Gmail gets themes!
Whoa! I’m a just a simple, geeky middle-aged man with no money. So the things that often excite me these days are simple, geeky things that just happen to be free. Well, just a few minutes ago I happened to hit the trifecta when I logged into Gmail only to discover that GMail now has themes. While the bland old GMail is still the default, even it has had a major face lift to make it (as the GMail blog describes) “crisper and cleaner” and “you might notice a few colors and pixels shifted around here and there.” Quoting:
We wanted to go beyond simple color customization, so out of the 30 odd themes we’re launching today, there’s a shiny theme with chrome styling, another one that turns your inbox into a retro notepad, nature themes that change scenery over time, weather driven themes that can rain on your mailbox, and fun characters to keep you in good company. There’s even an old school ascii theme (Terminal) which was the result of a bet between two engineers — it’s not exactly practical, but it’s great for testing out your geek cred.
Some of these themes are really nice. I happened to settle on the Planets theme which changes according to the time of day at your locale, although I’m going to have to check that Terminal theme out. On the other hand, some of these aren’t much better than many amateur designed blog themes. Still, this is a major improvement to GMail that has been a long time coming and I couldn’t be happier.
The themes started rolling out to users today and you can manage your themes by going to the Themes tab under Settings. If you don’t see it there yet, don’t panic. The GMail team plans to push the new feature out to users over the next couple of days. Enlarge the image to the right to get a sampling of the new themes.
Edited to add: There does seem to be a minor bug, at least for me. GMail no longer seems to respect the “Maximum page size setting on the General tab.
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