Mailplane, a Better Gmail Experience

Posted on September 4, 2007
Filed Under Innovation, Interesting Stuff |

I really like Mailplane for accessing my Gmail account. This is a great example of how someone can take advantage of the services nature of current generation applications to provide a better user experience than what the vendor themselves makes available. Take a look at the recent features added to the application:

IMEDIA BROWSER
No need to open iPhoto, iTunes, or iMovie to send attachments: There is a brand-new iMedia browser right inside Mailplane. Open it and then drag and drop photos, movies, or music to your message.

MAC ADDRESS BOOK
Insert email addresses directly from your Mac address book into your TO, CC, BCC, or message field. It works much like the text snippets panel:

FORMAT RICH TEXT
There is a new "Format" menu to make text bold (Cmd-B), italic (Cmd-I), or underlined (Cmd-U). Quickly access colors (Cmd-Option-C), too. And finally center (Cmd-|), left align (Cmd-{), or right align (Cmd-}) paragraphs.

CREATE NEW GMAIL ACCOUNT
New to Gmail? Need to create a new Gmail account? Like to try Google Apps? Just press the "Create new Gmail account" in either the Authentication window or Accounts preferences.

CLEAN ALL DOWNLOADS
Download window: There is a new button to clean the list of finished and cancelled downloads.

INSERT FILE
Press (Cmd-Shift-F) to directly attach a file. The command is located in the "Mail->Insert" menu. Both the dock menu and notifier menu contain a new "Send message with file…" items.

One could argue that these are the kind of features that are possible with a POP mail client, but that misses the point. Mailplane isn’t delivering a new mail client, it’s packaging the existing gmail app with new features and a dedicated browser UI to supercharge Gmail, not replace it. If Google updates Gmail’s existing UI you will see the update immediately in Mailplane, and still benefit from the Mailplane provided features. Fast forward to Apollo and Silverlight and we should see some amazing applications as a result of the capabilities those frameworks provide.

Makeover hacks is something I wrote about a few months ago, and SAP’s Project Muse is what originally inspired me to think about alternative user interfaces delivered by third parties. I really think this is going to be an emerging area as 1) the technology permits it, 2) the number of areas for new apps is few, and 3) there are few apps that can’t benefit from a UI makeover.

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