Earlier, I wrote about my pains with having many Firefox tabs open for Google Mail, Reader (news), and Calendar. The post included several ideas that could be used to move towards satisfying my pains. However, I feel that out of those ideas was a general cop out.

  • User Interface: This will be hard!!!

To fix this glaring issue I spent some time thinking about how I would combine the the interfaces for Google Mail, Reader, and Calendar. I have made a very basic mock up of how I feel it could work.

I’m not posting screenshots of the existing applications, but if you’re interested, and don’t already know, you can preview the Google interfaces @ About Gmail, Google Reader – Tour, Google Calendar Tour.

Mail Reader Calendar Mock Up I said it was very basic.

This only works for 1024×768, and larger desktops. For people using 800×600, I would suggest moving the calendar bar to the top left, and rotating it (i.e. make it horizontal). The agenda could also be collapsible to reduce vertical scroll to access content. Fitting in the AdWords panel for email might be interesting, but there is a lot of open space in the header bar, or it would work into the content panel somehow.

As I said in the previous post, I’m not sure exactly what the Terms of Service and Program Policies actually say about this. But to er on the safe side, I would presume that only Google can roll this sort of Mash Up. In a lot of ways that makes sense. We are not meant to reformat search results, for good reason, they are Googles work, they deserve the recognition. Of course if we kept the Google branding, well, maybe that could work. Similarly Google accounts are extremely generous for a free service, if the policies did not prevent this, any Bob or Alice could simply serve reformated Google accounts to their users, and make a significant profit. (It’s easy to setup postfix as a mail relay, so they could hide the email address, from most users anyway).

I’d like to see something like this come out of Google, I do have it pretty good though, considering what I’ve got for free. It’d be nice, but I can deal without it.