Gmail News brought to you by the Official Gmail Blog
Posted by Dan Pupius, Gmail engineer

Gmail Labs has been a really fun way to easily try out new ideas and get some of our pet feature requests implemented quickly. We wanted to take this to the next level and let you start adding your own stuff to Gmail. Today we’re launching a few Labs experiments that let you add gadgets to the left-nav, next to Chat and Labels.

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.

There’s a third Lab that allows you to add any gadget by pasting in the URL of its XML spec file (e.g. http://www.google.com/ig/modules/youtube_videos.xml). We realize this isn’t very user friendly right now; it’s a sandbox mainly aimed at developers who want to play around with gadgets in Gmail. We’re not tied to the left-nav as a primary way to extend Gmail — in fact we think it is relatively limited and doesn’t offer scalable real estate. There are also some downsides to the iframe-style Gadgets we’re using today — they can sometimes slow down the page. We’re fanatical about speed, so we’ll be keeping a close eye on performance.

This is also a chance for us to test the developer infrastructure involved. We’re using common gadget infrastructure, such as the Apache Shindig project, and working with other gadget containers to make gadgets more portable.

We’re looking forward to your comments in the Labs forum, so send us your ideas, let us know how you like the Calendar and Docs gadgets, and if you’ve written a gadget that you think works well in Gmail, post it and let us and other users try it out.

A couple of notes:
(1) Try out Anatol’s Navbar drag and drop Labs feature so you can easily re-order all the boxes on Gmail’s left hand side.
(2) Not all gadgets are fully compatible with https, so if you’re connecting to Gmail via https, you may see mixed content warnings caused by parts of the gadgets being served over http. We’re working on fixing this where we can.

Update: To turn on these gadgets, click Settings, then visit the Labs tab. Scroll to the bottom, select “Enable” next to the features you want to turn on, and then click “Save Changes.”

Official Gmail News

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Gmail News brought to you by the Official Gmail Blog
Posted by Darren Lewis, Gmail engineer

Here on the Gmail team, we’re always thinking of ways to help you communicate. Back in the day, we put chat right inside Gmail. Then along came group chat and more emoticons. And when we realized that late night communication had its downsides, we created a state-of-the-art lucidity test for after-hours email. Anyway, the black and white days of text-based emails have had their day. Following the evolutionary path blazed by colored labels, we present, in all their technicolor glory, emoticons in your mail.

No more will you have to settle for a when you can have a. Out with the “XOXO” and in with the. And of course, when the bad news smells really bad, transcends all words.

So raise yourand welcome in the colorful new world of Gmail

P.S. For those of you who love our chat smileys,
we’ve also added a whole new set for your enjoyment.

Official Gmail News

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Gmail News brought to you by the Official Gmail Blog
Posted by Peter Baldwin, Software Engineer, Google mobile team

When I joined the Gmail for mobile team a year ago, the mobile client worked like a web application designed for networks that were always available. This was fine on a fast and reliable network, but when you hopped on the subway, network reliability could be a big problem. Today, we’re happy to announce Gmail for mobile 2.0 for J2ME-supported and BlackBerry phones. For this version, we changed our fundamental assumption about the network. We re-thought every action that you might perform with the app and tried to solve for the case where there is no signal. We wanted to make the mobile client faster and more reliable and added some other new features along the way.

If you haven’t tried Gmail on your phone in a while, try this new version and let us know what you think. Gmail for mobile 2.0 is designed to be more reliable in low signal areas and provides basic offline support for phones like the Nokia N95, Sony Ericsson W910i, and BlackBerry Curve. You can now log into multiple accounts (including both Gmail and Google Apps email accounts) at the same time. Switching between them is as easy as a few button clicks or just hitting + j on phones that have a QWERTY keyboard. We’ve also added support for multiple mobile drafts, undo (using the menu or the z shortcut), and sending mail in the background (no more staring at the “Sending…” dialog until it finally gets sent). Be sure to check the help page from Gmail for mobile’s main menu for a list of all keyboard shortcuts.

To download Gmail for mobile version 2.0, just go to m.google.com/mail in your mobile browser.

Parlez-vous français? ¿Habla usted español? Gmail for mobile 2.0 supports over 35 languages, and the application language will automatically match your phone’s language setting.

Official Gmail News

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