PreviewPane
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Gmail's Preview Pane brings 'tablet-like' layout to your browser, but kills Multiple Inboxes
Google's still doing a fine job of ignoring Gcal's inability to routinely provide alerts and notifications to select users (nah, we're not bitter), but at least the Gmail team seems to be firing on all cylinders. Just this week, the outfit revealed its newest Labs feature -- Preview Pane. As you've probably gleaned from the title, it provides a "tablet-like" layout that's actually similar to standalone mail clients from yesteryear, and for those with more vertical space than horizontal, there's even an option to split the divider in that manner. In practice, we found it drop-dead simple to use, and it's largely an improvement over the stock Gmail layout. The only issue? It nukes Multiple Inboxes, so those accustomed to scrolling down and easily clicking into their Starred emails (for example) will likely be reverting back with dreams dashed. See if it's in your Settings pane and give it a go -- who knows, it might be love.
Videos of Leopard's 'live preview' in action
Musings From Mars has posted some revealing videos of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard's upcoming 'Quick Look' feature, which allows the OS to preview many different types of media, including audio and video, with unprecedented ease and power. MFM has created a YouTube playlist of three videos, all demonstrating different abilities of this new feature.Note that in the first movie, the Finder has an unmistakably different look to it, and this blogger would go so far as to wonder if it could be an early sign of an update to everyone's favorite file manager to hate. The second video demonstrates something peculiar that isn't quite apparent from simply watching it: once one video was playing in the preview pane, MFM began clicking on different videos in the Finder, which caused the preview pane to instantly start playing each new video, but picking up at the same point in the timeline - not beginning each video from square one. The third video is a basic demonstration of the preview pane's ability to preview movies even at full screen - unshackling Mac OS X users from the cramped chains of the Finder's tiny preview when in Column view.Now we don't have any way of verifying these videos, but if they are real, they're some appetizing examples of what is hopefully a shiny new Finder in Leopard.Thanks KurtUpdate: Leland, the author of the movies from Musings From Mars, stopped by to let us know that the interesting look of the Finder in the first video is in fact the work of Uno, and not evidence of a fancy new Leopard Finder.
