Gmail’s new interface is gradually spreading through its user base. I have it now.

It brings mysterious backend changes which enhance “the performance and the usability” of Gmail, as well as new features for contact management and more.

Two things will strike Hawk Wings readers at once.

First, the new interface breaks the Better Gmail Firefox extension. Its keyboard macros, quick navigation, coloured labels, advanced composing options and more make Gmail a pleasure to use.

Luckily Gina Trapani (a productivity goddess) is quick off the mark, and Better Gmail 2.0 is already available, although with a vastly decreased feature set, as she waits for the developers of each feature to update their code. Still, it already contains the keyboard shortcuts which are the key feature for speeding up your Gmail experience.

Secondly, Safari 3.0 is not fully supported. For example, on a cosmetic note, compare the contact manager layout on Google’s blog (top) with how it looks in Safari 3.0 (below):

Other early adopters of Leopard may agree that it is possible to spend too much time on the bleeding edge of innovation. Luckily, you can opt to use the old interface instead by clicking on “Older Version” next to the Settings.gmail, not apple mail, not mail.app, email, firefox, safari, interface, productivity

Gina Trapani at Lifehacker has done all Gmail users an enormous favour with her Better Gmail extension for Firefox.

She has taken some of the best Greasemonkey scripts for Gmail and rolled them into a more user-friendly extension that adds (among other things): coloured labels, a mind-bending array of extra keyboard shortcuts, a fixed font option, larger attachment icons, skins and more.

It almost converted me. Almost.

Now the latest version (0.8) adds even more goodies — bottom posting for replies, Google Reader integration, fixed conversation previews, and a Mail.app skin:

Each option can be enabled or not as you like from the extension’s preferences.

Needless to say, with the labels feature and the extra keyboard shortcuts that Better Gmail provides, it is not very difficult to hack up a very efficient “Getting Things Done” (GTD) system, which doesn’t have all the polish of the tailor-made GTDInbox (formerly GTDMail) extension , but not everyone needs that kind of power.

It also makes managing mailing lists the work of a new keystrokes and can filter work emails from personal emails quickly and easily.

I could go on and on.

Marriage is for life, we like to hope. Mail.app and me are forever (obviously), but — golly! — the occasional harmless flirt with Better Gmail is diverting! Try it out for yourself.gmail, mail.app, skins, email, labels, keyboard shortcuts, productivity, GTS, Getting things done, webmail, alluring

Anthony Baker emails to tell me that the new nightly builds of WebKit (which will be used for Safari 3.0) have fixed the WYSIWYG form editing problem that bedevils users of current Safari versions.

This means, he says, that “you can now hit Gmail and get the same kinds of rich-text editing capability provided to IE, FF and other browsers. You can also access Google Docs.”

And it’s true. Using Safari 2.0.4 (419.3) the formatting bar in Gmail’s basic HTML view doesn’t appear:

But WebKit displays the HTML formatting bar in all its glory (as it also does in Google Docs):

Not only that but some basic formatting keyboard shortcuts work too. So ⌘B and ⌘I toggle bold and italic text, making it easier for die-hard keyboard users to format their emails without fingers leaving the keyboard.

Not all the shortcuts work though. Tab+Enter doesn’t send a message and ⌘U doesn’t produce underlined text.

The latest beta of the much-hyped Desktop client for Gmail, MailPlane which I have been fooling around with for a few days also offers the option to use WebKit behind the scenes to give users this added functionality (but that’s a topic for another longer post.)

WebKit scolds you for daring to use extensions, but that’s a small price to pay for a user in love with Gmail’s HTML features.

[Thanks, Anthony!]mail.app, apple mail, gmail, webkit, safari, html, web forms, formatting, mailplane, google

Google has launched a Mac version of its Desktop search app.

Windows users have been able to use this for a while now as a kind of poor man’s Spotlight. Now it comes to Mac and brings with it several tricks that Spotlight can’t do. Hardcore Googlistas will love it.

As you would expect, it is able to search your drives for applications, files, emails and folders. But unlike Spotlight, it is also able to search your Gmail messages and web browsing history at the same time.

Desktop for Mac installs itself as a system-wide Preference Pane, where you can set the app’s options, including whether or not to include Gmail and your web-browsing history in the search results:

Another pane allows you to set the hotkey for Google Desktop (⌘ + ⌘ by default) and to determine how results are displayed.

Hitting the hotkey calls up a nicely-crafted search box. A search for “journo” lists emails from Mail.app and Gmail in one hit which is very handy, complete with a little snippet for each one, something I often wish Spotlight could provide:

In an extra nice touch for MailTags users like me, Google has made sure that the app is compatible with existing mdimporters. That means it recognises MailTags keywords, projects and notes and displays them in the results.

You can download Google Desktop for Mac from Google’s Mac software page .mail.app, apple mail, gmail, google, desktop, searching, web history, productivity

MacFreePOPs is one of two utilities that allow Mail.app users to access email from web-based services like Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL and more.

MacFreePOPs 2.0, just released, adds two nice new features of the mix.

It now includes an auto-updater, which means that users no longer need to go through the hassle of manually updating the separate plugins for each individual web service. It also checks for updates to the main MacFreePOPs application and the underlying freepopsd engine which powers the plugins:

It is now also “half-universal”. That is to say, parts of the app are now compiled as universal binaries, although the main app is still needs Rosetta to run on Intel Macs. The developer is appealing for donations from happy users to cover the USD 500 cost of new software needed to update the whole app. There is more on this in the app’s readme file.

A new reset/uninstall command is also included.

This update narrows the gap between MacFreePOPs (donation-ware, more complicated) and MailForward (shareware, easier to use).

[Thanks, Gary!]mail.app, apple mail, webmail, hotmail, yahoo, aol, squirrelmail, gmail, plugins, email

Juan Ignacio Leon’s excellent iPhoto2Gmail plugin has been updated and now offers even smarter ways for Gmail users to email photos from iPhoto.

Basically, it adds a pane to iPhoto’s “Export…” dialog:

The updated version offers a Contacts button that pulls down your Gmail contacts so that you pick the recipient(s) from that list.

Other new features include:

- A bugfix for RAW and other non-jpeg files that were not properly renamed when scaled.
- A fix for some situations in which the plugin would try to send message without recipients.
- Re-written code to be Object Oriented and Modular for maintainability.

You can get the revised version from Juan’s web site .iphoto, gmail, photos, webmail, plugin, web 2.0, integration, email

Mac OS X Tips UK has written up a list of tips to wring the most out of the menubar helper for Google services like Gmail and Google Calendar.

It shows you how to set the default number of messages displayed using the hidden Defaults Editor.

You can also set the Notifier to display only email matching a particular label in the same way.

Of course, the Defaults Editor just a fancy GUI to Notifier’s preferences file — com.google.GmailNotifier — stored in your ~/Library/Preferences folder, which you can edit directly with Proprty List Editor or any text editor.

The list also mentions Gmail+Growl , a plugin for Google Notifier that passes notification of new messages to the Growl alert system .Gmail, google, calendar, menubar, notification, not apple mail, not mail.app, email, tips