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Gmail Notifier and Google Notifier will no longer be available. They were two apps for Windows and Mac that displayed notifications for Gmail and Google Calendar (Mac-only) in the system tray, while also allowing you to set Gmail as the default mail client for your computer.

From the description of the Windows app (last updated in 2006): "The Gmail Notifier is an application that alerts you when you have new Gmail messages. It displays an icon in your system tray to let you know if you have unread Gmail messages, and shows you their subjects, senders and snippets, all without your having to open a web browser."

From the description of the Mac app (last updated in 2010): "The Google Notifier is an application that shows you alerts in your menu bar, so you can see when you have new Gmail messages or upcoming Google Calendar events without having to open a web browser."


Google sent this message, which suggests some alternatives:

We're writing to let you know about an important change to Google Notifier Beta. Starting on 31 January, Google Notifier Beta will no longer be supported, meaning that the app will no longer show recent emails and calendar events.

Since Google Notifier Beta was launched in 2005, a lot has changed. Smartphones can now notify us of new messages wherever we are, and improvements to web technology enable similar features to be built right into the browser.

If you want to continue to receive notifications, you can use any of the following alternatives to Google Notifier Beta, using the Chrome browser. To see the number of unread messages in your inbox at a glance, install the Gmail Checker Chrome app. To preview new messages on your desktop, go to Gmail's settings and enable Desktop Notifications. You can uninstall Google Notifier Beta by following these instructions.

It's funny to see that the apps were still in beta.

{ Thanks, Koen. }

Google Takeout now lets you export your calendars and it will soon add a similar feature for Gmail. The calendar exporting feature is not new - you could find it in the Google Calendar settings, but it's nice to see that Google Takeout gets more comprehensive and adds support for new services.

The Gmail exporting feature is completely new and it will be gradually released next month. It will let you download a big MBOX file you can import in mail clients like Outlook, Thunderbird or Apple Mail. You can also use this feature to backup your Gmail messages and read them offline.


"You can download all of your mail and calendars or choose a subset of labels and calendars. You can also download a single archive file for multiple products with a copy of your Gmail, Calendar, Google+, YouTube, Drive, and other Google data," informs Google.

When you enter a location for a Google Calendar event, Google now shows a list of suggestions. For example, if you type "Google H", one of the suggestions is "Google Headquarters". The nice thing is that Google also adds the address.


It's not clear how suggestions are ranked, but they're different from the Google Maps search suggestions. Nearby places are placed at the top of the list even if they're not that important.

{ Thanks, John Wilke. }

Google Calendar's app for Android has been updated with new controls for selecting time, date, timezones, colors and editing repeating events. I wonder if the next Android version will use these controls instead of the existing pickers.

Selecting the time is a 2-part process: you first select the hour and then the number of minutes. The time picker is based on a real 24-hour clock.



Selecting the date is straightforward: Google uses a scrolling calendar that's great for picking a date from the current month or next month. If you want to pick a date from a different year, tap the year and you can quickly switch to 2014, 2015 or any other year.


Here are the standard time/date Android pickers that were previously used by the Google Calendar app. "Each picker provides controls for selecting each part of the time (hour, minute, AM/PM) or date (month, day, year). Using these pickers helps ensure that users can pick a time or date that is valid, formatted correctly, and adjusted to the user's locale."


And here are the original pre-Honeycomb pickers:


The control for repeating events looks much better. "You can now set events to repeat every Tuesday and Thursday, every month, or every 7 weeks, it's completely up to you," informs the Android blog.


Now you can pick different colors for events and calendars:


There's also a different way to select time zones: instead of showing a long list of time zones, countries and regions, Google Calendar lets you enter the country name and it displays the relevant time zones.


I've found it easy to compare the old and new controls because my phone has both the stock Calendar app and the Google Calendar app from Google Play. It's a good idea to disable the notifications for one of the apps if you don't want to get multiple notifications for the same event.