Posts Tagged ‘GMail’

Usable AJAX (how to not break the back button)

Wednesday, December 10th, 2008

Have you wondered how the websites like Gmail use Ajax and yet make sure that usability is not compromised? The trick is widely being used but still, I get almost 3-4 hits everyday on this topic. So I decided to explain it…

The problem: Sending requests to servers asynchronously using javascript to load content dynamically(or should I say AJAX?) has been around for quite some time. It became popular when Google started using it in Gmail and it has been in the buzz since then. The buzz has started dying down now with usability becoming the important aspect now. I completely agree with the trend and this post is about solving one of the problems related to it. The problem in one sentence is:

While making AJAX calls, how do you keep the behavior of back button from breaking.

To explain it further: When you are changing the state of a page, using Ajax, how do you make sure that the user can return to it or a meaningful state without problems?

The solution:

(more…)

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Posted in Software, development | 3 Comments »

Email Client? – ThunderBird’s ready (almost)

Monday, April 7th, 2008

ThunderBird is an email client from Mozilla. Although it has been around for quite some time, I somehow never got to get all my mails out from Yahoo or GMail to my PC. But a few days back, it all changed. I finally decided to give it a try. There were certian basic requirements that I needed that Gmail did not give me so easily and so I had to resort to this.

  • Download all mail to my pc (yeah I know… kindof stupid)
  • Have a nice calendar which I can look at while I am looking at mails.  This is important coz I never open Google Calendar to look at my events(yes all my events are there on it..). It’s simply too much trouble.
  • Compose mail offline and send it off later on.
  • Have a good Address Book – Somehow the FF3 Beta4 was not displaying my address book properly(In Beta5 it has been fixed).
  • New email notification! – Yes Gmail has this, but we need to install other things which I dont want to. So I just used AT&T’s TTS service to create two nice audio files for “New Mail” and “Somethi’s up in [the] calendar” and am using them with TB and lightening.

So, I installed TB 2 and also added lightening and Provider for google calendar to it.  When I installed them, they did not work as well as I wanted them to – The offline read+write access to google calendar was not available. But just 2-3 days back, both of them got updated and they now support offline cache of the calendars. The two add-ons also got a nice UI update(not as good as FF3 is going to be though).

The only problem I have right now is the absence of a good Sync app between GMail and TB contact list. CSV is not good enough as it does not let me store all the fields from GMail properly. What I’d like is a way to map fields from Gmail Address Book to TB fields(dynamic! – I dont have a good parallel for this except for the Auto Organize feature in MediaMonkey :)).

Overall, I think I am doing fine with TB and might continue using it.

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Posted in Software, Uncategorized, internet, technology | No Comments »