I just discovered the greatest Gmail trick, and it makes me absurdly happy.
Go to Settings in the upper-right of your screen. Select the far-right tab, Labs.
Scroll down and enable “Google Calendar gadget.” (I also added the Google Docs gadget and the Mark As Read Button.) Presto! You have your calendar floating in the left-hand nav of your Gmail! Since it’s pretty much guaranteed that if I’m sitting in front of a computer I will have Gmail open in a Firefox tab, and since my entire life (work and personal) is in Google Calendar, this is sheer fantasticness for me.
Also, if you don’t use Gmail, what’s wrong with you? The facts that it caches related e-mails in line, and that it’s fully searchable make it U.I. perfection—nevermind the gazillion gigs of storage. Because you can send ginormous attachments, I basically use my account as a giant portable hard drive, with documents accessible from anywhere (perfect because I take computer classes that meet in labs; I can send myself files to work with at home, and type my class notes straight into Gmail). If you’re clinging to an old e-mail account that people know you better from, no problem. I have five different e-mail accounts (@fas.harvard.edu, @positdesign.com, @hotmail.com, and two Gmail addresses) that all feed new incoming messages into my primary Gmail account; the best part is I can also send messages FROM each of those accounts through Gmail.
It’s the easiest thing in the world.
(Full disclosure: Google owns Blogger, which hosts this blog. I swear I’m not getting anything lovely—aside from spectacular web-based services—for raving about them.)
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