After switching back and forth between various email clients, I have decided that the web interface for Gmail is the only one that works best for me. More than anything else, what I love about it (and need) is that it offloads the task of indexing and searching thousands of emails to another machine and my laptop doesn’t have to deal with that.
That being said, I am a big fan of the mail client built into the Opera browser. It’s fast, and I love the way it automatically sorts my mails according to mailing lists, flagged threads, contacts etc etc. One other feature that I love is the default “Unread” message view. It allows me to check my “New, unread messages until marked as read.”. You can even set it to display unread messages from the last week, month and so on. I wanted to replicate this in Gmail, and after some tinkering I think I managed to do it. Here’s how (all the following steps are referring to the Gmail web interface):
- Go to Settings
- Click on the Labs tab, look for “Multiple Inboxes”, enable it and click “Save Changes”
- Now you should see a “Multiple Inboxes” tab. Click on it.
- Under “Search query” fill out “label:unread”. (Under “Panel title” I filled “Unread” and in ”Maximum page size:” I filled out 9).
- I also chose to “Above the inbox” for “Extra panels positioning:”
- Click “Save Changes” and go back to your inbox.
You should now see something like the picture below:
I’m really happy with this setting. Hope you are too (I’m not apologizing otherwise anyway)
First, the Opera desktop browser got me totally addicted to mouse gestures and now the multi-touch trackpad has proved to be one of the major highlights of my new MacbookPro.
Jitouch, gives you the completely control over your multi-touch-trackpad-gestures. It lets you customize and add a lot more new gestures, and in decently innovative ways as well.
A few of the gestures just sold this app to me so well, that I am willing to ignore the mess the creators have created by going overboard with the crazy amount of default gestures this app switches on! I have disabled ALL OF THEM, apart from:
- Next / Previous tab
- Open Link in a New Tab
- Refresh
- Open recently closed tab
- Scroll to Top
- Scroll to Bottom
I would also use the “Character gestures” if I could only get them to work! All in all, for $5.99 .. actually I haven’t decided if I would pay for this yet.
In other news, the rumors of the Magic Trackpad sound interesting. It would work perfectly with my desk-laptop combination!
Helvetireader² – A minimal, anti-social theme for Google Reader
Although it won’t change my main use of Google Reader (as a backend to one of my favourite apps – Reeder), Helvetireader sure does look fantas-slick-tastic.
I have to say that I don’t get the rationale behind the assumption that the only people using Google Reader would be Chrome users – Helvetireader turns ugly in Opera. Bah Humbug!
ps – In other news, a caveat, setting up Mac Journal is a tedious recursive post-check-fix process.
Over the last 3 weeks I have fallen in love with Pixelmator. It’s perfect for my daily web design, minor tweaking, prototyping tasks. Simply put, it just works:
- Quick launch times
- Super light on the system
- Neat and familiar interface (as I come from Photoshop)
- Focussed (doesn’t make me feel like I’ve rented an auto-workshop just to open the battery cover of a mobile phone)
Yes, there are some things that I miss, (so far) mainly:
- Text formatting features
- Auto aligning layers (depending on your level of fussy-ness, doing this manually can take a gazillion hours)
It serves my needs well and efficiently, my system loves it too. I didn’t have to give my wallet a colonoscopy to pay for it either.
Using Pixelmator does mean, that I will be buying a license to Lightroom as well. The thinking is, special tools for specific tasks means less time to get the task at hand done. So until I get pissed off by a fellow band member or do a Babes Illustrated photo shoot in my living room, I should be fine without Photoshop and it’s sneaky content-aware fill features.
