Mailplane

Official Gmail Blog: Spice up your inbox with colors and themes

Thursday, November 20, 2008

Great news straight from the official Gmail blog! Gmail now supports many different themes. Of course these theme work in Mailplane, too!

Gmail fans have been building unofficial extensions to spice up their inboxes for a while, but up til now themes haven't been an integral part of Gmail. We wanted to go beyond simple color customization, so out of the 30 odd themes we're launching today, there's a shiny theme with chrome styling, another one that turns your inbox into a retro notepad, nature themes that change scenery over time, weather driven themes that can rain on your mailbox, and fun characters to keep you in good company. There's even an old school ascii theme (Terminal) which was the result of a bet between two engineers -- it's not exactly practical, but it's great for testing out your geek cred. We've also done a minor facelift to Gmail's default look to make it crisper and cleaner -- you might notice a few colors and pixels shifted around here and there.

To customize your inbox, go to the Themes tab under Settings. We'll be rolling out themes to everyone over the next couple of days, so if you don't see them yet, check back soon.

Use Gmail Video Chat in Mailplane

Friday, November 14, 2008

Are you excited about the new Gmail Video Chat feature?

Mailplane now supports it, but it hasn't been released yet. If you like to try and test it, then follow these steps to get started:

1. Download and install the Gmail Video Chat plugin.
2. Grab the latest "Preview" build from the Google Group
3. Start Mailplane and enjoy!

If you encounter any unusual problems, please let me know by using the Help->Feedback and Support... menu item inside Mailplane.

Google Calendar and Docs Gadgets

Thursday, November 06, 2008

Many Mailplane users asked for Google Calendar integration. Now Google released new Google Lab features to embed calender and documents in the Gmail sidebar. The latest Mailplane 2.0 release supports these two features.

From the Gmail Blog:

To get you started, we've worked with the engineers from the Calendar and Docs teams on two highly requested features: a simple way to see your Google Calendar agenda and get an alert when you have a meeting, and a gadget that shows a list of your recently accessed Google Docs and lets you search across all of your documents right from within Gmail.

Tip: To customize your sidebar, try the Navbar drag and drop lab feature.

Check the Gmail Labs group for support and feedback.

Mailplane 2.0 Release Candidate 1

Improved: Support Google lab features

See separate blog posts for "Remember the milk", Google Docs * Google Calendar features.

New: Permanent cookie storage

To better support the new Google Labs feature, web cookies are now stored on disk. They are located in the "~/Library/Application Support/Mailplane" folder.

This shortens startup and "account switch" time considerably.

Changed: Sign out

Sign out now terminates the Google session instead of opening the account drawer.

Experimental: Open external links in Mailplane

⌘-click links or buttons to open the web pages inside Mailplane instead of your preferred browser.

Important: This feature is experimental and may be changed or removed in future versions.

Tips + Tricks:

• ⌥-Click opens a link in "background"
• ⇧-click opens a link in Firefox instead of your preferred browser (Safari, OmniWeb etc.)

Bug fix:

Unread message counter didn't work correctly when the Gmail settings page was active

Support for “Remember the Milk”

Do you want to access your "Remember the Milk" tasks from Mailplane?

The latest Mailplane 2.0 version supports the new "Remember the Milk" Gmail Gadget. It lets you work your task from the Gmail sidebar.

Check out the installation instructions and screenshots on the "Remember the Milk" web site.

Mailplane 2.0 Beta 11 Released

Sunday, November 02, 2008

New: Brazilian Portuguese Translation

Thanks to Leonardo Otsuka, Mailplane 2.0 beta now contains the Brazilian Portuguese translation.

New: Google Labs Feature support

• Support for Calendar
• Support for Google Doc

Note: Only works with "normal" Gmail accounts (@gmail.com, @googlemail.com). Support for Google Apps will be released with next update.

Bug Fixes

• Downloads didn't start on Mac OS Tiger (10.4.x)
• Unicode downloads (Japanese, Hebrew, etc.) didn't get the right file names
• URLs dropped to the message field didn't work

Gmail Tip: How to send “subject only” messages

Sunday, October 26, 2008

If you add "EOM" (end of message) to the end of your subject, Gmail will not complain about an empty message text. This allows you to quickly send short subject only email messages like "Coffee at 9:30? EOM". Official Gmail blog entry

Mailplane 2.0 Beta 10 Released

Saturday, October 25, 2008

Mailplane 2.0 beta 10 has just been released. Use "Mailplane->Check for update" from the menu or download the latest version from the download page.

New Translations

• New: Icelandic by Páll Svansson
• New: Italian by Monica Cainarca http://www.mctranslation.com
• Updated: German by Patrick Scheips http://www.simple-dev.de/
• Updated: Japanese by mitcho (Michael 芳貴 Erlewine) http://mitcho.com

Improvements

• Now works under Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard Developer Preview
• Download window redesign

Bug Fixes

• Unicode files (Japanese, Korean, Chinese etc.) were downloaded as ???????.doc
• Crash when composing a message and switching back to overview
• main window didn't refresh when opening a conversation in a detached window (via growl or menu bar items)
• main window wans't brought to focus when opening a mailplane URL
• Remembered detached window size wasn't applied when using SHIFT-Click on Compose or Reply links
• Remapped Edit->Undo to Cmd-Opt-Control-Z because of the Cmd-Z crash. Cmd-Z will still work in the message body, as it directly handled by it.
• Send keyboard shortcut and attachments didn't work because of Gmail changes
• French users experienced a Display problem in the download window: The cancel button was too big.

How Do I Unmute a Gmail Conversation?

Monday, October 20, 2008

Yesterday, I discovered that I had accidentally muted an important conversation. I found no obvious way to undo it. This lifehacker blog post points to the solution:

To un-mute a conversation, select the conversation and click Move to inbox. Doing so will move the entire conversation to your inbox and will remove the mute action, so that future messages are also delivered to your inbox.

Muting conversations is very handy, by the way. From the Gmail help pages:

If you're subscribed to a mailing list, you've no doubt been subjected to the 'thread that just won't die!' If you're part of a long message conversation that isn't relevant, you can 'mute' the conversation to keep all future additions out of your inbox. By using the 'm' shortcut key, new messages added to the conversation bypass your inbox so that the conversation stays archived. If your address appears in the to or cc field, though, the conversation will pop back into your inbox ready for your attention. Muted messages are not marked as read, are still searchable, and can specifically be found by searching for:

Posted by Ruben on 10/20 at 08:14 AM
Gmail • Tips and Tricks • (0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink