Byrnesys Blabberings

I often pop into the ‘labs’ tab in gmail to see what those ingenious folk at Google are up to. For those of you who don’t know all Google engineers are encouraged to spend 20% of their work time (one day per week) on projects that interest them. Being enthusiastic users of their own products, the engineers often come out with great new features for their products like Gmail and they are tested in these labs until ‘bug-free’ when they are released as a regular feature.

A few new ones have come up recently which I thought were well worth highlighting:

Multiple Inboxes – This new function allows you to chop up your Inbox so that you can read your personal email in one section and everything else stays in your normal inbox. There are of course much more complicated ways of running it, you can use up to 5 inboxes if you have that many catergories of emails which require their own space. Find out more at the Gmail Blog.

Unfortunately the side by side view seen here seems to be messing with things in a bad way when I tried it in my inbox but this is certainly a feature to keep an eye on and can come in very handy to locate the emails from your friends and family from the endless stream of amazon offers and facebook friend requests.

Merge Contacts – Many of you know the pain of trying to keep an up to date address book over all platforms (mobile, email, and offline), I’ve mentioned before how I use NuevaSync to do this for me, and Google have predictably come up with their own solution, but one thing syncing tends to do is create lots of duplicate entries. For example I had 3 entries for Joe Bloggs, one has a phone number, another a personal email and another a work email. Gmail has now integrated the ability to select these 3 contacts and merge them which saves significant time manually cross typing all that info, if you happen to be as precious as I am about keeping a tidy address book.

Forgotten Attachment Detector – Prevents you from accidentally sending messages without the relevant attachments. Prompts you if you mention attaching a file, but forgot to do so. More here.

Other Worthy Gmail mentionables:

Gmail now lets you select more than one file at a time to upload as an attachment and gives each file a progress bar so you can check the upload, More over at the Gmail Blog.

A Labs Function enables you to send SMS to US Mobile phones and recieve replies into your Gmail chat window. I used this to chat to my friend John in Hawaii once when he went offline to go to a meeting. Nice!

If  you rely on Google Calendar to tell you when you can go and have a coffee like I do (slight overstatement) then you’ll find it useful to throw your calendar agenda in the sidebar of gmail to see if you can make the lunch you just recieved an email invite to.

Gmail recently had a little trouble and went down, so now google are keeping everyone up to date on how their different apps are functioning so you can check whether the problem is their end or yours.

Microsoft Outlook tweaks and Tips coming soon…