Once installed, the extension adds a new “Snooze” button to the Gmail interface, as shown above. Hit the button, and a drop-down menu appears, enabling you to choose a snooze period from five minutes to four hours, or to be reminded about the email on a specific day or at a specific time:

When the snooze period is up, the extension will then play an alert sound and pop up a desktop notification, reminding you about the email and (optionally) marking the email as unread. In the notification, there are handy links to open the email or to snooze it again:

It’s a simple idea and it’s implemented well. However, it only works on Chrome, so if, like me, you also tend to read your emails on mobile devices it may prove less useful. I’d love to see this as a Labs feature in Gmail itself and have it available on multiple platforms. Note that despite its name, Snooze Your Email for Gmail also apparently works for Yahoo Mail, although I haven’t tried it.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Social Inbox vs. The Future of Email
• What Does the Future Hold For Browsers?
• The 2013 task management tools market

But when I hear from the folks at Springpad about changes to the service, I always read with interest. Even as my usage has waned, I really have always been very impressed with the service, and the possibilities of what it could become. The latest batch of changes promise to make Springpad even more useful.

I’ve already discussed the transition that Springpad seems to be making, moving away from a structured note-taking app toward more everyday usage, like capturing and then using data around restaurants, movies, books, food and recipes, for example. The company’s own description of Springpad as a “lifestyle application” encapsulates this change and is quite apt. So while I don’t really use it to store the notes and other such data as I have in the past, it’s still a wonderful way to grab information about my stuff and then get presented with more contextual information about it.

I was really excited to read about the new Extension for Chrome, released today. The nice thing about the extension as opposed to the bookmarklet is that not only does it allow me to get info into the app, it also gives me access to the data that already resides there, without having to visit the site. I can quickly view and sort the info in my account. Adding items is easy and it does a wonderful job of recognizing the type of data that I am adding, and can also enhance it with useful information, such as pricing information or addresses for physical locations.

When I clip items using the extension, I can edit the information and add tags. I can’t seem to change the public / private settings at the time of clipping though, which would be nice. I do tend to capture a mix of items and the defaults don’t always match my intentions.

Any application that is supposed to help you capture and organize your information is really only as useful as the tools that are made available to help you get that information into the app. No matter what you can do with the data when it’s there, if it isn’t easy to grab and store it, chances are you just aren’t going to take the time.

I am not an iPhone or Android user so I don’t have access to the mobile applications available for those platforms, but they’ve received a couple of useful updates designed to make that connection even more useful, specifically the ability to send mobile alerts from within Springpad and to quickly push notifications about specific items directly to your phone for easy access. Again, the ubiquity of the data and the ease with which it becomes useful is key. I think mobile users with access to the Springpad application will find the service even more appealing than I do.

Springpad is free, web-based and works in all major browsers. Applications are also available for iPhone, iPad and Android.

I am rediscovering my Springpad — what can it do for you?

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub. req.):

• Enabling the Web Work Revolution
• Report: The Real-Time Enterprise
• Who Owns Your Data in the Cloud?

It’s a good bet that the average user probably doesn’t know anything about the extensions yet. We’ve compiled a list of 25 of our favorites, but Apple’s gallery will open up extensions to a wider audience, much like its downloads page did for third-party Mac OS X apps.

If you are a developer, submitting your extension is fairly simple. Apple has a form to fill out in the Safari Dev Center, and it’ll send an email to let you know when you’re extension has been received. When we walked through the submission process, Apple sent us this email:

“Thank you for submitting your Safari Extension.

Apple reviews all submissions and reserves the right to omit, edit, or reject any submission. Please note you will not receive any further notifications.

We appreciate your interest in Safari.”

Based on this reply it seems like the extensions Gallery may be subject to the same approval process as the App Store. Firefox has a similar review process for hosting addons at addons.mozilla.org, similar that is in that there is a process. Mozilla has been handling extensions for a long time, and has the process finely tuned. When submitting an addon for Firefox, the addon is available immediately and labeled “experimental,” and requires the user to acknowledge and accept the risk of using an addon that has not been reviewed by an editor. Mozilla has clear rules about what is acceptable and what is not, and has a page that addresses the review process directly. So far, I have not found the same for Safari.

Google Chrome also has extensions, but in a much looser, less controlled environment than Firefox or Safari. According to Google:

Most extensions won’t go through an approval process before being listed in the gallery. The exception to this rule are extensions which utilize the NPAPI interface, or extensions which access file:// URLs

Google’s rules are loose, but at least they are not vague. I hope that as development on Safari progresses, and the extensions gallery matures, the rules defining what is allowed and what is not are more clearly defined.

If you are interested in developing your own Safari extension, check out our beginner tutorial which walks you through creating a very basic “Hello World” extension.

On the support page created to describe the problem and the resulting warranty extension, Apple doesn’t mention which brand of hard drives are affected by name, which could mean that the problem doesn’t lie with the hard drives themselves, but with some other system components. Another indication that this is indeed the case is that all capacities of hard drive are also affected.

If you’re wondering whether or not you have an affected unit (Apple says only a “small percentage” of users will experience problems), it’s very easy to identify. Your MacBook will just stop working altogether, and any attempts to boot it will result in a screen that displays a folder icon with a question mark over top of it, as in the image below. As someone who’s seen this screen many times while fixing up old PowerBooks, I can tell you it isn’t a heartening experience.

