» Smart Phones, Web Design, Google or whatever
Email and Gmail
Email and Gmail, especially the latter since I think its such a great email platform.
Priority Inbox, a New Gmail Feature
Aug 31st
Gmail’s new Priority Inbox is a great new feature posted earlier today on Gmail’s blog. It was interesting for me to note that I have a personal email account and a newer work email account and I can use Priority Inbox on my work Gmail account. On this subject their post says:
Priority Inbox will be rolling out to all Gmail users, including those of you who use Google Apps, over the next week or so. Once you see the
“New! Priority Inbox” link in the top right corner of your Gmail account (or the new Priority Inbox tab in Gmail Settings), take a look.
… so you might not be able to use Priority Inbox yet, but watch for it during this coming week.
PRIORITY INBOX SETUP SCREEN
Call Phones in Gmail
Aug 26th
Filed under ‘new and cool things you can do with your computer’ Google has rolled out an improvement to Gmail voice and video chat that lets you call regular phones (with your headset/microphone).
Call Phones in Gmail
According to Robin Schriebman a Google Software Engineer:
Calls to the U.S. and Canada will be free for at least the rest of the year and calls to other countries will be billed at our very low rates. We worked hard to make these rates really cheap (see comparison table) with calls to the U.K., France, Germany, China, Japan—and many more countries—for as little as $0.02 per minute.
Just click the new “Call phone” button ion your chat window, and search contacts or dial a number on the keypad window and you can start enjoying this new feature.
You can also get phone calls in Gmail (just click the link to see how)!
Updated Contacts and Gmail
Aug 10th
Logging in to Gmail tonight I was greeted with this popup:
Contacts has been renovated and Gmail has some spruced-up changes, moving email closer to the top of your window, about 16 pixels higher, according to the Gmail blog. So I read a little bit of the writeup in Gmail help and checked out the new look. Contacts is surprisingly different and I’ll probably be checking that out for a while since its the biggest change.
CONTACTS
Its now simpler to add or edit a contact, the interface is cleaner and less distracted. Contacts are displayed more like mail in a long list, and adding contacts to different groups is very easy. Also, you can undo changes now, very handy. Ooops, was that DELETED? No problem, just UNDO.
There’s also automatic saving and more standard name fields.
GMAIL
Mail, Contacts and Tasks are now at the top, followed by Compose Mail which is now a button instead of a text link. Now I am waiting for ActiveInbox to update so I can use it again since that interface has disappeared!
Emails (as mentioned previously) are just a little closer to the top of the window now, and the left sidebar seems different, though I guess that could be due to my Gmail theme.
Gmail / Google Multiple Account Access in one Browser
Aug 6th
Wow, I just noticed this new access multiple accounts in one browser feature at the end of my lunch and had to write a a quick bit about it. First, a message from our sponsor (lol). But seriously here’s an interesting quote from Macduff Hughes’ post on the Gmail blog…
Now, you can visit google.com/accounts and click the link next to “Multiple sign-in.” After you sign into your first account, you can sign in with up to two additional accounts from the new accounts menu in the upper right hand corner of Gmail, then easily toggle back and forth between them. You can even open multiple Gmail tabs — one for each of your accounts.
- Gmail Blog, Access two Gmail accounts at once in the same browser
I’ve got to check this out more later and add more – its such an exciting feature with possibilities. One caution, read the Gmail post because access via one browser to multiple accounts is not working universally yet and the post lists these exceptions and notes.
Gmail Now with Drag and Drop attachments onto your desktop
Aug 4th
Yesterday the Gmail Blog posted Drag and drop attachments to save them to your desktop … for now it looks like it may only be available on Chrome.
Dragging and dropping files is an easy way to save time in Gmail. We’ve previously blogged about dragging files to upload as attachments and dragging images into new messages. Now, if you’re using Google Chrome, you can also drag attachments out of messages you receive to save them to your computer.
- Gmail Blog
More later….
Google Video Chat – In Gmail
Jul 1st
Google video chat is one of the cool Google/Gmail things I don’t use, but I’m sure most of you aren’t too lazy to go out and get the required gear (watch the video) to get starting video chatting on your own! I’ve got a friend who video chats with his mom overseas (pretty sure he uses Skype, but its the the same idea), and I’ve got family in 2 states I could video chat with because they live far away.
Often when I tell people that I work on Google video chat, I hear stories about how they’ve used it to give a video tour of a new home to friends, introduce a baby to relatives, keep in touch with traveling loved ones… the list goes on. This got me thinking about how convenient— and sometimes even magical — the experience of video chatting is.
- Gmail blog (link below)
Check out the Grandmother’s guide to video chat on the Gmail blog for more info and find out how to get a t-shirt, printable guide and VHS of the video.
GOOGLE VIDEO CHAT
View Word .doc Files with 1 Click in Gmail
Jun 25th
The title of this post says it all: View Word .doc Files with 1 Click in Gmail
Of course, you’ve already been able to open some other documents like this in Google Docs such as PDFs…
Chrome Plus Gmail Equals LIVE Popout Windows
Jun 10th
Gmail is reminded us about popout windows back in March (when reading an email, chatting in Gmail, composing a message, replying , and forwarding email), adding that they had sped up page loading on email popout windows. They also mentioned that when you log out of your main Gmail window, that your popout windows also “expire”, or are logged out.
Today’s post Long lived new windows points out that Chrome users can now forget that last detail, and when they have logged out of the main Gmail window, their popout windows continue to be logged in.
MORE
Fast new windows
OTHER RECENT POSTS
Making it easier to video chat, voice chat, and group chat in Gmail
Google Maps previews in Gmail and Google Buzz
Gmail sweatshirts
