Thought Garage

Google introduces a new feature on Gmail, called “ Motion ”. Now you can use your body gestures to communicate with GMail. The mouse and keyboard were invented before the Internet even existed. Since then, countless technological advancements have allowed for much more efficient human computer interaction. Why then do we continue to use outdated technology? Introducing Gmail Motion -- now you can control Gmail with your body. Don’t forget to Try it out. You will be pleasantly surprised at the feature !! If you encounter any problems while trying it out, remember to check your calendar.

I work in a company where we develop software for Wireless carriers and all our software is expected to provide service availability at 99.999% (Five Nines). That means just about 5  minutes outage for an entire year. And its really a big deal if that target is missed (and result in hefty penalties). And as consumers of a telephone service or a cell phone we expect that cell phone works all the time. You never know when we need it. On the web though its a different story. For many services we are quite fine with outages now and then. Unless you are a business consumer and your business depends on having an internet portal up and running all the time ( like Dell.com or Amazon.com), an outage normally doesn’t affect anything. We regularly see ‘Maintenance or Scheduled Outage’ Notifications on most web applications and we thank them for the notice. As per Gmail’s official blog , Gmail service availability is at 99.9%, which means about one and half a minute per day outage or about...

Google announced Gmail offline access yesterday, I read on the web different interpretations of what it is and what it means for your offline email activities like checking and composing emails even when offline. Well, if you are currently using Outlook or any other desktop counter parts, there is nothing new on the table. Gmail was one of the first providers to provide free POP/IMAP access. So if you have outlook or any other desktop email application, you could readily access Gmail and compose emails while offline. This functionality was not new. This new offer is for those who do not use any desktop email client applications like outlook but only use Gmail in a browser.  Gmail with the help of Google gears now can download all email and store in the browser add-on (gears) to provide offline access to your emails. It will even allow you to compose an email and send it when connected to the Internet. This functionality as such is nothing special if you already accessing Gmail ...

Google is very well known for this. Gmail now comes with a custom time. That means you can send an email as if you had sent it in the past. Not only that, you can request such a way that the email will be marked as 'read' by the recipient. AAHHaaaa!   I am about cry 'cheating' cheating. Instead, I realized, today is April 1st.   Wonderful, Googlers !! How do I use it? Just click "Set custom time" from the Compose view. Any email you send to the past appears in the proper chronological order in your recipient's inbox. You can opt for it to show up read or unread by selecting the appropriate option. Is there a limit to how far back I can send email? Yes. You'll only be able to send email back until April 1, 2004, the day we launched Gmail. If we were to let you send an email from Gmail before Gmail existed, well, that would be like hanging out with your parents before you were born -- crazy talk. How does it work? Gmail utili...