Rui CarmoChristopher Whipple was kind enough to spend one of his three invitations to Gmail on me, and I've been idly poking around the menus for a bit now. I still have only the one welcome message on it, since it's going to take time to figure out what I want to send over there - after all, I have my own IMAP-based thing (which aggregates a bunch of accounts), and it's not trivial to decide what goes where or move stuff to a web-only account.
Still, I'm amazed at the speed of the thing. Hotmail feels like molasses (at best) even with an empty inbox, and has far too much cruft on screen to make it a pleasant experience (same goes for Yahoo). Gmail is clean, neat and most likely very addictive.
I hope to follow up on my earlier piece with yet-another-Gmail-user-experience article (I know the topic is a bit jaded by now, since everyone hated the accelerator keys and whatnot...) as soon as I can get some decent e-mail traffic going on it.
All I need now is a desklet or dock icon of some sort that can poll the number of new messages - preferrably cross-platform, and totally independent of the Google bar - which I don't use, and never will.
Hmmm. I wonder if there is a Google API for it yet?