Christian Geekery

I have always wanted to see web apps take off, but have been disappointed with the reality every time I try working with one. When Gmail came out I started to get my hopes up thinking that perhaps we have reached the point where the “Zero-Pound” computer was finally starting to become a reality. I then started using gmail as my backup mail client, and soon discovered that the Gmail’s spam filters are second to none. At this point started sending all my mail through Gmail and popping my mail from Gmail to mail.app, and soon after they allowed me to send mail as if I was using any of my other email addresses, and I started using Gmail’s smtp servers to handle my outgoing email. But wait, there’s more!

At this point I was still relying on my local apps to do all my heavy lifting. Sure there was Google docs, but it was clunky, and I only used it from time to time to create documents that I wanted to share. Over time Google improved Docs with templates, better spread sheet features, and more. Still I was using my comfortable apps for mail, documents, and task management most of the time.

Finally I am getting to the point. Yesterday Dan Shafer pointed out that Google just updated the look and feel of Gmail and showed me a couple of other newish features that had slipped by. Dan has been using Gmail as his primary client for some time now and seems very happy with it, so I took another look and found myself taking the next step. I spent some time finding a theme that I liked, added some new lab features, and… I turned off Mail.App, pulled it from the Dock and Auto-Startup.

So far so good. One of the lab features that I enabled is to bring links to my Google docs to the Gmail side bar. This makes my Gmail tab a pretty nice gateway for most of my office needs. Next I will talk about how I am trying to implement GTD (Getting Things Done) from Gmail using another web based application that I stumbled upon.