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Let’s begin with this: I love Gmail. When it hit the streets 5 years ago it changed everything from the way I communicate to the way I store information. It is, like most things, not perfect. Fortunately, there are things we can do to inch it a bit closer to perfection. I’ve recently made some changes to the way I use Gmail and I thought I’d lay them out here. Here are some of the tricks and tools I’ll be talking about:

• Google Apps For Your Domain
• MailPlane
• Better Gmail 2
• Multiple Inboxes
• Themes: Shiny

Using a non-Gmail email address (Google Apps)

I use Google Apps for both my personal and professional sites. This allows me to have a fancy custom email address without subjecting myself to whatever lousy webmail interface happens to come with my domain host provider. Sure, I could set up Mail.app and use POP3 or maybe even IMAP, butI’m a Gmail guy and I don’t want to give that up just because I’m not using a gmail.com email address.

There are three tiers of Google Apps: Business, Education, and Standard. You probably want Standard, but they don’t make it easy to find. Good thing I do: http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/group/index.html.

You may need to do a tiny bit of CNAME editing at your domain host to get set up, but the instructions provided by Google are clear and concise.

All done? Now you have a Gmail interface to your custom domain email address. Nice work, tiger! Oh, and don’t missGina Trapani’s great article on how to tweak your new Google Apps setup.

Google Apps Standard »

Website vs. mail app: The best of both worlds (Mailplane)

Gmail is subject to the same limitations as any web application. Although new tech like HTML5, CSS3 and web workers are squashing those limitations every day, they’re not gone yet. Additionally, a lot of folks think that mail tasks should happen in a mail tool, not a browsing tool. Academic? Maybe, but there’s something to it. Enter Mailplane.

Mailplane is a peculiar hybrid of web and desktop app. It’s essentially a smart wrapper for the Gmail web site, that provides some neat features like drag and drop attachments, multiple account support, formatted signatures, Growl notifications and an altogether more native feeling experience. I’ve been using Mailplane for a good two years with no complaints. Without it, I may not be quite so bullish on Gmail.

Mailplane is available for $24.95 (with a free trial) »

Gmail Labs: Multiple Inboxes

You may have noticed the Gmail labs section in the past, but it’s not unlikely that you skimmed the list and found very little of use. After all, it’s a big, long list of sometimes goofily-named items presented with no discernable order. There are some gems in there, though, if you look.

My absolute favorite is Multiple Inboxes. This feature divides your inbox screen into up to 5 boxes which you populate with search operators. For example, my main screen has the following boxes: Inbox, Starred, Projects, Drafts, Archive. This is invaluable in keeping my inbox at zero and my life in balance.

Here’s an official writeup of the feature »

Missing features? Not anymore! (Better Gmail 2)

I’ve recently made the move from Firefox to Safari 4 and, so far, I’m happy — but that’s a topic for another post. If you’re a Firefox user, you’ll want to grab Lifehacker’s Better Gmail 2 extension to seamlessly add powerful UI tweaks (row highlighting, custom icons, hide Gtalk, etc).

Read up on Better Gmail 2 »

Make it pretty (“Shiny” Theme)

The “Shiny” theme for Gmail not only makes the whole thing prettier, but does a better job of setting apart the more important information. You’ll like it, trust me.

I’ve always been a fan of those colorful “business culture” turns of phrase you hear so often in conference halls and agency pitches. You know, the ones that seek to reduce complex social, fiscal and strategic concepts to snappy, often vulgar vagaries. As designers become entrepreneurs become businessmen, they’re more likely hear and use these handy devices with some regularity. Even so, I get the feeling that their heyday may have ended before mine began. A turn of phrase so descriptive and vaguely sexual as “opening the kimono” seems to have a long tail.  Ooh, “The Long tail!”  There’s another one!

As yet another tiny part of my plan to leave an indelible and vaguely offensively shaped mark on the world, I have decide to author my own business culture metaphor. I fully expect it to be uttered with at least the frequency and double the shit-eating-grinniness of such luminaries as “one throat to choke”, or “paving the goat path”.

I give you: “Putting on the fedora.”

But let me explain.  This idea was inspired in equal parts by my work in technology product design and my life in and around Los Angeles (where fedoras have had a second heyday of their own as of late). The idea is based on two givens:

1) Justin Timberlake inarguably rocks the fedora. I don’t like it any more than you do, but he does. (Further: No one else does). (Even furthermore: An appreciation for the Timberlake/fedora combo is not an admission of homosexuality).

