We wanted you to be the 878,444th person to know, so we’re going to post it here:
Google Enterprise today announced the arrival of offline Gmail, the latest feature in the Labs settings of Google Apps Gmail. It ain’t perfect, but basically works.
As suggested last week, Gmail seems to be emerging as the prevailing point of engagement for many of us using Google Apps. As if on cue, today Lifehacker highlighted the Integrated Gmail Firefox extension that loads any Google App inside Gmail. Not that I am recommending that particular extension. But it goes in the same Google Apps direction so many of us are going, namely, relying on the Gmail UI as the point of first entry to Google Apps.
It has been fascinating to watch the evolution of the user interface changes as the various Google Apps and other Google tools evolve, and none more so than Gmail. Email, uh, Gmail is the core web application for Google Apps users. They may or may not regularly use Google Docs or Google Chat or Google Sites or Google Reader, whatever… but you can pretty much count on your organization’s users relying on the Gmail interface to get basic work done. And with steady additions to the Gmail Labs features and now direct gadget integration into the Gmail interface — for example, the recent additions of Calendar and Docs gadgets that display directly within Gmail – the Gmail UI is evolving as a primary workaday dashboard for integrating and accessing an array of Google applications and tools.
Here’s a particularly interesting description of how one person does it: Making Gmail Your Gateway to the Web. You could make the case that what he really needs to do is get a life, but regardless he has come up with several very smart and creative ways to exploit Gmail to help organize, access and communicate.
Whatever else Google Chrome is, one very gratifying experience today is how much faster it handles my AJAX-heavy Gmail app, which can so often and so annoyingly load pages so slowly. I have never, ever seen Gmail pages load this fast. One probable explanation is that, apparently, Google Chrome is insanely fast.
With our organizational switch over to Gmail 2.0, we have been working on practical, advocate-friendly solutions that work with the updated Gmail 2.0 interface. The initial solutions a few days ago had to do with using Better Gmail 2.0 to give our users mailto functionality that works with our Google Apps, plus nifty new file-type icons and other goodies that come with that add-on package. Done.
The second part of the plan is to exploit the power and flexibility of the Stylish Firefox extension to perform a few modest cosmetic tweaks, while also offering users some options about what appears and does not appear in the new Gmail interface.
Here are the targets of our coding madness today — all real-world examples as of this afternoon from my Google Apps Gmail account — displayed here and familiar to all who are familiar with the default Gmail 2.0 interface, from top to bottom: the two search buttons, one for your Gmail and the other for a general Google search; the Labels menu with its new “color-code/edit-label” boxes to the right of (and partially obscuring) each label; and the indispensible Inbox, illustrated below, with a default design that makes it touch harder than it needs to be to read the labels in the message row:
So you’re asking yourself, “Yeah, I love Gmail. But do I have to live with all this blah design and extraneous stuff I don’t really want?” No, my friend, you do not.
The solution for today’s tech challenge is the Stylish add-on for Firefox. The short version is that Stylish enables you to easily change how things look in your Firefox web browser by simply invoking a new set of CSS rules that control the “presentation” or visual design of what you see, including web applications like Gmail. And there are truckloads of Stylish code bits already available for Gmail 2.0.
But it is even better than just loading someone else’s Stylish code. What you can easily do is cherry-pick a design idea or two from any of the many code samples already available and build your own custom Stylish code set. With a nod to ideas and code lifted shamelessly from Gmail: Inbox with new style and GMail Cleaner, plus a few original ideas for changing the look of Gmail labels in the Inbox itself (to make them easier to scan and more readable) and removing the “color-code/edit-label boxes” (so that they no longer obscure the already-too-narrow Labels menu), here’s how I did my own personal, quite modest makeover of the Gmail interface:
Tools > Add-ons > Stylish > Options. That opens the “Manage Styles” dialog. Click on Write./* Stylish code based in part on code and ideas from "Gmail: Inbox with new style" http://userstyles.org/styles/678 and "GMail Cleaner" http://userstyles.org/styles/4118 */ @namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml); @-moz-document domain("mail.google.com") { /* remove web search button */ button[id="1fbh"] {display:none !important;} /* create hover "row" effect for message lists */ table.N2mZ7b tr:hover, table.tlc tr.rr:hover { background-color:#FFEB86 !important; } table.N2mZ7b tr.rfza3e:hover, table.tlc tr.ur:hover { background-color:#CDF39F !important; } /* restyle how Labels display in message lists */ span.s75Nkf b { background-color:transparent !important; border-color:#C0C0C0 !important; } /* remove "color-code/edit-label" boxes */ div.qn0D4e b b { display:none !important; } td.BFvfre { display:none !important; } }
What does this get you?
