New WordPress theme & logo refresh!

I’ve changed my WordPress theme to P2 — P2 is a WordPress theme with Gmail-like keyboard shortcuts. I’ve also refreshed the logos that I use on various online services. Have a look!

Request to Google: Improve the link strip and make it behave consistently

The Google link strip present in some of Google’s web applications, though useful, can be improved a bit to improve the general usability of the applications.

When using Gmail/Google Reader/Google Calendar, if the window is not maximized, the display of the link strip is inconsistent across these applications.

In Gmail, the link strip wraps to the next ‘line’, with the application specific links moving to the 2nd line.

When the window is maximized/restored, the page realigns, which is a bit irritating.

In Google Reader and Calendar, the links on the left side and the ones on the right side overlap when the window is not maximized. The result looks ugly!

Google can do better! Make the web application links on the left size auto adjust, with the ‘extra’ ones moving to the drop down menu under ‘more’. Like this:

In the above ‘paint-shopped’ image, the ‘Web’ link is now hidden under the ‘more’ drop down list.

Of course, this won’t work under all conditions. But for use under ‘normal conditions’, this looks and works much better than the existing (inconsistent) implementation.

Gmail labels trick for IMAP folders: Make all labels appear together.

Gmail recently added IMAP support for their excellent webmail service. Look here for details.

One of Gmail’s best feature is Labels. If you have the 3 labels, Bank, Receipts and Work, this is how they would appear in Gmail (ignore Junk E-mail — that’s something that Microsoft Outlook creates).

If you have configured your email client to access Gmail through IMAP, this is what you are going to see (using Microsoft Outlook 2007 as an example).

Confused? Unable to spot your labels that were so clearly visible in Gmail? Me too! More so if you have a lot more labels (I am sure most power users have more than the three labels that I use in this example ).

There is a simple solution for this. In Gmail, edit label names and add a common prefix to all labels. In the example below, I have used the ‘~’ (tilde) character as prefix. With this change, all labels appear one after the other in the email client. No need to look through the list of folders anymore to identify labels!

But wait… There are even more ways to organize your labels and emails! In Gmail, edit label names and add a prefix followed by ‘/’ (forward slash). In this example, I have added the prefix ‘Labels/’ to each label (See image below for how it looks).

Now look at the folder structure in the email client. All labels appear under the ‘Labels’ sub-folder! Isn’t this even better?

You can take this further by creating different label structures (E.g.: Info/Bank, Shopping/Receipts, Shopping/Tracking etc.). You can even do multi-level label hierarchy (E.g.: Work/Project1/HiP, Work/Project1/LoP, Work/Project1/All etc.) — be creative here!

Note:

1. I have tested this only on Microsoft Outlook 2007.

2. I discovered the label hierarchy feature when I created a new label with a ‘/’ character in it and Outlook displayed part of it as a sub-folder.

3. If someone already knows about this, well, good for them!

4. If this is as per IMAP specification, great! Good for us…

Technorati Tags: Gmail,IMAP,Outlook