Gmail 2.0 saw some nice design updates but the overall look of Gmail has been the same. But, thanks to a Firefox extension called Stylish, it is possible for a Firefox user to completely overhaul the look of Gmail.

Stylish is a Firefox extension that can load user created scripts that can change the look and feel of any website. Just like Greasemonkey changing the user-interface options via user-created Javascript, Stylish lets you change the look and feel via CSS. There is a huge number of popular Stylish scripts out there. (look at the Related posts section in the bottom for my collection of Greasemonkey scripts for Gmail 2.0, Google Reader, etc.)

Here is how you can pimp your Gmail in 2 easy steps:

Step 1 - Install Stylish Extension:

Grab the Stylish Firefox extension from the newly updated Firefox add-ons website and install it. Restart your browser.

Step 2 - Install Re-designed Gmail Stylish Script

Scroll down in this page until you see a title named ‘Install Options’. Install the script and login to Gmail. Voila!

That’s it. Enjoy the new look.

Why would I want this?

• If you are looking at your monitor all day long, darker themes are supposedly easy on your eyes
• The new look just rocks. Look at the screenshots.
• You can always turn this off with a click and go back to your old ways or even switch back and forth

The script is being constantly updated so check back every few days to load the new version as the bugs are getting squashed. The comments in that page indicate the ‘Remember the Milk’ extension as incompatible but I am using it with no problems. There are many Stylish/Greasemonkey scripts for Gmail but this has to be the best one so far.

Boy, it looks gorgeous. Now, here are some screenshots of my inbox

I have just recently adopted the Inbox Zero methodology coupled with GTDInbox Firefox extension. It really is a lot less stressful to look my Inbox now.

Sorry my posting has been light lately. Just busy with some projects and stuff around the house.

Have a great weekend!

Hello newcomer, did I say welcome to ShanKri-la yet? Before you move on, just wanted to thank you for visiting and we hope you come back and see us again!

That’s right. Move over Meebo. Move over Yahoo Messenger, GTalk.

Digsby on the covers will look like one of the dozen multi-protocol Instant Messenger clients out there. But, this is by far the best integration I have seen among them. I am not just going to say that but actually tell you why. Garry Conn asked me on Twitter why I liked it so much and here you go, Garry!

Digsby integrates not just your IM accounts but also your email accounts and your social network accounts like Twitter, Facebook and MySpace.

Digsby Features

Instant messenger Features

• Support for multiple IM networks. Nothing new here. It supports Google, Yahoo, MSN, AIM, ICQ and Jabber.
• Tabbed conversations. You can chat with multiple buddies with just one window.
• If your buddy is on multiple IMs, you can merge their accounts into one in Digsby.
• Your buddy has a weird number in his/her name? Give him an alias.
• This is the best part. You can have Digsby minimized but new messages will popup and you can reply from within the popup and get back to what you were doing!
• Setup various alerts for individual buddies like a sound and/or a popup when a friend logs in or logs out.
• Video/Audio chat using TokBox

(picture credit: digsby.com)

Email Features

• Supports Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, AOL/AIM Mail, IMAP and POP accounts
• On login, a InfoBox popup shows you new email messages and you can scroll within the popup to see all messages.
• A taskbar icon for the email account showing unread messages.
• Clicking on the icon, popups a box with latest message and you can Mark as read, delete, archive messages without ever opening up the browser. You could also go to the Inbox or the Compose screen right from here.
• You can send email directly from your Digsby Contact List from the IM window.

Social Network

• Get Facebook/MySpace news feed and updates on Digsby
• Best Twitter integration I have experienced so far - Timeline view, replies, direct messages. Plus, every contact looks just like the twitter web interface with the Favorite star, a reply icon, etc.
• Update your status easily and new Tweets popup (configurable) in a nice little window.
• Support for more networks coming soon.

Digsby has many more features to list here. And did I say it looks gorgeous with capital G in Vista?

Sometimes, applications gets overloaded with features and casual users will get lost. Not with Digsby. Every feature has been implemented very naturally and probably better than the app maker themselves in certain instances. Personalization options are another option you have to see it to appreciate it. Just the whole look and feel is very user friendly.

Download Digsby

With this software in beta, I haven’t had it crash even once in the last 2 days of full use. I installed it for my wife and she is in love with it too. I know I am writing this with rose-colored glasses but I haven’t found a single thing to complain about. But, again I have used it only for a couple of days and this is more like my first impressions and I have been known in the past to change my allegiance.

Nevertheless, this is a great piece of software that’s availabel for free. If you are a Mac/Linux user though, you’ll have to wait a little longer but they promise to have one for us nerds soon.

