Pimp Out Your Email

Last week, I did a post on making your Desktop look good. If you missed it, read Trick Out Your Desktop To Make It roductive. On a similar, but more vain note, today I am going to talk about making Gmail look good for you. These tweaks, though more of a cosmetic kind, will make your Gmail experience nicer, and more worthwhile.

First of all, switch to Firefox. It's one of the safest browsers around, and some of the tweaks mentioned here work best on it.

• Use a theme for your Gmail inbox: If you haven't done so yet, head over to the Settings  > Themes tab and select one of the many themes available for Gmail. You can also choose your own colors by clicking Choose Your Own Colors at the bottom. If a fixed theme is not your taste, select Random.
• Install the Better Gmail 2 Firefox extension: Better Gmail 2 adds a lot of handy features to your Gmail tab in Firefox. It ad various features such as Row Highlights, Attachment Icons, Unread Count on Favicon, etc. Hit the link above to read the whole list and install it.
• Install Stylish for Firefox: Stylish is a really neat addon for Firefox. It lets you reconfigure the appearance of most websites, and theme it to appear differently. Themes can be installed from Userstyles or just right-click the Stylish icon in the status bar and select "Find Styles for this site". If you are good with CSS and Javascript, you can even code and upload it to the website (in case you do, mention it in the comments below). Mac fans can use the Snow Leopard theme here. Check out the screenshot below.
  

• Use Gmail Labs Features: If you have Gmail Labs enabled, you can simply use the Default Text Styling feature by going to Settings > Labs. After you enable it, go to Settings, scroll down and select how you want your text to appear. Do note that the style you set here will also be how your emails will appear to your recipients. So go a little easy on that shade of lavender that you love.

Incorporating these tweaks will surely help to make your Gmail experience droolworthy. In case you've always stuck to the POP/IMAP interface for Gmail because of Gmail's lacklustre default interface, maybe this will convince you to make the switch.

---

Like this post? Make sure you make your opinion heard. Click the post headline above to get commenting. You can also use the Share button below to post this page to your favorite social networks.  If you really dig this post, then Digg this post :)

Read more...

3 Things I Miss in Mozilla Firefox

Everyone knows it. Mozilla Firefox is an awesome product, which shines as a bright beacon (read open-source and free), in an otherwise increasingly commercial software market. Recent stats show that if the number of Firefox users around the world were treated as a country, they would form the third largest country by population, preceded only by China and India. After conquering Antarctica and Europe in terms of penetration, it is catching up to Internet Explorer really quickly.

However, in-spite of being one of the best browsers on the planet and doing that one-handedly, there are certain features that I wish were a part of Firefox out-of-the-box.

• Domain Highlighting: This is something that the Firefox team can pick-up from Chrome. Chrome, by default highlights the current domain you are on. This acts as a safeguard against fraudulent websites as it automatically attracts the user's eye to the domain name. By doing so, the user more often than not, ends up taking a second look at the domain name. The user can then determine whether the domain being displayed is indeed the domain he/she intended to visit. There is, however, an extension that enables this very feature in Firefox (as well as a lot of other nifty features). It' called Locationbar2 and can be found here. It works well with all versions of Firefox up to 3.6

• Jumplists: Let's face it. Jumplists are probably going to be the most-used feature in Windows 7. I have talked about it in my post about Nifty Windows 7 Features. Sadly, Firefox users are going to have to wait for Jumplists till Firefox 4.0 is released. There is however, a workaround, which enables you to make use of the yummy Jumplists. It's called Winfox and it's available for both x86 and x64 versions of Windows. Find it here.

• Quick-start Home Page: Opera has Speed Dial. Chrome has a new tab page that shows your recently viewed websites, bookmarks, and recently closed tabs. Safari has the swanky Cover Flow lookalike. Hell, even Internet Explorer has a lame excuse for a new tab page. And that's exactly the reason why I believe Firefox should have a New Tab page of sorts. It's just something no modern browser can do without. However, like everything else, the extension gallery has a solution for this. You can install the New Tab King add-on to get a handy startup page. Once you got it up and running, you can go here to configure some of your other add-ons to work seamlessly with it.

And those are the 3 things, which I believe if implemented, can raise Firefox's awesomeness to new heights.

Do you have any brickbats about Firefox? Discuss them below in the comments section.

Read more...