Image: Screen grab of Gmail by Jason Bean

I’ve been waiting patiently today as I’ve been hearing everything talk about the cool, new themes for Gmail that have now been released. It was all the buzz today on twitter but every time I opened Gmail it was just the same old look and feel.

A couple of hours ago I noticed a little bit of a change to the look and feel and thought that maybe things were in a rolling staged release for users.

I got home from work, fired up the laptop and bingo! there are the themes all there sitting and waiting on me.

The theme shown above seemed to be the popular one on twitter, and I’ll agree. It does make the Gmail interface nice and friendly. Than in itself is kind of odd in that just about all Google products pride themselves on sparse, utilitarian functionality which I normally enjoy. But this is nice. I may try a couple of different ones, there’s loads to choose form already and I’m sure they’ll keep releasing them and they’ll be expanded upon like the themes from iGoogle have been.

Which is your favorite theme? What themes are you waiting for that would be your favorite? I’m thinking pop stars and sports teams will be the first releases coming soon.

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Image: Screen capture by Jason Bean

Gmail has this setting where you can tell it to always display images from a certain recipient. That’s a really good feature because it gets annoying to always click on the "Display images below" link.

The problem is that it doesn’t matter either way. No matter how many times it appears that I click on the "Always display images…." option instead, I always have to click on it again to see the images in an email.

Where does this setting get stored? Is it a cookie? Do I lose it when I have Firefox clear private data? Is that why I sometimes also lose my Google search preferences?

Let me know if you have that answer, that would be great!

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It’s been a very busy day today but I figure it’s time for me to throw my $.02 into the ring on my thoughts of the new Google browser, Chrome, that was released today. I’ve just now had a chance to download and install it and I’ll share just a few of my initial reactions.

My first thought that came during the setup process was why in the world do I not have the option to import bookmarks from my Google Bookmarks? I could only specify to import them from Mozilla Firefox or Microsoft Internet Explorer. Do what?

Hand-in-hand with that is why there’s no mention or capability to even mirror the use of the Google Toolbar. I can tell you right now, I use the Google Toolbar so much that I can’t imagine using Google Chrome nearly as much as I would if I had access to the toolbar.

Now that I’ve got that behind me, my general thoughts of the browser is that it’s comfortably clean and simple in layout, what I believe we’ve all come to expect. And it’s quick! Web pages seem to load very quickly in the browser, that’s for sure.

Some of the applications and functionality of tabs bring with them some nice improvements. Being able to drag tabs around to a separate window or regroup them to other windows would be helpful in my opinion. Some of the security steps that Google Chrome does to maintain stability in the browser also looks like a great improvement.

Aside from those items, there’s nothing really that blows me away or colors me impressed. It’s a nice, clean, fast browser. But it’s missing far too much that I’ve come to expect from my browser for me to switch it as my default browser.

I’d think higher integration with maps, Google toolbar, search and Gmail just seems like obvious gaps to me. I also think it would be a perfect browser that could have been released for mobile phones.

A comment from one of my friends was that it’s still “in beta” so I shouldn’t expect much. I replied that Gmail is still in beta too, but it’s pretty darn refined and useful for email at this point.

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One thing I’ve done from the beginning of my days on the Internet has been to take advantage of free e-mail addresses from places like Juno, Yahoo!, Hotmail and Gmail. One of the newest providers I’ve come across is GMX and I’ve been happy with them so far, even though I still don’t use them as a primary provider.

One thing I’ve never done is relied upon the e-mail addresses provided by whomever is my ISP at the time. The problem with that is if you ever change ISP’s you’ve got to let everyone know your e-mail address changed as well. That’s just too much of a pain for everyone to keep up with when it does happen.

A feature I really like about GMX even though I haven’t started to use it yet is that I can consolidate all of my e-mail to that interface if I desire.

Another feature GMX has that I just recently saw though is a built-in, online file storage solution. They even have a File Storage Manager tool that you download to your PC to mirror and manage your online file storage on GMX’s servers.

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GTD – Getting Things Done – is a simple and effective productivity concept: designed so that even the laziest and most scattered of people can be organised and stress free.

It is a way to get things done with “less effort, more ease and elegance”.
GTD focuses on Contexts and Next Actions. A Context is the best place to achieve something, and a Next Action is the thing you think is most important to do next.
Projects and complex priorities are strongly devalued as they are rarely the answer to organisational problems.
As a very simple example, a to do list might have the Context ‘At Computer’, with the Next Actions being ‘Visit GtdGmail.com’ and ‘Download GtdGmail’. Thus, when you are next sat at the computer, you know exactly what is most effective to do next.

Take charge of your Inbox and your life and start getting things done!

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This little website may have just the thing for you. You can download a little app called POP Peeper and it will alert you when you’ve got new mail on any of the following types of e-mail accounts:

• POP3 of course
• SMTP
• Gmail
• Hotmail/MSN
• Yahoo! Mail
• Mail.com
• MyWay
• Excite
• Lycos
• Rediffmail

Some of the other features you may be interested in knowing about:

• Easy Setup – accounts are imported from your existing email client(s)
• Read and delete email without opening your email client
• Send Mail using SMTP or WebMail
• Password Protection
• Send, Save and Open file attachments
• Many ways to receive new mail notification: skinnable desktop alerts, audio, flashing Scroll Lock LED and more
• Specify different intervals for each account
• and more

Pretty cool eh? You can download the little bugger at www.poppeeper.com

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