GApp

a distraction-free interface for the Google Apps

G is for GMail, Google Apps and GTD

GApp is a lightweight, configurable, interface for GMail and the Google Apps for people that live in GMail. For those who use GMail labels for Getting Things Done (GTD), GApp provides a searchable GTD view of your Inbox. The clean, lightweight interface helps you keep focused on the task at hand, without the distractions and extra functionality of working in a fully-fledged web browser.

The application is based on WebKit, the engine behind Safari, and leaves all your messages on the GMail server. So you can switch to another computer knowing that all your mail is fully accessible.

GApp is free software, developed under the GPL. Please encourage the continued support and development of the application by donating to the project.

Features

	Tabbed interface for the Google Apps
	Skin the webmail interface using CSS
	Get a searchable GTD view of your Inbox
	The dock icon badged with the number of unread messages

Motivation

Having used the GTDGMail Firefox extension I found that benefits of using GMail to keep myself organised. Also, the Greasemonkey extension and scripts provided extra functionality and a skinnable interface to GMail. However, the Mac version of Firefox is resource hungry and seems to have a number of memory usage issues. So I found myself looking for alternatives.

It was during this search that I came across a blog entry that I thought made sense - Webmail is not web browsing. The emphasis being on creating a minimal browser that was focused on reading GMail through the webmail interface. The GMail Browser project came as a result of this post.

Having seen these examples, I decided that I wanted a distraction-free interface for GMail, with some of the functionality that I'd seen in the GTDGMail and Greasemonkey Firefox extensions. Hence GApp was born.

Acknowledgements

The best ideas are usually built on other ideas. I'd like to thank some people for sharing their ideas:

Webmail is not browsing

Inspiration from Michael McCracken to realise that WebKit was the interface that I needed.

Insights on WebKit

The code to GMail Browser gave some insights into the workings of WebKit.

Tab Bar Control

PSMTabBarControl available from PositiveSpinMedia

Badging the Dock Icon

CTBadge by Chad Weider