You’ve Got Mail!

jasonkarns — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 20:43:06 +0000

I’m a big fan of Gmail and Google Reader. I generally leave these tabs (along with Google Calendar) open all day long. To minimize the amount of visual space these long-lived tabs consume in the tab bar, I use the great FaviconizeTab extension. However, with these tabs minified, you lose the ability to be notified visually (via the title text) of new mail or new posts. A simple solution that I found years ago was to write a simple user style to change the background color of the tab whenever a new item arrives. It’s a great simple solution that doesn’t require any new programs or extensions. For those of you who use the Stylish extension, I’ve finally gotten around to posting this style to userstyles.org so installation is dead-simple. This style also works well with the Badges on Favicon extension which actually displays the number of unread items via small ‘badge’ on the tab. Go ahead and grab the style now! I’ve posted a Firefox 1.5 – 2.0 compatible version as well. (But seriously, if you’re not using Firefox 3, upgrade now!)

Gmail S/Mime Icons

jasonkarns — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 20:13:38 +0000

I’m a big fan of Gmail and I’m a big fan of S/MIME for securing your email. Unfortunately, the current state of S/MIME on web-based email is currently quite sad. There is a Firefox extension which allows you to send signed/encrypted messages from Gmail by Richard Jones and Sean Leonard. (called Gmail S/MIME, surprisingly enough) However, Gmail does not provide any visual indicator to differentiate between unsigned/unencrypted messages and signed/encrypted messages. I found a great user style by Moktoipas (updated for compatibility with the recent Gmail changes) which replaces the default Gmail attachment icon (paperclip) with icons that represent the standard attachment file types (.doc, .txt, .gif, etc). Lo and behold, lownoise took this idea and created two userstyles to provide the same icon support for signed and encrypted messages. Signed messages sport a certificate icon and encrypted messages sport a padlock icon. However, these userstyles haven’t been updated to cope with Gmail’s newest changes. I have taken it upon myself to make the required changes and post the new style for everyone’s use. I can’t claim too much credit, however, as the changes required were only a couple lines of code, which I simply copied from Moktoipas’ styles. In addition, I merged the two styles – one for signed messages and one for encrypted messages – into one style. While this style is extra beneficial for users of the Gmail S/MIME extension, it does not require it. Further, the style is packaged as both a Stylish userstyle and a Greasemonkey userscript so users of either extension can get their style on. Grab the style from userstyles.org.

Code Nomad » stylish

You’ve Got Mail!

Gmail S/Mime Icons