2) You probably wouldn’t want to be stood side-by-side with JT and have a jury of your peers compare the two of you.

If we accept the above as being relatively accurate, we can then safely extrapolate that it’s a good idea to not walk around pretending to be — or be like — Justin Timberlake, lest you suffer the cold, cruel truth of a direct comparison. So don’t put on a fedora, because you will not rock it.

And now to apply this concept to the trade: If you don’t want to be compared directly to Twitter, don’t make status your main game. Similarly, making business networking a significant part of your offering will likely cause comparisons to LinkedIn, which may be daunting to say the least.

This isn’t another article suggesting that you find a niche. Everyone knows that a blue ocean is the best place to find something new and exciting. This article is about not riding someone else’s niche — unless you’re truly prepared to compete.

I think what I may be suggesting is this: do it backwards. Have a steady footing based on more typical functionality before developing/promoting a niche sub-feature in a highly competitive area. You may lose your chance to make an initial impression as a trail-blazer, but you also reduce the risk of that initial impression falling short of “trail-blazer” and landing squarely on “me-too”. Maybe.

These three components combine to put a list of every concert or show that may interest you right in the palm of your iHand.

SonicLiving.com is a great events site not too dissimilar from Yahoo’s Upcoming. It’s not quite as slick and easy to use, but it does have a few features that Upcoming is still missing, most notably, the Wishlist. This feature ingests your entire iTunes library (mine is 160GB) and keeps a list of every artist you listen to. It then creates a calendar / hCal / RSS feed of every appearance by any of those artists within a certain distance of your home. This calendar is separate from your “I’m Interested” calendar which includes only the shows you click to add.

Simply set up your account at SonicLiving, scan your iTunes library, and subscribe to the calendar feed in iCal. The next time you sync up your iPhone, you’ll have all the goods. This is all fairly obvious stuff, what’s remarkable about it is the List View on the iPhone.

This view just happens to be incredibly conducive to scanning through a bunch of upcoming shows and planning out your evenings. Also remarkable is the set-it-and-forget-it nature of event subscriptions. This thing updates itself, and is limited only by how often you sync your phone. I have honestly been going out more since I got my iPhone. I guess owe it a drink.

It’s apparently not live yet, or at least it’s not visible to all users, but Amazon seems to be preparing to release a new version of the site.

I saw the new page briefly yesterday afternoon. After taking a few moments to appreciate the category menu and the realignment of the header, I clicked on the “We’ve been remodeling” link in the top-right corner. I was taken to a page describing the redesign, but with the old header and menu. Sure enough, when I went back to the homepage I was greeted by the old design.

The new look seems like a big improvement and I’ll be anxious to check it out when it goes live.

The new iLife suite is about to hit the streets, and with it comes an iPhoto update. This is good news for those of us who are both photo junkies and organization freaks. iPhoto is obviously the de facto solution for organizing your photos on a mac, but it’s not without it’s quirks (I’m looking at you, keywords). I’ve developed my own method for pseudo-tagging images in iPhoto that I believe to be a much simpler alternative to Apple’s wacky packed-in solution. It’s so simple, in fact, that it never occurred to me to write it up. Several people I’ve shown it to have actually found it quite useful, so I agreed to write this post. Then I forgot. Then they released a new iPhoto. Oops.

So, I give you, several years later than would have been helpful, Escapist’s Guide To Sane Tagging In iPhoto.

The Problem

So far, iPhoto has featured a keyword scheme that could most kindly be described as… “unique”.

To begin with, you need to predefine all of the keywords you plan to use across your entire library inside the iPhoto Preferences panel. This adds complexity to the simplest task associated with keywords: applying one to an image.

The next oddity is that you need to open up a special Keywords pane in the main view in order to apply or query keywords.

The ability to add and remove keywords from your search is very cool, but in my opinion, not worth all the tomfoolery. This truly is a new way of using keywords, but not really a suitable was of using tags.

I guess they got the terminology right.

The Solution

Since iPhoto uses OS X’s standard search-as-you-type, it’s quick and easy to find anything in your library with a descriptive title and/or comments. Adding verbose comments to each image is probably not the best option, but you could certainly toss some quick and dirty, descriptive terms into that there comment field and treat them like tags! Right away you’ve just bought yourself the ability to work with tags without going into your preferences or pulling up the special keywords pane in the main view. This process should seem familiar to anyone used to working with tags online at sites like Flickr and YouTube.

