New Gmail features with Gmail Labs

Google likes to keep their project in ‘Beta’, forever is possible. Gmail is one of those forever ‘Beta’ products. If you notice, there is still the ‘Beta’ tag under the Gmail logo.

Up until recently nothing much had change with Gmail ever since the open it to public. It was an invite only deal in the early days, but most people got the invite.

The Gmail team takes good care of the look and feel of the whole app. Even adding a ‘delete’ button is a big deal for them. So to rollout new features they are taking a different approach.

Instead of having two versions, old version and new version, you can now pick and choose features to see which suits you best. Introducing Gmail Labs. Since this is a tryout run, you may then send feedback to Gmail team on which features should be incorporated to Gmail.

You can access this feature by going to the settings panel and clicking the ‘Labs’ tab. There are 13 Lab features at the moment and more are expected to come.

Here are some features I’m using:

• Quick Links: Adds a box to the left column that gives you 1-click access to any bookmarkable URL in Gmail. You can use it for saving frequent searches, important individual messages, and more.
• Superstars: Adds additional star icons. After enabling this feature, you can choose which icons you wish to use in the “General” Settings page. This gives more options to differentiate my started item then the normal yellow start.
• Fixed width font: Adds an option to the reply dropdown menu that lets you view a message in fixed width font. I like fixed width fonts.
• Mouse gestures: Use your mouse to navigate with gestures. Hold right-click and move the mouse left to go to a previous conversation, move it right to go to the next conversation, and move up to go back to the inbox view. Of cause you need a two button mouse for this, but hey mighty mouse has two buttons.
• Signature tweaks: Places your signature before the quoted text in a reply, and removes the “–” line that appears before signatures. I’ve been asking for this.

I like how the developer from the Gmail team add features with minimal change of the overall user interface (UI). It’s just the same Gmail only it gets better.

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