Mailplane now boarding: standalone GMail app for Mac OS X
My friend Ben just shot me a beta invite to Mailplane which looks essential for GMail users running Mac OS X. Mailplane is a standalone application that’s essentially built around Google’s Gmail with functionality and plugins that make the mail experience much better from what I’ve seen. Some of the features include:
- Drag and drop attachments
- Integration with Grab to capture and send screen shots and clips
- An iPhoto plugin for sending optimized photos
- Automatic picture optimization to decrease attachment sizes
- Works with multiple GMail accounts
- Send any document as a PDF
- Google Talk integration
I’m downloading the application right now to give it a look; everything I’ve seen so far was in this screencast overview; well worth a view of this shareware app now in beta.
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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Interesting… except that the biggest advantage of Gmail is that you can get a really good mail experience anywhere via a web browser, IMHO.
But of course if one lives in the mailbox and doesn’t move around much this might make sense.
I received a MailPlane beta as well. And this would convert me from Thunderbird if it had two things: Offline viewing, and support for non-gmail accounts. But that’s only because I can’t control where a couple of my e-mail accounts are hosted.
For the integration with Gmail, MailPlane looks promising. But I can’t help but feel that the current generation of web apps are still too limited in some aspects — mainly offline viewing and the fact that they’re all contained within the browser. But I’m just going off on a tangent now… Kudos to MailPlane developers, I look forward to trying it out more.