Better Faster PC

A couple of things happening in the world of Google you might be interested in:

• Google has FINALLY introduced themes for users that use Gmail with their own domain (like companies). That means if you are in an office and have been stuck with the plain, old boring standard Gmail theme for too long now you can change that (though apparently it has not been rolled out to every single domain, though this will occur shortly) by clicking on ‘Settings’ in the right hand corner. There should now be a tab called Themes from which you can select a Theme. Read more about it at Download Squad HERE
• If you use one Gmail account to manage more than one address you will have encountered the on behalf of phrase that is added to your emails, revealing the fact that the email was sent from a different email address. This was one of the reasons I personally stopped using Gmail for this purpose as I felt it negated the entire concept of anonymously managing multiple addresses (apart from the worry of your email address falling into the hands of the spammers you were trying to avoid in the first place!). This little phrase is NO MORE, thank goodness. Read more about it HERE
• If you love Autocomplete (the feature that makes suggestions when type in a search box) you will want to check out the new Gmail Labs feature that does just that - when you type in a search in Gmail it will offer suggestions with some extra features throw in as well. Worth checking out (and enabling) - go HERE
• Lifehacker did an interview with Senior Product Manager of Gmail, Keith Coleman, on the 5th Birthday of the ’still-in-beta’ free email service. Read it HERE

Two Google related topics you should be aware of:

• A bunch of holes have been discovered in the security of the web application Google Docs. If you are a user of Google Docs and keep any sensitive information stored there you would want to read this. The article at TechCrunch is HERE. If you don’t know what a web application (webapp) is, then you might want to read the Wikipedia entry which is HERE
• Gmail is celebrating it’s fifth birthday soon and with that they have announced “Google is celebrating with the launch of an exciting new product”. What it is I am not sure, but come April 7 we will find out. Read more about it HERE and HERE

Do you use Gmail? If you do then you might want to check out this post on Lifehacker with a bunch of great tips from the Gmail Labs team to spice up your experience.

Check out the post HERE.

When Gmail was launched there was one big sticking point that everyone complained about and was not so sure would become popular - the concept of ‘labels’ as opposed to folders. So, instead of archiving mail into seperate folders, the mail is all stored together in the archive and only differentiated by the label it carries.

For new-comers to the internet this was nothing to difficult to understand but for old-timers, used to neatly organizing everything into different folders it was a major shock to the system.

Today Gmail is rolling out a small update to the label feature of Gmail. As opposed to having to find the labels under the ‘More Actions‘ button, there is now a ‘Move To ‘ button (check out the image below). They have also introduced a new keyboard shortcut, according to the official Gmail blog, you can now apparently label a mail without even using your mouse. Read more about it HERE.

Since I recently migrated to Gmail I am probably going to be loading on the Gmail stuff for a while! Anyway, here are a couple of things I found quite useful.

•  GmailAssistant - This is an Open Source project at Sourceforge.net, that means it is completely free. It is a JAVA application and does not require install, just double click the .JAR file and it will run provided you have JAVA installed. If you get a “Cannot find main class error”your file associations have been messed around with, possibly due to your ZIP program or an old installation of JAVA. Get a fresh install of JAVA from Sun HERE. GmailAssistant provides notifications from multiple Gmail accounts at once, so if you have more than one Gmail account and want to be notified of new mail in all accounts at the same time (while working for instance) check it out HERE. Otherwise the Google messaging client also gives notifications while you work, though this is only for a single account. Google Talk (or Gtalk) is HERE. There is also a more advanced Labs edition which you can get HERE, that gives desktop notifications for Gmail as well as Google Calendar.
• MakeUseOf.com has a great list - the Ultimate Gmail Collection - containing tips, tricks and other things just for Gmail. If you are looking for a certain kind of application for Gmail you might find it HERE.
• Labs & Themes for Gmail - I can’t provide a link as you must be logged in to your own Gmail account - so log in, click ‘Settings’ in top right corner and then look at the tabs at the top of the new window. The last two tabs on the right should be labelled Labs & Themes. Themes just make your Gmail look pretty and there are quite a variety. More interesting is Labs. If you read carefully through the Labs features you can enable a lot of powerful features in Gmail. In my personal account I have integrated Docs & Calendar into my Inbox as well as a few other nifty features. It really is worth checking out Labs features if you use Gmail a lot.
• If you can’t get the Gmail address you want (most of them seem to be taken, almost everything I could think of…) then sign up for another email account that is POP enabled and use Gmail to fetch mail from that account. There are tons of free accounts out there. I would recommend Zenbe as a decent one, with no advertising. That way you can still be johnsmith@zenbe.com instead of johnsmith1329@gmail.com which can be a bit confusing. Check out Zenbe HERE.

And that’s it!

Do you go home and get irritated when you have to log into your Gmail business account as well as your personal Gmail account and trying to juggle between messages and calendars and work out what is going on? You need to setup up POP mail fetching.

1. Login to your personal Gmail account - the login page is HERE
2. In the top right corner click SETTINGS, then select the label ACCOUNTS
3. Find “Get mail from other accounts” and then Add Account (or something similar)
4. A little box will pop-up. For username enter full username your company Gmail account uses including domain ie. nicholas@yourbusinesshere.com 
5. Enter password
6. For POP server enter - pop.gmail.com
7. Port - 995
8. Tick - Use SSL (my business account uses SSL. If you are not sure, login to your business account on Gmail. If it says https:// in the address bar then it uses SSL otherwise not but  I am assuming they all do but you can never be 100% sure)
9. DO NOT tick leave a copy of message on sever
10. Think of a label ie. Work Emails or YourBusinessHere.com

And that is it!

Now all your work emails will arrive in your personal Inbox and will be labelled with whatever label you chose. Don’t worry all the message remain archived on the work Gmail account so if you mess it up the first time nothing will be lost. Now just share you Google Calender between Work and Home and you are ready to work anywhere.

Gmail has got a whole lot of users and basically everyone has been stuck with the same, boring, old Gmail interface since the start, however that is suddenly all changing. Apparently, being rolled out to (hopefully) everyone, are a whole lot of different themes for the browser interface of Gmail.

That means if you are using Gmail you no longer will be stuck using the standard look, instead you can switch over to something that more suits your personal taste or desktop theme.

If you have a Gmail account, look out for this feature.