Google changed its Gmail membership policy this week to prevent people from profiting ...

A friend of mine got within 4% of his Gmail limit. Here s what happens.

GMail code hints at coming domain feature: These guys did some snooping around in the huge JavaScript code libraries for GMail and found some code that leads them to some cool conclusions. Their next big move will likely be GMail for domains -- a powerful way for anybody who owns ...

Gmail is too creepy: Will Google become the next Microsoft great for the masses, but looked down upon by geeks? Presumably you have a Gmail account, and do not object to Google's policies. But many of us will not send mail to gmail.com ...Problem 1: Gmail is nearly immortal... ...

A couple of interesting things about Google's GMail in this article: FIrst, and not all that surprising, is that GMail is running on Apple Xserve hardware, which is something I'd heard before (reported here earlier.) I'd be interested to find out if they're actually using OS X on them. Another ...

About Gmail Paper: This is a little early to be an April Fools joke, so I have to assume it's legitimate. Not it's not -- I just checked the calendar and was shocked to realize it's April 1. You can ask Google to send you a paper archive of all ...

I noticed this morning that my Gmail inbox contained an Atom link on the left hand side. Yet another cool and easy way to keep track of your incoming gmail. I couldn't get it work correctly in SharpReader though. I assume it has something to do with the fact that ...

This Post is in Beta: Two years ago today, we were talking about how long beta periods are getting ridiculous. I concluded the post with this: For perspective, consider that Gmail is still in beta. Today, two years later, GMail is still in beta.

The Onion | Gmail User Pities Hotmail User: Too funny. Recent Gmail convert William Ramsak, 23, said Monday that his "heart goes out to" friend Kelly Oldenburg, who still sends e-mail through an MSN Hotmail account. "I feel so bad for you, needing to squeeze into 250 MB of storage ...

Digital Inspiration: Convert doc, xls, ppt, rtf, pdf to HTML: Brutally simple hack to get a ton of different document formats into HTML: send them to a GMail account as an attachment, then "View as HTML." GMail will show the following types of files as HTML: .pdf, .doc, .xls, .ppt, ...

Gmail Invitation Prices Crash: A good lesson in economics here. On Monday morning, invitations to join the testing of Google's Gmail Web e-mail service were still fetching as much as $100 on eBay closed auctions. By Wednesday afternoon, sellers were lucky to crack the $20 mark. Increased supply is the ...

GMail Drive shell extension: GMailFS has been around for Linux for a few months, but this is the first Windows port I've seen. Holy Cow, this works well. Double-click installer, very professionally done. I installed it at the office, dragged a few files into the drive, then installed it at ...

An Offline Gmail Client: Sweet: I saw this coming 1,000 miles away. In fact, I d venture a guess that this was the entire reason Google Gears was introduced. A report from India’s Hindustan Times indicates that Google is prepping an offline version of Gmail. It’s claimed that a client has ...

Gmail accounts go up for bid: I suppose there would be some glamour value in having "bob@gmail.com" for an address. Beta testers invited by Google to take part in its new free e-mail service also received invitations to give to another person, but many are being auctioned on eBay, so ...

Legislator seeks to block Gmail: I don't agree with the senator's logic here. Like I've said before, GMail is essentially a big bribe. In exchange for 1GB of storage, you give up some privacy. So long as people understand that going in, where's the harm? You won't catch me doing ...

Free E-Mail With a Steep Price?: Here's the agenda behind GMail. You knew there had to be a catch. Google said it would use automated technology to scan the content of incoming e-mail for keywords and place related text ads inside the mail. For example, if someone sent an e-mail ...

Google mail's features outweigh privacy concerns: Here's a review of Gmail, which is generally positive. The privacy debate tends to obscure assessment of other Gmail attributes namely usability, storage and search. In most of these areas, Google trounces other free e-mail services, including those offered by Microsoft Corp. ...

This probably isn't new (in fact, one sharp Gadgetopia reader commented on it in April) but I just noticed it. As I was checking my GMail account tonight, I noticed something odd; at the bottom of the page it read "You are currently using 7 MB (0%) of your 2269 ...

Yahoo fortifies free e-mail to counter Google's Gmail: It's a huge battle to see who can give away the most free stuff. Reminds me of 1999. Beginning Tuesday, all of Yahoo's free e-mail accounts will be upgraded to 100 megabytes, a move spurred by Google's plans to offer 1,000 megabytes ...

