{"id":1587,"date":"2008-09-15T08:54:00","date_gmt":"2008-09-15T16:54:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/i-heart-google-apps"},"modified":"2017-01-20T15:07:56","modified_gmt":"2017-01-20T23:07:56","slug":"i-heart-google-apps","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/needmoredesigns.com\/i-heart-google-apps\/","title":{"rendered":"I Heart Google Apps"},"content":{"rendered":"

Google Apps<\/a> is a service you can use for free or pay for. It\u2019s affordable and very solid, and its killer feature is a Gmail<\/a> account that you can use for whatever email address at your business you wish. Even with the free plan you get a hundred email addresses with tons of storage, along with a bunch of other Google services. And over time, we\u2019ve found ourselves using them more and more.<\/p>\n

Gmail has really won me over. I can\u2019t bear to use a regular desktop email app anymore! First of all, I love that it automatically keeps back-and-forth discussions in one \u201cthread.\u201d This makes it dead simple to look at twenty messages as if it were just one big long conversation, which feels quite natural to me. I also appreciate that you can \u201clabel\u201d a conversation, such as \u201cbusiness,\u201d rather than putting it in a folder. While Google treats these labels as folders behind the scenes, it\u2019s much more natural to be able to add several labels to a message, because then you can get more specific. Something might be \u201cbusiness\u201d and also \u201cneedmore.\u201d<\/p>\n

This really works well when you realize that Gmail keeps the label for a whole conversation. If I\u2019m using the typical desktop email client, and someone replies to my message, it just shows up in my inbox. But with Gmail, if I\u2019ve already given that conversation a label, it keeps it. New messages go right into the same thread and the same folders with the same label. This is very convenient and saves a lot of time messing about with the folders, something I was always loath to do.<\/p>\n

None of this means that I can\u2019t get my email in my desktop client, or that I can\u2019t read it on the go with my iPhone. I can, and it still works just as before. Although I have to say, the uptime with Gmail has been far superior to any service provider we have used in the past. And the spam blocking is by far the best I\u2019ve seen. I get the odd spam message, perhaps one a month, but I used to get a dozen or two a day, no matter who our email provider was. That\u2019s huge! Even if I were still using my desktop client, this would be a big deal.<\/p>\n

I feel that Gmail still has a way to go, but that\u2019s okay. It\u2019s probably not a one-size-fits-all solution. For example, I\u2019d love to be able to share a discussion thread with Kandace, or add a note to an email. But since I\u2019m avoiding using my email inbox as a todo list these days, that\u2019s fine. There\u2019s no big problem I can\u2019t work around. And having something as fast and reliable as this is really a huge leap forward already.<\/p>\n

You know, I was very excited to see Apple\u2019s new MobileMe<\/a> service. Having both a work and home computer, I really appreciate its sync services, among other things. But the new website is a disappointment. While it looks<\/em> far better than Google, it\u2019s just the same old thing. It\u2019s just \u201clipstick on a pig,\u201d as they say. There\u2019s nothing at all innovative about the email client, for example. Gmail is still light years ahead for me in terms of actual usability. And so this is one place I think Apple has really dropped the ball. They can make it as pretty and modern as they want, but once you\u2019ve used Google\u2019s equivalent apps, you see that there\u2019s really no contest.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Google Apps is a service you can use for free or pay for.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":9224,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"acf":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/needmoredesigns.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/q-s\/Screenshot-2014-03-03-14.29.16.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/needmoredesigns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1587"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/needmoredesigns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/needmoredesigns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/needmoredesigns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/needmoredesigns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1587"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/needmoredesigns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1587\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/needmoredesigns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9224"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/needmoredesigns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1587"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/needmoredesigns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1587"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/needmoredesigns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1587"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}