Google makeover on full swing, previews new look Gmail

Today morning when I opened my mail, I was drawn to a link that said “Preview Gmail’s new look” !. This wasnt spam as I found the link right above my chat window, not a place where spam mails could ever put a link! 🙂

Preview(Dense)

Drawn to the link out of curiosity, I discovered that Google is trying to rebrand and redesign, a complete makeover of all its services. The aim is to bring uniformity to all of its services so that they blend well with the newly launched Google+. These services will have a tight integration with Google+ .

A recent news also states that Google has plans to rebrand Blogger as Google Blogs and Picasa as Google Photos in the next four weeks. Youtube, however, will  be spared from the rebranding drive.

Coming back to Gmail,my inbox has two preview themes, Preview and Preview(Dense). These can be found under Mail Settings -> Themes. These options, however, may not be available for everyone at the moment, but Google plans to roll out to every user very soon.

After trying out the new themes for about 15 mins, I was a “Preview” convert! I must say I am very pleased that Google has brought about these changes. To me, the old theme was there for far too long and needed a change. Agreed, there are a lot of themes available, but those are merely change of colours and I do not like most of them.

The new themes are quite pleasing to the eye and works nicely on my Easylinux 0.9 x86_64 installation. I have also tested the theme on Windows 7 . It works well.

There is an added feature which can be seen in the screenshot below, the option to select inbox types. There is a Classic view, Important first, Unread first, Starred first and Priority Inbox.This is a cool feature, makes it easier for the users to make his selection without rummaging through the mail settings.

I like the Preview theme more than Preview(Dense) as the spacing between emails is a little more and I looks quite nice on my 16.4 inch Dell XPS 1640. Having said that, the themes are still “Previews”, so expect the unexpected! I can see  my chat contact list is not aligned properly when Preview theme is on but as I said, its still under works. Inspite of that, I am keeping the “Preview” on as this is the best Gmail theme Google has ever released till date!