G4techTV - The Screen Savers: The guys at Tech TV's The Screen Savers did something interesting this last week they tested the "g" in "Gmail." They got a GMail account and announced the address on the air, then asked people to send email to it. They wanted to test ...

GMailCompose: If you have a GMail account and use Mozilla or Firefox, this extension is right up your alley. Makes mailto: links load a google mail compose window and adds a GMailCompose link to the context menu. Apparently Google has created a URL spec for doing just this. Good for ...

I was traveling last week, and I couldn't get my outbound SMTP to work from anywhere for some reason -- from the airport, the hotel, the remote office...nowhere. Frustrating. So I started using GMail last week, with the intention of using it just until I could get back to home ...

Google to offer 1 gig of free e-mail: This will alter the playing field a bit. Comes with a GB of storage. Search engine Google Inc. announced Wednesday it will launch a free, Web-based e-mail service to compete against popular services from rivals Yahoo! Inc. and Microsoft Corp. Google's service, ...

Just want to drop a quick note to say thanks to everyone who sent me a GMail invite. I had asked for one last week (post since deleted), and was under the impression that they were much harder to get than they actually were. It turns out that two of ...

Consumer watchdogs tear into Google's new e-mail service: If you don't know why critics are having a problem with this service, see this post. I would just say, "If you don't like it, don't use it," but the system scans incoming email as well. So I have to say, "If ...

Gmail becomes more widely available: Well, thank goodness it's still a beta. We don't want anyone getting crazy or anything. Effective Wednesday, the Mountain View-based company removed the invitation-only restrictions on its Gmail service in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Brazil. Google opened up the service last year in ...

Google has launched Google Reader, an online feed reader. As expected, it's a fairly slick and AJAX-ized reader interface that seems at home alongside Gmail. I imported my feeds from Bloglines, and here are my first impressions: Google's reader takes the approach of focusing on aggregating all the posts into ...

One of the interesting side effects of separating style from content is the fact that it takes very little to redesign the style even if it's not your site. In his programming journal, Mihai Parparita has a neat article about reskinning GMail with his own custom stylesheet. However, there ...

Bridging Desktop And Web Applications - A Look At Mozilla Prism: Here s an article about what are being called Single Site Browsers (SSBs), or little standalone browsers that let you browse and interact with a single Web app in a desktop app-ish environment. Surf to Gmail, for instance, choose “Convert ...

You will bow before me, Gmail. Oh yes, I will conquer you.

Gmail: Google s approach to email: Here s Google s April Fools Day entry for this year. Just click Set custom time from the Compose view. Any email you send to the past appears in the proper chronological order in your recipient s inbox. You can opt for it to show up read or ...

Clever little sh*t: This is brutally funny. Watch the YouTube video that started it -- I'd have fallen for it if I had seen it. Last Friday a YouTuber by the name of "Mark Erickson" posted a video claiming to reveal an easter egg in Gmail that unlocked an invite ...

Proof that Gmail has raised the ante in the Webmail game: new betas from the two other big players -- New Hotmail screenshots (Microsoft Mail, it's called) New Yahoo Mail screenshots It goes without saying that they're all Ajaxed up.

Here's a really handy thing: if you get an Excel attachment in Gmail now, you get the option to "Open in Google Spreadsheets," which means you don't have to download it. Very handy for a lot of reasons, and seems to work beautifully.

Lately, I've struck upon a new benchmark for usability: the extent to which the interface disappears. Let me explain -- My wife drives a Honda Odyssey minivan. This is the Swiss Army Knife of minivans. It's set-up perfectly, to the point where I've often said, "If you need to find ...

GWT is Open-Sourced: This is cool, but I had no idea the GWT was that complicated. The Google Web Toolkit has been open-sourced. The toolkit was developed internally and can be used to create products like GMail and Google Maps. It allows you to program in Java and let the ...

Hellacious Riders - Hriders.com 1 TB email: This can't be legit. Hriders.com gives unlimited free 1 Terabyte email accounts that include 500 Megabyte attachments. We have been asked why we would do such a thing. The answer is simple to help people store large amounts of information in a safe ...

Google just hired Mike Pinkerton, the brainfather of Camino. He will join Firefox Big Dogs Ben Goodger and Darin Fisher, among others. So the biggest search engine is putting a lot of horsepower behind the most popular browser (at least the most popular one not owned by a competitor). This ...

WordPress 2.1 Ella: A roundup of the new features in WordPress 2.1. Gmail started a revolution, it seems: Autosave makes sure you never lose a post again. This is good too: You can set any "page" to be the front page of your site, and put the latest posts somewhere ...

