Mailplane

Call phones from Gmail (for U.S. users only)

Thursday, August 26, 2010

Is Gmail's voice and video chat becoming a serious Skype competition? Now, it even supports calling to normal phones.

The new feature is only available for Gmail users in the USA. Hopefully, this will change some day.

Gmail voice and video chat makes it easy to stay in touch with friends and family using your computer’s microphone and speakers. But until now, this required both people to be at their computers, signed into Gmail at the same time. Given that most of us don’t spend all day in front of our computers, we thought, “wouldn’t it be nice if you could call people directly on their phones?”

Starting today, you can call any phone right from Gmail.

Calls to the U.S. and Canada will be free for at least the rest of the year and calls to other countries will be billed at our very low rates. We worked hard to make these rates really cheap with calls to the U.K., France, Germany, China, Japan—and many more countries—for as little as $0.02 per minute.

Read Gmail blog post

New Gmail lab feature: Find docs and sites quickly with Apps Search

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Google is famous for its search, but search in Google Apps documents or Gmail attachments was rather lacking. Here's a new lab feature to improve search in Google Apps and Gmail:

Where is that presentation? Was it attached to an email? Or in Google Docs? If you’re not sure, you may end up searching several places with the same query in order to find it. With the new “Apps Search” lab, we just made that all a bit simpler.

Once you enable it from the Gmail Labs tab under Settings, the “Search Mail” button in Gmail will say “Search Mail and Docs” instead, and your search results will include matching documents and sites in addition to email messages.

We also added “Did you mean?” style suggestions, for those of us who make mistakes (who doesn’t?):

You may notice that mail results show up just as fast as before while non-mail results may take a tiny bit longer. That way, if you’re just looking for an email, having this lab enabled won’t slow you down.

Read Gmail blog post.
Related post on TechCrunch

Galactic Inbox: An HTML5 game inspired by Gmail

The Gmail blog mentions a special Gmail game implemented with HTML5.

Here's the direct link

Updates to Contacts and a (slightly) new look for Gmail

You certainly already noticed it. Google has updated the look and feel of Gmail and contacts:

Contacts now works more like the rest of Gmail, so if you know how to use Gmail, now you should automatically feel comfortable in Contacts too. And you'll see a bunch of the features you've requested, including:

• Keyboard shortcuts (go to Contacts and hit "?" for the full list)
• Sort by last name (look under "More actions")
• Custom labels for phone numbers and other fields
• The ability to undo changes you've just made
• Automatic saving
• Structured name fields, so you can adjust titles, suffixes, and other name components
• A bigger, more prominent notes field

Gmail Rich text signatures

This is old news as I am currently catching up with the Gmail blog.

Gmail now offers Rich text signatures, too. They are very easy to setup and support different from addresses:

The next time you log in and visit the Settings page, you'll see a rich text editor in the signature section. Here, you can customize your signature by adding pretty formatting, links, and images — or decide to leave things nice and simple.

Gmail also now supports a unique signature for each email address associated with your account. So, if you send mail using a custom "From:" address, you can use a different signature for that address. From the Settings page, you can edit the signature for each account by changing the email address that appears in the dropdown menu.

You can continue to use Mailplane's rich text signatures. Here are the differences:

• In Mailplane you can use HTML to define your signature. This gives you more freedom, but it is more involved as you need to know HTML.

• Mailplane signatures work in Mailplane only. The Gmail signatures work in all desktop browsers.
• You can define more Mailplane signatures and easily replace a signature with a keystroke.

Mailplane signatures - more info:

• Setup your first HTML signature
• Insert a different signature
• Define and use multiple signatures for another from email address.

Mailplane 2.1.10 released

Saturday, August 07, 2010

• FIX: Text cursor stopped blinking after installing Safari 5.0.1
• FIX: Different crashes and freezes after installing Safari 5.0.1
• FIX: Spellchecker didn't work after installing Safari 5.0.1
• FIX: File > Page Setup didn't work when main window had the focus (only worked from the "print" window)
• IMPROVED: The Rapportive plugin is loaded using https:// instead of http://
• FIX: Better clear caches on account switch to prevent "Loading takes longer" issue.
• NEW: Latest MacBook Pro NVIDIA card switching workaround. Disable Adobe Flash plugin using a preference. To change the preference, open Terminal and enter

  defaults write com.mailplaneapp.Mailplane DisableFlashPlugin -bool YES

• UPDATED: French translation (Preference window)
• FIX: SAMLAccounts preference didn't work when Google Gears was disabled.

Know issue

Drag and drop of the following file types has no effect: mailloc, mailtoloc, and webloc