Apple describes what you should do if you’re greeted with such a screen:

Please take your MacBook to the Apple representative most convenient for you:

• Apple Authorized Service Provider – Find one here.
• Apple Retail Store – Set up an appointment with a Genius.

If Apple or an Apple Authorized Service Provider confirms that your hard drive is affected, Apple will replace it with a new hard drive. You will need to have the original OS installation discs that were shipped with your product in order to re-install your operating system, other applications, and any backed up data.

If you need assistance finding the best service option in your area, you may contact Apple Technical Support for more information.

It sounds like any data you may have stored on the drive will be irrevocably lost if this does happen to you, so if you have one of the affected models and you haven’t yet implemented any kind of backup system, you should probably consider doing so.

If your machine has already had this problem, and you’ve already paid out of pocket to get it fixed or replace your drive, you can contact Apple Technical Support and inquire about a reimbursement process. No word on whether that extends to at home HD replacements, which is how I would’ve tried to solve the problem, but if you haven’t kept your old faulty drive, I highly doubt it would. Mostly I expect this will apply when people have taken their machines through official Apple repair channels to correct the problem.

The extension period covers affected Macs three years from the date of purchase, for this specific problem alone, or until August 15, 2010, whichever comes last, so you still have about six months in which your HD can fail and you’ll still be covered. It may seem like an arbitrary window, but Apple does include a caveat that it will be evaluating the repair need on an ongoing basis and extend that deadline if circumstances require.

Anyone experienced the symptoms Apple is describing with this model MacBook?

AT&T President Randall Stephenson hopefully has a few things up his sleeve for moving AT&T out of the dying landline business and increasingly toward the much more lucrative and future-proof mobile wireless market. Clearly, securing iPhone carrier exclusivity would be high among his goals then, since 4.3M iPhone subscribers joined up in the second half of 2008, nearly half of whom were new to AT&T.

Problem is, from where I’m standing, AT&T probably isn’t in a very good bargaining position at the moment. Sure, they’re building out their network as fast as they can to keep up with the additional strain put on their 3G network by iPhone demand, but what kind of carrot could they possibly wave in front of Apple to really convince them that selling their phone to more people on multiple networks isn’t the better deal?

The answer is money. They could offer Apple a revenue sharing model that is extremely generous, and subsidize upcoming handsets to the point where Apple could potentially offer the iPhone at a lower price point and expand their user-base even more. The key ingredient will be network buildout, though, since Apple is unlikely to stick around if AT&T can’t get its act together enough to even allow for more subscribers, regardless of how either company intends to attract them. That’s good news for current subscribers, because it means they should see significant improvements in service through at least 2011.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Mobile first-quarter 2013: analysis and outlook
• The fourth quarter of 2012 in mobile
• What to watch in mobile in 2013

We’re constantly talking about ways of dealing with information overload, so it’s a happy day when a tool can truly make a difference. Today, that tool is Idea Shower’s ReadItLater.

Along the same lines as InstaPaper, LaterLoop and others, ReadItNow is simply a Firefox add-on that helps you save a list of pages for later reading. Better than regular old bookmarks, it’s for those pages you want to read when you have a moment but maybe not keep around forever.

ReadItLater has been around for over a year, but this week with version .99, it got insanely useful. I understand why other sites have been talking about it so much.

You can read and save pages on any computer, any platform, even a mobile device (yes, an iPhone). If it’s not a Firefox-based browser, you can use a bookmarklet to save your page.

There’s an offline caching feature so you can catch up on your reading even if you don’t have an Internet connection. Great for plane reading.

You can sort your reading list by Quality (aka PostRank, formerly AideRSS), so you are sure that you are reading the best stuff first.

You can toggle something called “Click to Save Mode” so when you’re flying through your Netvibes or Digg pages, you can quickly collect those sites that interest you and skim them later. I’ve gotten into the habit of loading Netvibes first thing in the morning, opening the pages I want to read in multiple tabs and working through them throughout the day. Doing this in ReadItLater makes much more sense.

The new Google Reader integration is simple and well done. Click the check to add the post to your reading list, without having to actually load the page just yet.

The only bug I found is that it’s not 100% compatible with all 3rd party Firefox themes. If it’s not displaying properly for you, try switching back to the default theme.

Happy Halloween!

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• What Does the Future Hold For Browsers?
• Personal tools lead to practical business
• 12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012

I’ll let you hit up the product page for the typical choices, i.e.: RAM, hard drive capacity, processor and more. I want to specifically point out the two display options: a WXGA BrightView Widescreen or a WXGA BrightView Widescreen with Integrated Touchscreen, which is an additional $125 option. Is this a Tablet PC or isn’t it? I’d say yes, but will consumers realize that if they don’t take the touchscreen option they’ll be missing out on the Tablet PC functions included with their pre-installed Vista operating system? Here’s the even funnier part: the base model comes with Vista Home Premium, which actually has the Tablet PC functionality. I really hope I’m reading this wrong; can someone check my eyes on this one?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Where new opportunity lies in the mobile operating system space
• Forecast: Global mobile subscribers and handsets, 2012-2017
• How to deliver the next-generation web experience

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• What Does the Future Hold For Browsers?
• 12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012
• Google Chrome OS: More and Better Web Apps on The Way?