Gmail gadgets

While I was (spending far too much time) investigating the best Gmail theme for my purposes, I had another look at the other bits in Labs that might prove interesting to me. Google's own gadgets didn't seem very inspiring but the "Add any gadget by URL" caught my eye as, perhaps, having the greatest potential.

The only obvious this I could see missing from this gadget is the facility to adjust the order of the gadgets that it displays, with its default behaviour to apparently sort everything alphabetically. Perhaps this is a deliberate deduplication as another Labs option, "Navbar drag and drop", does allow you to tailor the gadget layout to your needs.

Having tried a few, PolyClock is by far my favourite. For me, this has completely replaced the erstwhile essential Qlock application that I had installed quite liberally around my PC estate. The developer responded instantly when I found my chosen theme had a narrower Navbar than the default, causing scrollbars to be unnecessarily displayed, thanks Sterling! I'm sure my friends living in the future, by a few hours at least, will be grateful of me realising the time before I try to wake them up with Chat and other annoyances.

The only thing with these gadgets that's not so nice is that they tend not to be available over HTTPS. This causes an "Always use https" Gmail session to warn of mixed content. Hopefully this is something that will get better over time, as the gadgets become more popular.

As an aside, it's quite scary to me just how much I come to depend on Google's email service, especially when I'm away from home, and quite amazing how very, very infrequently it's ever let me down. Long may this continue!