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.

It’s always difficult to gauge the quality of UCD projects other companies get. One feels let down when they start comparing themselves with their counterparts in other companies. But the ground reality might be different!

Following are the questions I’d like to have answers to  to clear the misconception about “User Experience Design” group.

• How do other companies preach usability in their organization?
• What kind of projects to they get?
• Do they get a complete life cycle projects?
• Do a usability group in an Indian IT companies restrict themselves to User Research and Analysis and pass on the prototype development process to some other group within the company.
• Do they hire people having a good knowledge of usability or do they hire the ones with proficiencies in HTML/CSS/Flash, etc… and ask them to do certain usability related tasks
• Do they have a separate web development team that looks into development and is in no way related to the usability aspects of the project?

Answers to these questions would solve many misconceptions people have pertaining to a “Usability Group”

CSS VISTA
CSSVista is a free Windows application for web developers which lets you edit your CSS code live in both Internet Explorer and Firefox simultaneously.

This comes as a boon for me and my team as we can now test our applications on Safari without leaving our desk

Yeah… you read that right. :)

• Store and serve application resources locally
• Store data locally in a fully-searchable relational database
• Run asynchronous Javascript to improve application responsiveness

Google Gears will enable you to read the most recent messages from Gmail while offline or to edit your documents in Google Docs even without a network connection.

Google Reader is the first Google application powered by Gears. To enter the offline mode, just click on the small arrow and all the recent feed items are downloaded to your computer. You can disconnect from the Internet or click on “work offline” in your browser and you will still be able to read your favorite feeds in Google Reader. Like in any feed reader installed on your computer. Well, almost, because Google Reader doesn’t download images or other multimedia files embedded in the posts.

Talk of offline support for web applications in browers? It’s right here!!!

I happen to visit the site today and whas surprised by the small but notable change in their header!

Another application moving towards AJAX

Over the past year the idea of the Web as an operating system has been widely debated, but not well understood. It’s true that the Web has become the locus of many traditional PC–based computing tasks. But what’s next?

Well, I just happen to come across NetVibes.com

• to create a personalized page with the content they like.
• to put together data feeds and services from web 2.0 with a very simple interface
• to access your page anytime and from any computer .

Past few months have seen a hughe influx of applications on the internet that have being developed using the AJAX technology to increases the response time. There are many such applications claiming to change the way the web works. I happen to beta test one such technology but have been advised against discussing the details, so we won’t discuss it for now

Moving on, I came across Start.com project by Microsoft using excessive AJAX and DOM. I was very curious to check the source code, and to my surprise, found many linked JavaScript files and hardly any (X)HTML tags!!

The questions popping up in my mind are:
Are we depending heavily on JavaScript, DOM and DHTML?
What will happen to Web Standards?

I know I am talking about the Web Applications here and not Websites. But don’t you feel the developers across will start aping the technology come up with some weird scripts claiming to enhance the user experience on the internet?