Email Call to Action: The Mozilla Foundation is planning to give the Thunderbird project away so they can concentrate solely on Firefox. We have concluded that we should find a new, separate organizational setting for Thunderbird; one that allows the Thunderbird community to determine its own destiny. Mozilla is exploring ...

Tech magazine speaks to the MacGyver in us all: USAToday has a nice, little article about O'Reilly's new Make magazine. [...] the magazine offers dozens of simple and practical tricks and hacks. For example, the Imaging section tells you how to recover photos that have been erased from a digital ...

Userscripts.org - Universal Repository: Here's a site full of Greasemonkey scripts for about everything you could ever imagine. I like this one, that automatically switches all Amazon affiliate links in the page you're viewing to your own affiliate ID. Sneaky. This one for Blogines continually checks your feeds in the ...

Extension Room :: URIid: I found this via Joe's post on skinning GMail. Very cool extension. Let's you fix little formatting problems with sites you visit frequently. Well thought-out. The URIid extension makes it possible to create CSS rules based on the site you are visiting. This is useful when ...

Google turns 9 today Happy Birthday! (it just so happens to be my birthday as well, but that s slightly less notable.) We write a lot about Google here (as do lots of others), and I think it s a rare day that I don t touch something associated with Google. But, I m ...

More on 'Google Purchases': If you hate PayPal, here's some joy for you. The new 'Google Purchases' service (purchases.google.com) will be launched in a few days, and is to allow users to make micropayments within 'Google Base' (buy and sell all kinds of items), to acquire licences of 'Google Earth', ...

Greasemonkey 0.4.1 (The Next Generation): Apparently Greasemonkey has been gutted and put back together to fix the huge security hole in the last version. I can confim that, despite massive architectural differences, GM-TNG is incredibly backward-compatible, even with complex user scripts like Book Burro, BugMeNot, and GMail Persistent Searches. I ...

Apple has beefed up its .Mac service in several ways, but it's still way too expensive. $99.95 a year for a gigabyte of storage space (combined Mail and iDisk), .Mac Backup software, .Mac Groups, your own Homepage, yadda, yadda, yadda... Who needs it? I guess I'm still hacked that Apple ...

For Some Technology Companies, 'Beta' Becomes a Long-Term Label: Here's an article about the perpetual beta periods surrounding new services these days. Few people would fly on an airline that advertised its planes had untested engines, or swallow a pill from a drug company that admitted the side effects were ...

Social Network and Relationship Finder, or SNARF, was released by Microsoft Research at the end of November. SNARF is designed to assign priorities to email in your Outlook inbox according to established relationships you have with the senders of that mail. As one MS Research guru puts it... We often ...

Microsoft's Worst Nightmare: Business 2.0 has a good article on the new front in the browser wars: rich client apps. Firefox has XUL, which is a language to create applications within the Firefox browser. This article explains why Microsoft should be worried about it. [...] Firefox's open platform gives it ...

Much like my selfish use of this space to ask for a GMail invite, I'm now asking for a software recommendation. I'm building a Web site for our local Christian school, and we need a Web calendar. I'm not going to roll my own, so we're looking for open-source or ...

It's raining free apps! Picasa is a pretty terrific photo management software. Google just bought the company, and they're giving Picasa away for free. My father-in-law just got a digital camera for his birthday, so I set him up with Picasa. Now he just plugs in the camera, and up ...

At what point does a usability flaw become unethical? If a usability flaw continues to cause people to do something undesirable to them but very desirable to you and you know this and don t change your interface at what point do you become a massive tool? I m left ...

Shelfari is a social networking app built around books. You connect to other people based on the books you re both reading. It s been pretty cool until tonight. Here is my email to their Feedback address. I let you into my Gmail address book to find people I know that might also ...

Application UI goes back to basics: Jon Udell discovers WriteRoom, and makes an important point. I'm writing this column on a Mac-based imitation of a 1970s green-screen terminal. Hog Bay Software's WriteRoom, a free program for Mac OS X, advertises "distraction free writing" as its In WriteRoom's default full-screen mode ...

Shelfari: Invitations and updates: From the official Shelfari blog, posted yesterday. We ve seen the recent emergence of complaints about Shelfari s invitations feature, and it s quite distressing. [ ] It s been about five months since we last touched our invitation design. In June we looked at a number of different designs with ...

Admit it: whenever some group like 37 Signals or Six Apart comes out with a new software product, you secretly think, "I could of done that." How many of us developers thing we could build something just as good if we only put in the time? I do. Yes, I ...