Thanks for this cool Adobe AIR GMDesk software. I have recently found about this GMDesk through Official GMail blog and been looking for something handy for my desktop. Wonderful appliance widget.

Thanks to share

Use whatever solution you find the best, and suits your needs in the most optimal way.

Dan,

Thanks!

carlos,

Thank you! Sorry about two accounts, it’s not possible at the time.

If IE crashes then my google browser app is still running..

The web interface is by far the most robust IMO

Those are things I’d love to fix, but unfortunately they’re beyond my control (my thoughts on the matter).

So, basically, if I get the technical possibility to address those, I plan to have it done.

Thank you! I would love to make much more of GMDesk as well, but currently my hands are tied by limitations of the Adobe AIR framework.

cool app. keep up the good work.

i would like to say that i too would appreciate the following features, already mentioned above; minimization to system tray and possibility to use the Google Redesigned skins.

Too bad it doesn’t seem to be easily implementable.

Anyway, congrats and keep it up.

j

I’d love to, but currently Adobe AIR (which GMDesk is built on) doesn’t offer any chance of manipulating the actual content. We’ll see in the future how it evolves…

Apart from that, I’m loving it! Thanx so much.

Don’t worry.

Yes, the font is only a problem with Gmail, and it works just fine with the other Google applications included. I guess Google Maps just works better with the WebKit rendering engine.

Thanks for using the application!

my 17″ is running 1024×768 and on this the font becomes blurry and tiny… other than that, I am impressed… in AIR Google looks better than in FF/IE

on the Memory Usage issue highlighted above, take a look at any Adobe app and you will find a memory issue… I have never seen an Abobe App with a small Foot Print, and in any case, why would you be so worried about it, if you are running Vista, you should be running atleast 2GB of Ram..
so a 100mb foot print is not that big, and really do you need to be running Email at the same time as all your other Apps??? I hope you are not one of the people who are answering emails while playing MMORPG’s and letting yer team down as they are squished by an Ogre……

If it were possible, I would really want that too! Unfortunately, as far as I know, this is only possible on a link-per-link basis with Adobe AIR, and only for content one can control (as opposed to the Google code which is beyond my control).

So, at the moment I can’t make that happen, but if I find a solution, I’ll definitely implement it.

Inkpot,

Thanks! I’ll reply to my best knowledge:

1. Completely Adobe AIR-related. As I’ve heard/seen with other Adobe AIR-based applications, memory usage does seem to be a bit of a problem for the moment.

2. Yes, it’s extremely annoying, since it uses the WebKit rendering engine (same as in Safari, but a slightly older version), so everything should work just fine. At the moment, I’m clueless as to why Gmail, and only Gmail, fails to render fonts in a normal size.

3. It is possible, but to accomplish it is somewhat a hack in my opinion, since you have to turn off an auto-exiting feature of the application, and handle it yourself. I might add this in a future release, but I’m not sure.

1. The application seems to have a huge memory footprint (a whopping 106mb on my Windows Vista system). Mozilla Thunderbird (which I use to access all my gmail accounts) uses 13mb. Can anything be done to reduce GMDesk’s memory footprint?

2. As has been stated elsewhere many times, the font-size is miniscule. I recognize that you’re working hard on this issue, and I don’t envy the headaches its’ resolution must be giving you.

3. This last one isn’t so much of a criticism as a cosmetic ‘want’. I would love for GMDesk to be able to be minimized to the system tray as opposed to taking up space on my already cluttered taskbar. Is this a possibility?

That’s all I have for the moment. I love the idea and it looks like this could be a truly great application with a little more fine-tuning. Keep up the good work! =)

Inkpot

The fonts being small I can live with, even the shoddy sub pixel anti aliasing which looks horrible on my off-monitor. Links not opening in my darling Firefox, on the other hand… why? :’(

Well, first of all, I care, since I want to be able to offer this ability to everyone.
Second, as mentioned above, this is a complete application as opposed to, for instance, Fluid, which more or less is just an application that points to a URL.

The latest version now has Google Apps support, so you can switch between those, and the next version (coming very soon) will be having some very interesting support for other Google services!

Peter,

Thanks! I know about the fonts, and I’m working hard to find a solution. The problem is that I, as a developer, can’t create the code generated from Google, and it seems like Gmail (as opposed to other Google services) has some special font scaling going on.

Colin,

The connection type Google seem fit will be used, and in those cases it redirects via https in the web browser, it will do that in GMDesk as well. In the end, though, it’s about security precaution.