Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

Google has recently added a super mega cool feature to Gmail – multiple inboxes.  For me, it was an instant boost in productivity and huge improvement in the way I handle email. However, while I was sharing my excitement with friends and co-workers, I’ve received quite a few cold looks and “so what?”s.

So, what’s so cool about multiple inboxes?  Here is how I enjoy them so far.

I’ve setup forwarding on all my email accounts so that all messages end up in the single Gmail account of mine.  This means that I have the same mailbox for personal emails, work emails, blog related emails, spam, and so on and so forth.  All that email is handled with a multitude of labels and filters.  And overall it works pretty well.

However, there was a little annoyance in my daily routine.  As part of my job I have to review and monitor Subversion commits from several programmers that work in our office.  Commit notifications come to me in the form of emails, and since they are rather high priority, they are labeled automatically, but not archived.  They stay in the main inbox until I read and archive them manually.  Also, as part of my consulting work for another company, I have to go through their commits as well.  These too are labeled separately, but end up in the main inbox.  And, additionally, I am using Gmail as a task manager for things that should be done eventually.  For that I have emails with tasks, labeled separately, and starred.   Not a huge mess, but not the ideal solution, especially when it mixes up with direct messages from work and friends.

Once Gmail got the multiple inboxes feature, I modified my filters to archive commit messages from both companies automatically (but not mark them as read).  Then I created three additional inboxes – one for tasks, and two for commit messages.  The tasks inbox lists all starred messages with a certain label.  Commit inboxes list messages with labels for each company.  Now I have my main inbox for direct messages from friends and work, and the rest of the things that I need to keep an eye on are right there, in front of me, but re-organized a bit to give me some breathing room.
With this new feature I can keep my main inbox message count much closer to zero, while still have some lose ends in case I need to argue over a commit or keep a few more things on the task list.  Excellento!

Big thanks to Gmail team – well done.

Many of us, Gmail users, have been waiting a really long time for this, but now the wait is over.  Gmail blog announced task manager / todo list in Gmail via Labs extension.

We put your tasks in the same kind of window as chats, so they’re visible while you’re scanning your inbox, reading mail, or searching (and in Settings, too!). Just pop your list out into a new window to use Tasks outside of Gmail.

To enable Tasks, go to Settings, click the Labs tab (or just click here if you’re signed in). Select “Enable” next to “Tasks” and then click “Save Changes” at the bottom. Then, after Gmail refreshes, on the left under the “Contacts” link, you’ll see a “Tasks” link. Just click it to get started.

Excellent news for this morning.

Web Worker Daily is being extra helpful recently.  Via one of their posts I learned about Read It Later Firefox extension.  It’s simple and, as many simple things – genius!  It adds two buttons to your Firefox toolbar, which you can use to control your “I don’t have time for it now, but I want to read it later” list.  Great idea, much needed tool, and brilliant implementation – that’s what I can say about it.  It has all, and just enough of, functionality that I’d expect from such an extension.

Go check it out!  There is even a video demonstration on how it can be used. Instant favorite.

Some time ago Google acquired JotSpot – a wiki-like web service. There weren’t much news about it since then though. It was obvious that JotSpot will join Google’s office applications in one form or another. But details and time lines weren’t clear. Slashdot runs a follow-up post, saying that JotSpot will replace Google Pages tool. It will be called Google Sites. Here is a relevant quote:

Based on JotSpot collaboration tools, Sites will allow business to set up intranets, project management tracking, customer extranets, and any number of custom sites based on multi-user collaboration.

Obviously, this is something to wait for. There is a demand for a tool like this among small companies, and existing solutions could use a little competitive push.

Update: More details about Google Apps plans for 2008 at this Techcrunch post.

Via this post at Web Worker Daily, I learned about Morning Coffee extension for Firefox.

Keeps track of daily routine websites and opens them in tabs.
This extension lets you organize websites by day and open them up simultaneously as part of your daily routine. This is really handy if you read sites that update on a regular schedule (like webcomics, weekly columns, etc.).

I haven’t tried it yet, but it sure sounds promising.  I don’t close my browser very often these days, but I know a lot of people who do.  Many of those people also don’t use any RSS readers to keep updated.  Instead they revisit their favourite web sites once in a while.  Morning Coffee seems to be the perfect extension for them.

If you are still not interested, check the link above for excellent screenshots, which show exactly how this thing works.

Here is a productivity tip from the you-don’t-want-to-do-this department:

You don’t want to wait for a filesystem check to finish, when it’s working on a 200 GByte partition.

Hopefully, this tip explains the 5-hour downtime that the server experienced from today’s morning and until now.