Mac Geeks

Google Labs recently released an extension for Google Mail (GMail) which makes GMail available for offline use. The biggest drawback on GMail is that you can’t use it when your’re not online. Not only you can’t receive or send new messages, you even can’t browse your archived messages.

Of course you can configure your desktop mail program to fetch google mails via POP3 or IMAP but that isn’t the same as accessing it Online.

Now and with the help of the Google Gears add on for Firefox you’re able to synchronize your GMail account to your local computer for offline use.

This feature is only available when you’re using GMail with “English” as default language. The option wont show up if your for instance use the german interface for GMail.

When you have the english version, then you got a “Labs” tab in your GMail settings. One of the top most options here is the GMail offline mode. Just enable and save and GMail starts to install the Gears scripts and start to synchronize your mails locally. You get a nice progress window which you how far back in time your mails are synced local.

After enabling offline mode GMail is a lot faster and – of course, available offline. You can search your messages and even write new mails. They will be saved in some kind of out basket and send when your’re back online.

For some years I used to make full screenshots of Websites with Paparazzi. This is a little free tool wich renders a website and saves it as a image file. In contrast to a normal screenshot you can make a picture of websites which doesn’t fit on your screen. This is very usefull when it comes to blogs and news websites. These often have very long pages.

Paparazzi hasn’t got an update for quite a long time and I was afraid the developer had fiven up. But to my positive suprise I saw an update announcement of Paparazzi at macupdate.com this morning.

The new release is a bug fixing release with a few minor feature enhancements. Paparazzi uses the WebKit rendering engine which is the same as the one from Safari, Apples popular browser.

One of the enhancements I noticed is the capability of Paparazzi to batch render URLs which are read from a text file.

You can do the very same with some add-ons for Firefox. The Screengrab! add-on will render and save the pages from within Firefox. The Pearl Crescent Page Saver add-on has a pro version and is controllable via the command line. I used the latter on to create a website render monitor.

I got a special album on my Ipernity Account for my website screenshots.