In the dead of the night, last night, Google released some new functions to their popular “Beta test” email program (which we all just call Gmail.)
For those of you who don’t know, I migrated my University email to Gmail earlier in the year and have been nothing short of pleased with the results. Just the search function alone is worth it. The archiving, sorting, threading, ability to handle multiple accounts that I can send mail from, chat, labels, quick links, AHHHHHH. It’s too cool.
And now they’ve gone and made it better by adding customizable keyboard shortcuts, mouse gesture navigation, fixed width fonts and much, much more. I’ve only had time to play around with the keyboard shortcuts (what can I say, I wanted to play “snake”) but so far, from what I’ve seen, this is a very useful extension.
Not only that but there’s a robust online help community. I had a problem with keyboard shortcuts feature and got an answer in like 10 seconds. Pretty snazzy.
And make no mistake, this is an extension. Google is looking to take over the Operating System market and this represents a small foray into the online OS business.
I suspect they want to take over from Facebook in that regard.
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