Update: 6/26

After using it for 3 months, Digsby still rocks my world with its user friendly features. I love the ability to delete my emails right from the Gmail notification window and keeping just the emails I want to read when I open my inbox. At build 30, it even integrates Facebook chat nicely but I am still waiting on their promised Linux version. Patiently.

It’s no secret GTalk client is for Windows only. Linux and Mac users have so far sought out other IM alternatives thanks to GTalk using Jabber protocol for their IM client. I use openSuSE 10.3 as my primary desktop and have had trouble getting some of the excellent IM clients like Pidgin to work behind a proxy.

Thanks to GChat in Gmail, I have been able to use IM even if it has to be within Gmail. I even used a Greasemonkey script for Gmail 2.0 to alert me with the tab flashing when there is a new IM. However, I did find this a little annoying to keep going back to Gmail to check on IM messages. Because, everytime I go into Gmail to see IM messages, I would also end up checking my Inbox and before I know 20-30 minutes would have vanished. This kind of goes against my goal of trying to increase productivity with all these web apps and hacks.

So, I started to run Google Talk gadget in my browser sidebar with a browser bookmarklet. This freed me up from using GChat in Gmail to GTalk in my browser sidebar.

You’d think I’d be content at this point. Not.

Run Google Talk (GTalk) gadget with Mozilla Prism

Mozilla Prism released their 0.9 version last week and I am smitten by the usefulness of it. If you haven’t heard of it, check out my Mozilla Prism review. In that post, I also show how you can run it from behind a proxy at work or school. Since it’s a beta version and a work in progress, they don’t have a straightforward setting for proxy in it’s options yet.

If you don’t want to click over, Prism is a prototype from Mozilla Labs which lets you split your web applications from the web and run it in your desktop as a standalone application. They even allow separate profiles for each Prism app which means you can have multiple Gmail accounts open in different Prism web apps in your desktop.

I have taken this idea and created a Prism web app for the Google Talk gadget and now I have a GTalk client like app running standalone in my desktop!

Here’s how you do it:

1. Install Mozilla Prism - Windows, Mac & Linux installers (v0.9 at the time of writing)
2. Create a new web app with url https://talkgadget.google.com/talkgadget/client
3. Give it a name and choose to save it on desktop
4. You are done!

If you are a Mac or a Linux user, you can now run GTalk standalone in your computer with Mozilla Prism. If you are already using Firefox 3, with this Prism Firefox extension you can just open this url (or any other web app) in Firefox 3 and then directly create a desktop application for GTalk right from your browser.

I see that Prism has an option to install extensions. It doesn’t look like it’ll accept Firefox extensions as it complains that they are not compatible. I even tried turning off compatibility checking but didn’t have much success. I would love to hear if someone has succeeded installing extensions with Prism as that would open up a whole new world of options to these Prism web apps. I am sure it will be obvious in the coming releases. But, I want to make it work today!

GTalk makes it the fourth web app I run in my Linux desktop with Prism after Gmail, Google Reader and Remember the Milk.

What other web application do you see yourself running on your desktop with Mozilla Prism?

If you are a web application lover, you probably have accounts everywhere in different web services such as Flickr, YouTube, del.icio.us, etc. And it could be incredibly hard to remember which service has something you saved or marked as a favorite or bookmarked or dugg or shared via RSS feed. The information you need is with you but spread around in various services with no real structure.

Sometimes, it might be easier to search in Google than finding it from your own favorites beating the whole purpose of saving it in the first place. In other times, you may not get so lucky to remember the right search phrase to land on the exact you link you need.

SecondBrain aims at combining all your social networking web accounts and bring all the data together in one place. It works by pulling data from your various accounts into your SecondBrain account. It will become your repository of data from various web services pulled together so you can organize them, share them and search them to find what you need.

How does it work?

A lot of the social networking sites and web applications provide public API’s or atleast provide RSS feeds for a user’s content so that someone interested can follow the feeds or interact with the data from elsewhere.
SecondBrain works with public API’s where possible and uses RSS feeds to pull in updated content for an user in other cases. Once added, SecondBrain will keep your account synchronized automatically. Some of the popular services it can aggregate content from at the time of writing this post are:

• Blogger
• Delicious
• Digg
• Flickr
• Google Docs
• Google Reader
• Picasa
• Twitter
• WordPress
• YouTube
• ZohoDocs

After importing your content, you can mark them private or public. Plus, SecondBrain can import tags from various services like Flickr, YouTube etc and you can organize your entire content by tags and collections.

