I'd been thinking about hacking something like this together. GCount works, but it doesn't do exactly what I want, which is tell me how many messages are unread in my inbox. Rather, it gives you the total unread count, which includes messages that have been labeled and removed from the inbox. I was thinking of putting something together using PyObjC. As it happens, the "screen scraping" part of this utility is written in PHP and can be found within Resources in the app wrapper. Now I just need to figure out the right regex to pickup the inbox unread count, and I should have what I want.
comment []  trackback []  7:55:30 PM    

Size Doesn't Matter

Well, it isn't all that matters. The 1GB of mail storage is certainly what gets everyone's attention, but for me, the more interesting breakthrough is GMail's use of labels rather than folders to organize mail. It can be a subtle difference, but I think it is quite important. Multiple labels can be applied to a single e-mail, and that e-mail will be found in the "folders" for each of those labels. (I thought I had ranted about the tyranny of hierarchy here before, but I can't seem to find such. Maybe when I have a bit of time. It is an overarching problem, IMO.)

Gettting a Little (More) on the Side

Much has also been made of the advertising that GMail displays to the right of your e-mail based on the contents of said e-mail. I'm not all that concerned about Google reading my mail, but I wish they'd do a bit more for me as a result. What I think would be brilliant would be to do something like Dashboard or The Remembrance Agent. Tell me about other e-mails that might be related, pull up related contacts, etc.

comment []  trackback []  5:25:35 PM