Don’t like something? Just remove or edit the offending CSS code. But you get the idea: Play with other folk’s Stylish code by installing any number of Gmail styles to get some useful ideas of what you like and then what you really want. Then cut-and-paste and recode and add code as suits you and create your own master Stylish code set.
To coin a phrase, “It’s all good.”
As a coda to last week’s post about turning on Gmail 2.0 for Google Apps, it is worth noting that doing so will effectively kill some Firefox add-ons that you may be accustomed to using to spiff up the appearance of your Gmail interface, including some commonly used Greasemonkey Gmail scripts and popular Userstyles.org Gmail scripts that rely on Stylish. You should update those, as needed.
For LSNC perhaps the biggest deal is having a solution for mailto links, so that the Gmail 2.0 “Compose Mail” page opens whenever the user clicks on a mailto link.
One of the easiest solutions to this dilemma is to have users install the Better Gmail 2.0 Firefox add-on.
To get the “Compose mailto Links in Gmail” feature to work with your Google Apps domain, click on the “Advanced” button in the Better Gmail 2.0 console and then simply add your domain. Problem solved. Well, for the most part. Once set, if the user has Firefox open and is already logged into Gmail, whenever the user clicks on a mailto link it will open to the Gmail Compose Mail page. If not logged into Gmail, clicking the link will trigger Gmail opening to its default Inbox page. Hey, but no harm, no foul.
With the Better Gmail 2.0 add-on you also get several other useful options, including a very helpful “Attachment Icons” display that substitutes file-type specific icons for the Gmail default paper clip icon. Useful stuff.
This is not exactly new news, since it is a new Google Apps option I had not noticed when it was implemented two weeks ago. But for those who have adopted Google Apps for their organizations, it will be of interest: Google Apps administrators now have the option of changing the system default so that newly enhanced features in various Google applications that have already been implemented in the “consumer” versions are automatically implemented in your organization’s Google Apps. No more waiting for Google Apps upgrades, people!
About two months ago Google rolled out Gmail 2.0 to its “consumer” Gmail accounts with a host of enhanced features. Of course, the proverbial problem for Google Apps users is that changes made in the consumer version of Google applications can take a long, long time to migrate to the Google Apps versions. Well, in response to demand, Google now permits Google Apps administrators to opt-in to the changes immediately.
To do so, go to your Google Apps control panel and select Domain settings > General > Control Panel. At the bottom be sure to select both “Next generation” and “Turn on new application features to my domain before they are rolled out to all Google Apps customers,” as illustrated here:
I turned ours on today. It took only about 4 hours to kick in. Nice, very nice. Really dig the way improved Contact Manager.
Hot damn! Google has announced that Google Apps non-profit accounts now have access to its email migration tools. Apparently this newly updated API can handle email account migration from anywhere, not just IMAP as had previously been the case. Good news, people.
This week the How-To Geek has done a great series of tutorials on implementing the new Gmail support for IMAP with individual articles on how to configure it with Outlook, Thunderbird and Windows Vista Mail. Yet another example of why I think the How-To Geek is, day-in, day-out and pound-for-pound, the best site out there right now for practical help and short-form tutorials useful to tech-savvy average joes and janes. Sure, the more serious geekers salivate daily over the latest, ever voluminous but all-too-often-irrelevant-to-real-life posts at Lifehacker. For my money, the How-To Geek is the go-to guy. He relates.
Gmail 2.0 has yet to hit the Google Apps accounts, but if you have a personal Gmail account, you should be good to go. True, the roll out of Gmail 2.0 has been bumpy but the feature enhancements sure seem worth all the transitory trouble. Not only is the way improved Contact Manager to die for, there are many other, more subtle goodies now available in the new Gmail interface you are going to really like, including these five little-known Gmail features you may not yet know about.