Have a peek at the above video from iPhoneBuzz that shows an experimental version of Gmail on the iPhone and G1. The application is based on HTML5, a web standard, and works offline with a local database cache.

This is the future.

we’ve added a search layer for local search results that activates when there are more relevant results than we can show on one page. Instead of just plotting the first page of business results on our map, we plot more of them as small circles. You can click on the circles to get more information about the businesses they represent. The top ten results will still appear in the left-hand pane and as pins on the map.

Google has definitely taken the lead in every day tasks usability.

If you click on the Gmail shortcut, you have to option to register Gmail as the default mail client.

One step even closer, at least on the Windows platform.

it’s nearly pointless to have scales of 5 stars, 10 stars, or 100 stars, when all you really need is: “Liked it, Didn’t Like It, and Neutral”.

Steven Frank, via Daring Fireball.

Going back to any other email client is agonizing and disorienting, like being knocked around and dumped out of the back of a pickup on the outskirts of a strange town.

I’ll let you guess which client. Great post from Alex Payne; highly, highly recommended.

And, just when I thought I’ve seen it all in regards to email clients, Google came up with a very thoughtful touch. As seen in the screenshot below, during synchronization, you are shown the date of the oldest message that would be available locally should you stop the sync. Armed with this information, you can decide to wait until sync progresses further or completes; or to disconnect and move on.

I love it.

Digital Arts - Blogs - Digital Arts - The eight secrets that make Apple No 1

(via Core77 Design Blog)

Out of what I tried, I am extremely impressed with wp-recent-links, it is almost perfect for what I have in mind. What is left is figuring out how not to intersperse the linkblog entries with regular posts, and to get the recent-links feed to work.

Since it took some research, here’s a quick dump of my del.icio.us links to related WordPress hacks and plugins:

• geeked. » Blog Archive » Tale of a new sideblog and how publishing an RSS feed to your blog should be easier

• A WordPress Developer’s Best Friend : The Blog Herald

• WordPress › Support » Tags — sideblog

• Passioni della Vita » Blog Archive » The RustAsides WP 1.5 Plugin

• Projects › wp-recent-links [rebelpixel productions]

• Fahlstad.se » fQuick, WordPress SideNotes plugin

• Pie Palace · MiniPosts

• Adding Asides « WordPress Codex

• h4×3d.com | Building a Wordpress sideblog (plugin) that works

• Sideblog Wordpress Plugin « Extend › Plugins

Blogliners we’re proud to introduce a beta of our latest redesign of Bloglines. Our About Beta overview outlines the key features a personalizable home page, 3 reading-views and drag-and-drop foldering in an Ajax interface. We’re inviting you, the Bloglines fans, to the new Bloglines beta in the redesign cycle to provide us feedback. We look forward meeting you in the forums or at conferences to brainstorm on ways to make Bloglines an even better feed reader.

The current Beta is available for Firefox and IE 7 browsers. Of course, the full-featured original Bloglines will still be available during the Beta period.

Enjoy!

- The Bloglines Team

By far the most exciting additions, for me, are the river of news view and abandoning the marking of a feed as read when selected in the feeds panel. I rarely have the time to read through all of a feed’s articles in one sitting therefore I’ve never been able to warm up to Bloglines before.

Navigation

In the beta reader, you can now navigate through the list of articles Google Reader style, using just the j, k and space keys. J and k scroll down and up, respectively, one article at a time while marking the current article as read. Space seems to be doing double duty - scroll down through a long article and, for short articles, scroll down an entire page while marking all of the page’s articles as read. The scrolling is fluid and good visual feedback is given to the read state of an article. Keyboard shortcuts are available for moving between feeds and for selecting a folder of feeds. One weird omission seems to be the lack of a keyboard shortcut to open an article in a new window or tab. There is a message in the forum asking if this is a bug or just not implemented yet.

My Start Page

The start page, labeled “My Start Page” is basically a page filled with feed gadgets. The page is populated by dragging one or more feeds from the subscriptions list to the page. One or more widgets will be created, each listing the newest five articles in the feed. A “view all” link is provided at the bottom of each gadget. I don’t believe the widgets are resizable at this point in order to display more than just five items. On a 1024 x 768 screen you should be able to fit 4-6 of these boxes before scrolling. The idea is that, upon logging in to Bloglines, you are immediately presented with the feeds you track most.

My Library

Unfortunately, the same new start page somewhat breaks the river of news model. The problem is that it also serves as the top of the feeds hierarchy, labeled My Library. In order to bring up all news items in all feeds, sorted with the most recent on top, you need to create a folder and move all feeds into it. You would then select this top folder to start reading, similar to selecting “All items” in Google Reader. Fortunately, the expansion state of the folder is preserved between logins.

Search

The Search function in its default “Find articles” search mode does not seem to perform a search through your own collection of feeds, but rather through all the news articles in all the feeds tracked by Bloglines. The other options are “Find feeds” and “Search the Web”.

Upcoming Features and Conclusion

A new mobile reader, personalization, the handy Bloglines disposable addresses and an updated API are listed as key future activities. Sharing and link-blog creation and are also listed as upcoming features. This is excellent news!

I will be tracking this beta; so far it seems to be a good step forward to finally create some competition for Google Reader.