Some thoughts

I like some of the integration such as with Twitter where it imports your content as well as let you post to Twitter from SecondBrain. You could also bookmark urls you come across directly in SecondBrain or via a browser bookmarklet. (added to my favorite browser bookmarklets)

I would like to see some more of my favorite sites integrated into SecondBrain like StumbleUpon, Facebook, PhotoBucket, etc. I am sure they are on to it as I am probably not the first one to request this either.

I like the idea of having an Internet content repository from all my favorite services so I can go back find what I am looking for easily. Plus, I can share all my content with everyone from one place instead of having to find and share with my friends in every service. You can find your friends from your Gmail contacts or invite them easily. One think they have improve on is to tell us in advance that we can only invite 10 people at a time. I can understand why they do this but I just quit with the inviting out of frustration as I spent a good 15 minutes going through long list of contacts and selecting the folks I wanted to invite only to find that I can’t invite more than 10 people at the same time! Atleast I am able to warn you about that.

If you sign up for a SecondBrain account, you can follow my updates at Karthik’s SecondBrain page.

Mozilla Prism is an open source initiative from Mozilla Labs which attempts to bring web applications from the browser to run directly from your desktop. In Mozilla’s words,

Prism is an open source cross-platform prototype of functionality that lets users split web applications out of the browser and run them directly on the desktop.

Web applications like Gmail, Google Reader, etc. are more and more mimicking the functionality we have gotten used to in desktop applications such as right click contxt menu, drag and drop interface, etc. But, you still need to fire up a browser, go to the website and login to use the web application. It does give you the flexibility to access from anywhere with a browser but takes a bit of time if you are using a desktop day in and day out to go through all these steps to get to your favorite web applications.

Mozilla Prism attempts to bridge that gap and splits the web application from the browser and lets you run a web application like Gmail straight from your desktop. It helps web applications act like desktop applications with the benefit of being on the web without the web application developer having to do anything to offer that to an user, you.

Prism is cross-platform and is availble for Windows, Linux and Mac. You will have the option of having a location bar, status bar or the location bar in the web application window. I just include the status bar alone to see the links when I am hovering and hide the other 2 to maximize my screen real estate.

New Features in Prism 0.9

Prism 0.9 was just released last week with some major updates and new features. A few of those are:

• Simpler installation and desktop integration capabilities
• Browser integration with Firefox 3 through an extension Prism for Firefox 3. This extension lets you split a web application you are on directly out of Firefox without installing and maintaining Prism as a separate application. You will get a ‘Convert Website to Application’ option in the Tools menu with this extension.
• Ability to pick an icon to represent the desktop application (or pick it from the web by default)
• Run each webapp in its own profile - in other words, you can have 2 desktop Gmail webapps for 2 accounts simultaneously (link to old post)

If you’d like to learn more about it, check out the Mozilla Prism Wiki. Here is a screenshot of creating a web application for my favorite online task manager.

Running Prism from behind a Proxy

At work, I was first unable to run it from behind our proxy and found a helpful tip in Ubuntu forums on how to do this. Here is what I did to get Prism working from behind the proxy. This involves editing a all.js file in the Prism installation.

1. Open the <install-directory>/prism/xulrunner/greprefs.js in your favorite editor
2. Find and edit this line from:
   pref(”network.proxy.type”, 5);
   to
   pref(”network.proxy.type”, 1);
3. Then add your proxy information in the following lines: (enter your own ip & port there)
   pref(”network.proxy.http”, “127.0.0.10″);
   pref(”network.proxy.http_port”, 80);
   pref(”network.proxy.ssl”, “127.0.0.10″);
   pref(”network.proxy.ssl_port”, 443);
4. That’s it!

I am already running my favorite web apps like Gmail, Google Reader, Remember the Milk via Prism from my desktop. One downside right now is that I am missing my Greasemonkey scripts for Gmail & Google Reader. But, with Prism being built on Mozilla’s platform, I wonder if there will support for Firefox extensions. If I find out how or if it’s even possible, I will write another post soon.

Also, I am yet to see how it affects cpu & memory usage by running multiple Prism applications. Although I am getting rather spoiled with our new addition of 2GB memory to our Windows XP desktop making it a 3GB RAM! Firefox can consume a gig of ram as fas as I am concerned and I can test even more extensions to share with you without affecting it’s performance.

Bookmarklets are tiny useful javascript nuggets that can be easily dragged and dropped to the bookmark toolbar in a modern browser such as Firefox, Opera, etc. They can be used to quickly perform a task without having to visit the website/web service with just a single click.

I have compiled a list of bookmarklets that I find useful and use regularly.

