Four years ago, I signed up for Gmail. Back then it was still invite only and I managed to get an invite from a “Gmail Swap” site by offering the password to “The Blue Room” flash puzzle game that one of my friends had found out. I was quite proud of this because the password was basically common knowledge if you googled “blue room password” yet it still seemed attractive enough to be worth a Gmail invite.

I’m sure you already know how much of a Gmail fanboy I am, and that’s basically 90% spam filter, 5% lots-o-storage and 5% “conversations”. So rather than write a post blabbing on about how great Gmail is, I thought I’d try out some of the new Gmail Labs thingies. And in the process, I started to realise that Gmail still has a long way to go.

• Custom date formats: Very welcome feature. Finally, I can have the date in dd/mm/yyyy while still using US English as my language. But it only affects dates on “really old” emails, the ones Gmail deems to be old enough to display the year as well. Newer dates are still in the “Jun 16″ format.
• Random signature: I’m not a big user of random quote signatures, but I know certain people who will be very excited about this feature. Unfortunately, it only pulls quotes from an RSS feed, so that’s an extra step for users who haven’t already set that up.
• View messages in fixed width font: Good idea in theory but to activate you select from a dropdown on each email, and that’s one extra unnecessary click. Would be good if you could blanket enable for all plain text messages, perhaps. The option affects HTML messages, overriding style fonts. I’m not sure if I like this behaviour. It seems non-compliant to me in some way. I also find the font too small and quite thin but that’s Courier New for you. Would like to be able to select a custom font.
• Quick links: Interesting. You can bookmark certain views of Gmail, like searches etc. This could be useful, like Search Folders in Outlook which I find useful. But it could also quite easily backfire by illustrating just how clunky the interface can be sometimes.
• Superstars: More stars. It’s great how you just click to cycle through the different stars. Yes this is extra clicks, but they aren’t moving clicks which require targeting time, and that changes everything.
• Pictures in chat: I disable these in Gtalk anyway, so this gets a big fat “meh” from me.

So what do I really want to see in Gmail?

• A link next to the To, Cc, and Bcc boxes that lets you select from your contacts. At the moment, when I want to browse my contacts for people to send to, I use the autocomplete feature, typing “a”, “b”, “c”, etc. right up until “z” until I’ve gone through my whole address book. Efficient, this is not.
• Improved filter GUI. It’s OK, but currently we have mystery text boxes that do… what exactly? Does the search include the exact text I type, separate it into keywords, or what? Also needs the ability to have “does not include” through the GUI. You can’t expect users to dig up the list of operators in help.
• Stop saving blank drafts. This has been happening lately. I will go to compose an email, write nothing and it saves a blank email in my Drafts.
• Optional attachment reminder. If you write the word “attachment” or variants of this, then hit send but haven’t attached any files, the GUI prompts you with something like “It looks like you may have forgotten to attach a file, would you like to do it now?” Not an essential feature but one I’ve thought would be useful for a while now.
• Easier editing of Contacts. I’m getting used to the “click on field to edit” behaviour of MS Windows and now used in Flickr, so being able to do this in a giant grid of my Contacts would be nice.
• GUI overhaul. Call me picky but Gmail’s user interface is starting to feel like it’s just a collection of hacks, with this new feature tacked on here, and this new feature shoved in some free space there. One day I might do a proper analysis of the GUI but for now I’ll just say it needs some work.

Wow, this post has turned out to be way more cynical than I was anticipating but I think I’ve realised something. I still love Gmail, but for different reasons than when I first got it. Back in 2004, one whole gigabyte of email storage was ground breaking and “search your email like the web” seemed like it would be powerful. The conversation feature rocked out and still does. But now, I feel like the main reason I prefer Gmail over other providers is that I’m trapped by the awesome spam filter. Not so much trapped as too scared to use anything else for the fear of going back to the days of spam.

I’m really interested in trying Apple’s new mobileme service when it opens. Mainly for the user interface which is being plugged as being a desktop app on the web.

I recently found out about an awesome program that does for remote desktop what Hamachi does for VPN. It’s called TeamViewer and it lets you control someone else’s PC, and it JustWorks(tm). You (as the one providing support) download the “full version” while the client downloads the small, single .exe “customer version”. Both programs generate a unique session id and password. The customer reads theirs out to you over the phone, you type it into your TeamViewer and voila! Instant remote desktop. But it gets better, with the ability to tunnel over port 80 (by default) it gets around most firewalls easily. All traffic is encrypted and the whole package is free for non-commercial use.

As for performance, well I’ve only had a chance to try it out between my Mac and PC in the same house, and it seriously outperforms what I was previously using for “I’m-too-lazy-to-get-up-and-walk-6-metres-to-do-something-on-my-Mac” which was TightVNC connecting to Apple Remote Desktop. On a good day this would use 80% of my Mac’s CPU. PC-to-Mac TeamViewer uses a tiny amount of CPU (around 15% IIRC) so it makes me curious as to what it’s actually using for the remote desktop part. It “feels” like VNC in that the screen is divided into blocks and the cursor lags in the same way, but just performs way better.

There is the slight downside of needing someone at the other end to actually read out the session id and password, so it isn’t a completely unattended solution. But as someone who uses this type of remote support constantly at work, I find myself limited when trying to support non-work computers, such as those owned by relatives or friends. TeamViewer brings professional grade remote support to everyone, and it’s so simple to set up, it’s probably “Nanna Proof”.

There are some acid tests I’d like to perform but haven’t yet had a chance to:

• What’s the performance like over dial-up (at one end)?
• Can it make it past the BFP (Big Friendly Flaky Proxy) at work?
• Is it really Nanna Proof? Test out on real-life Nanna.

Will update this post as I do each test. If you want to be a test-subject, email me.