I keep receiving lots of mails, and each time I have to search for a particular mail, I have to use the Gmail’s search functionality using search parameters to filter unwanted results.

I wanted to search a particular mail that I have received from a client. Since there were several mails from him which were threaded by Gmail because of the same subject, it became difficult for me to identify it. This is where I missed “tagging” feature the most.

“Labels” can form the outer layer for mails whereas “Tags” can act as a sublayer thereby narrowing your search results. The users can then get to see all the TAGS associated with that particular label and easily search the mails they want.

Incorporating the “tagging” functionality will not only improve the overall interaction of searching the mails in Gmail, but will also help in quickly identifying the mail from the bunch.

Update:
Interestingly, Glattli has come up with a unique way of tagging your mails using del.icio.us. You can view the complete screencast at his website.

Though this is a temporary solution, I hope gmail does incorporate the “tagging” feature permanently in its future releases.

In case you haven’t seen it, please invest ten minutes of your time to complete the 2008 A List Apart survey so that we can build a snapshot of our industry.

Calling all designers, developers, information architects, project managers, writers, editors, marketers, and everyone else who makes websites. It is time once again to pool our information so as to begin sketching a true picture of the way our profession is practiced worldwide.

Please take the survey and encourage your friends and colleagues who make websites to do likewise. The world is watching.

Pencil is a free tool for sketching user interfaces. Since it’s a Firefox 3 extension, it runs on virtually all platforms.

The tool has many of the features you would expect from a decent prototyping tool like:

• Built-in stencils for diagraming and prototyping
• Multi-page document with background page
• On-screen text editing with rich-text supports
• PNG rasterizing
• Undo/redo supports
• Installing user-defined stencils
• Standard drawing operations: aligning, z-ordering, scaling, rotating…
• Cross-platforms
• Adding external objects

The only disadvantage of the tool is that it lacks bacis interactivity like creating interlinked pages.

The Pencil Project