• Stumble This! - StumbleUpon Toolbar less stumbling link. Very useful if you don’t want any other extra features that the toolbar provides. Become a power stumbler quickly! [via Firefox Facts]
• Gmail This! - One of my most used bookmarklets. Opens up a compose window with the url I am at in the email body and the title of the page in the subject. Based on a reader request, i previously showed how to create a custom gmailthis bookmarklet out of this for your most frequent contacts.
• Share This! - A very useful WordPress plugin also comes as a bookmarklet that lets you share a link via different social networks or by email.
• Digg Submit - Submit a site to Digg easily with this bookmarklet
• TwitThis - Send a quick Tweet if you have a Twitter account. (my Twitter account)
• TinyUrl! - Make a long url a short one with TinyUrl with this bookmarklet
• Subscribe.. (Google Reader) - Subscribe to a website/blog’s RSS feed with Google Reader in one click. You could also try a Google Greasemonkey script to do this automatically when you hit any RSS feed.
• Analytics Today (Google Analytics) - This bookmarklet will take you to your Google Analytics account and show you today’s stats for your site. You have to edit this url and insert your Google Analytics id (you’ll see it in the location bar when logged in) where it says .
  
• RSSFwd - It’s a bookmarklet for a service that lets you have any RSS feed emailed straight to your inbox.
• PassPack It! - This is a bookmarklet for my favorite online password manager program, PassPack. Once setup, it lets you quickly login to websites with your saved username/passwords.
• Add to RTM! - A bookmarklet to add tas
• Google Talk (gadget) - Opens the Google Talk gadget. Read how to open Google Talk gadget in Sidebar here.
• Enlarge Text Areas - Use this to enlarge text areas in forms in any website or blog.
• Zoom images in - This one lets you zoom into images in any website
• Map your Flickr Photos - A very cool bookmarklt that enables mapping, geocoding and geotagging directly in your Flickr photo page [via Sumaato]
• All-In-One Video - The all-in-one bookmarklet supports YouTube, Google Video, Metacafe, Myspace, Break.com, Putfile, Dailymotion, Sevenload, MyVideo.de and Clipfish.de. Bookmark the link below and access the bookmark when looking at videos on any of the supported websites. The bookmarklet will give you the download-link(s) for the video you were looking at.
• SecondBrain - You can easily add websites to your SecondBrain account. (3/13/08)
• PricePinx - Just highlight the price in a product page and use this bookmarklet to receive price drop alerts from ProcePinx. (3/13/08)

A great resource I found while collecting bookmarklets I could use and that might be of interest to you, is Jesse’s Bookmarklet site. He has nicely categorized various bookmarklets into different sections.

Do you know of any other bookmarklets that’ll make this list better? Let me know in the comments and I’ll add them to this list. As the other posts in the Top Stuff series (look below for other posts), this list will be an evolving one with updates as I come across useful ones.

I have become a big fan of opening some of my most used web services/applications in my browser sidebar after starting to use a widescreen monitor. It gives me good use of the extra space I have in the browser with most sites I frequent being fixed width and don’t really have to be as wide as the monitor.

Here are a few things I open in a sidebar right now:

• Open Google Calendar in browser sidebar
• Open Google Docs in browser sidebar
• Open Remember the Milk in browser sidebar

Open Google Talk Gadget in Sidebar

I have been using the Gchat within Gmail for a while now. I have the Faviconize tab Firefox Extension and the Gmail Favicon Alerts Greasemonkey script to get the Firefox tab flashing when there is activity in Gchat. But, I would have to either keep my eye on the tabs (I tend to have a dozen open) or miss someone’s IM for a while until I go back into Gmail.

I recently came across a cool bookmarklet for Google Talk gadget and figured I could use that to open the gadget in my browser sidebar. I love this as the Google Talk gadget offers a few more options than the Gchat in Gmail. You get a ‘Call’, ‘Group Chat’ & offline message (Gchat goes to compose window when a contact is offline) with Google Talk gadget. Plus, chat sessions with different contacts appear in neat tabs. When you get a new message, it creates an easy to notice yellow message blurb even if you are on a different tab.

Also, you get to see your contact’s profile picture in the gadget if they have one.

Here is how you do it:

1. Drag this link to your browser bookmark bar GoogleTalk! OR right click and copy the location and save it as a bookmark
2. Right click on the saved bookmark and open Properties
3. Choose ‘open in sidebar’ option (Firefox & smiliar browsers.. not sure if it’ll work in IE)

That’s it! In Firefox, you can use F4 to toggle the GTalk gadget sidebar window. (Update: This is true only if you are using All-In One Sidebar Firefox extension as that gives you a hotkey to toggle sidebar)

I realize this post isn’t for everyone but with wide-screen monitors replacing the regular ones, I figured you might find it useful.

I love to find new things and would love to hear how you go about using Gchat/GTalk. I am sure this is not the only way and I am always open to new ideas.