I prefix each of my pseudo-tags with a colon to help set them apart and to increase search accuracy. Searching for “:button” will only return items I’ve “tagged”, and not items that happen to have the string “button” in the title or description. Some of you programming nerds out there might recognize this as a fairly common way to be able to treat a string as a symbol without actually defining a variable. Turns out, that’s exactly what we’re doing.

For my most common tags, I set up a handful of smart albums that self-populate with certain tags. For instance, my “Buttons” album has a rule that automatically grabs any images which have the string “:button” in their comments fields. It’s basically a saved query and gives the same result as typing “:button” into the search field. This way, though, I get a list of all my most common tags and one-click access to each. All of this, again, without any need to dive into the iPhoto Preferences or open the Keywords pane.

So, that’s it. Now that you don’t need it, there it is.

Now let’s all go download our iLife 08 updates and forget any of this ever happened.

I know, I know. Joost was the next big thing. The hype was there, the idea was there, and the guys behind it are obviously some of the sharper minds in the game. Clearly it’s too soon to write Joost off entirely, but I get the feeling that the first beta has left a lot of people a bit clammy.

VeohTV, on the other hand, has every opportunity to not just beat expectations, but to leave them bloodied and panting. It’s not that expectations were low, it’s that expectations were different, mainly because Veoh has brand recognition as a social video site. A decent one, but not a leader in the field, and not a wave-maker (despite the use of peer-to-peer technology for distributing higher quality content). Their only recent press has been regarding funding. This spring, Veoh raised $12.5M in series B funding and added Michael Eisner to the board. This set the stage for something big, but Veoh was decidedly hush-hush about it. Shortly thereafter, VeohTV was announced, as well as an additional round of series C funding in the amount of $26M.

Same Space, Different Approach

Joost looks like computer powered television. VeohTV looks like online video on your TV. While Joost has attempted to create a new paradigm, VeohTV has sought to improve upon the existing online video experience and possibly bring it to the living room. Joost made some bold decisions when it came to interface design. Shiny blobjects, prisms and refracted light, elements scattered across the four corners of the display and video playing behind menus a la a set-top receiver or DVR. The icons are all single color and very simple shapes, which probably improves visibility on lower resolution TVs. I never experienced this interface on a TV from the couch, but I think that’s probably where it shines.

VeohTV takes a more conventional approach, not shying away from windows, boxes, tabs and dropdown menus. These metaphors have worked well in computing and have increasingly made their way into the interfaces of home theater devices and consumer electronics. Still, I can’t help but think there’s a better metaphor out there somewhere. Kudos to Joost for making the effort, but with the majority of users getting their first taste on a computer screen and not a TV, VeohTV’s more conservative approach may make a better first impression.

The Content

What the hell am I gonna watch? Joost could promise that all the content in the world was on the way, but when beta users logged on, there was nothing to keep them engaged. Of the handful of not-ready-for-prime-time programs they were able to muster, only one interested me. They’ve improved the roster somewhat since then, but for early adopters, the damage had been done.

Within a minute of downloading and installing VeohTV via Parallels, I was watching the season finale of Heroes in full screen on my second monitor. Thumbing through the rest of the channels, I saw a number of high-profile programs from most of the networks. With Eisner on the board and a lot of cash in their pockets, Veoh has had the tools to make the kinds of high-level distribution deals their competition may have found difficult or impossible. I now have a viable source of TV content that I didn’t have before.

The Extras

The Veoh Player was always pretty cool. In addition to giving you a decent playback experience, it helped you interact with your Veoh account by managing uploads and downloads, allowing you to manage your Veoh content from your desktop. This functionality have been folded into the VeohTV client, as well as some rudimentary torrent functionality and a kind of odd news / start page section. Although a lot has been crammed into this app, it looks like Veoh has kept their eyes on the prize and given priority to the discovery and playback of both premium and UGC content.

The Competition

I am a huge fan of Democracy and have been from the start. Their recent attempts at bridging the gap between mRSS reader and pseudo-IPTV have been noble, but perhaps lack flair. Of course, they haven’t had $28M and Michael Eisner in their corner. They are still a remarkable product and a viable player in the game.

Also tossing their hat in the ring is Babelgum, another windows-only, peer-to-peer solution for distributing TV programs. I’ll have to find some time to check them out, as I’ve only heard tell that their product is a good one. All reports indicate that the platform and client are more than adequate, but content is, predictably, lacking.

For today, it’s clear that VeohTV has the spotlight, and I’ll be looking forward to seeing what they do with it.

VeohTV is currently in invite-only beta.

Request your invite here: http://www.veoh.com/veohTV/veohTvIntro.html.