I was really hoping to give this feature a thorough test right away after hearing of it a couple of days ago, but unfortunately I keep my Inbox far to clean and have to wait until tomorrow morning to test it out for real.

As you can see, I didn’t have enough mail to truly test the new feature out. I usually go through around 100 message throughout the course of the day, but at this point I’d already filtered through them all.

I’m excited to try this out, as about 80% of the emails that I receive are skim-able and not all that dire. I like the idea of Gmail learning to sort these as you correct it from the beginning and am curious to see how well it works, but also a little concerned on privacy (thanks to my brother for the link!).

I’ve developed a sort of skill for parsing through the emails in my chaotic inbox every morning and am wondering if the new Priority Inbox will actually feel more chaotic, but I’m willing to give it a try for a while. Compare the Priority Inbox above to the regular Inbox below.

One of the best features of this new feature for me is that it doesn’t replace the regular Inbox. As you can see in the screenshots, you’re still able to select either view you prefer easily from the list on the left.

Now I’m curious. Have any of you used this feature yet? And if so, do you find it useful?

Curious about adding it to my blog (as you should now see in the right column), I fired him an email. Unfortunately he didn’t have a script prepared, but still offered up the images!

Taking a little time, I grabbed the old script for an Ubuntu 10.04 Banner, made a few modifications (and corrections) and got the banner up and ticking in no time!

If you’re interested in using one of these two banners on your site then you’ll be happy to know I’m posting easily linkable scripts to these two right here!

Orange
<script type='text/javascript' src='http://www.kyleabaker.com/fun/ubuntu1010banner/orange.js'></script>

Purple
<script type='text/javascript' src='http://www.kyleabaker.com/fun/ubuntu1010banner/purple.js'></script>

Copy and paste the style that you’d like to use into your blog or web site. If you have any problems just let me know.

Be sure to give Anthony a shout out and thanks if you like his design as well! You can find his email listed on the Ubuntu banners page linked above.

I tweaked it ever so slightly to “span” across my dual screen displays smoothly, so if you’re looking for another dual screen wallpaper then you’ve found it!

If you liked this wallpaper, make sure you leave a message for the author, schmoek. I’m also always interested in using a new wallpaper, so if you have any suggestions then please send them my way!

Here are some pictures for your entertainment. If you’d like to use this, you need to install the Google Voice plugin first and then restart you web browser.

Keep in mind that you need the plugin to do this (and obviously a microphone) and that you’ll be calling friends or family using a number provided to you by Google Voice (so they may not recognize it at first).

The best thing going for Google’s new calling feature (if you ask me) is that its completely free for me to call any phone in the USA. While this pricing may not be permanent, it should at least last through the course of this year (my source for that is linked somewhere up above ).

This looks a little cleaner and more professional if you ask me!

Another small update, which I gladly welcome, is the reintroduction of colorful status icons in Empathy so the status of your friends is once again easily recognizable! The previous icons were monochrome and were hardly ideal.

If you haven’t seen the new set of wallpapers for Ubuntu 10.10 yet, head on over and checkout Joey’s post displaying them all. Following discussions regarding the new wallpapers, I’ve had my eyes set for a while now on the Blue building.

The new Ubuntu 10.10 wallpaper, which I predicted here, has also been packaged in LaunchPad and released. Though many have doubts that it is the final and I for one am hoping that they’ve been holding on to something amazing to shock and awe us with later.

If you’d like to take a look at what has been released as the official wallpaper, I’ve posted it here for now and will make sure its properly updated later if it happens to change.

Also, if you’ve been sitting on the edge of your seat waiting to upgrade, you’ll be happy to know that Ubuntu 10.10 goes into Beta status next Thursday. You should realize that betas are not finished products and may contain bugs, but thus far I’ve seen very few major bugs and in a week there should obviously be even fewer.

Here’s a quick preview of the updates to the Radiance theme, image brought to you by the Design Team.

UPDATE:

It looks like the progress bar has also see some slight tweaking to make it look oh so much better. Attention to detail is highly important (as seen by Mac OS X) and this is a great example!

I checked the app store last night just before going to bed for this app and there was no sign of it in sight, so I had decided to write a post along the lines of “Where is the promised (summer) Netflix iPhone/iPod touch App?”. Little did I know that I would wake up to the release headlines (that was much better)!

Without further ado, I bring you a brief gallery of what you can expect to find in this little app..

That’s a rundown of the Sign-in page, Home, Genre, Search, Instant Queue and player screens!

In case you missed these details, hiding the keyboard in the Search screen expands the movie covers into view where there was previously too little room to show them.

In the player screen with controls, you should note the progress bar at the top with a “zoom” button to the right which zooms in just enough to fill the wasted space above and below the video (not pictured zoomed). There is also the play/pause button at the bottom which is accompanied by the 30 second backtrack button and the volume bar.

This design is nearly (if not exactly) identical to the Netflix app design for the iPad which has been released to the public for some time now.

If you’re a Netflix member and own an iPhone or iPod touch then I highly recommend you head straight to the App Store and download this free app for yourself! Enjoy!

I eventually came across one that caught my attention.

He’s been a member since 2007 and has scrobbled 1 song..and he is a paying subscriber. I thought to myself, what a waste of money! …so I clicked on his Last.fm page.

You’ll have to open these images to see the details, but basically what you’ll see is that my math skills are apparently either ridiculously awesome or Last.fm’s are very poor.

Play counts are based on the total number of tracks scrobbled divided by the length of the membership in days. This seems obvious enough doesn’t it? Well, my calculations show that 1 song in 1180 days is somewhere around 0.000847 plays per day…which is far from the 12,920 plays per day that Last.fm seems to think.

Am I wrong in thinking that this is just really poor programming to make such inaccurate calculations?

In case you’re wondering, the “589 more plays needed” tidbit means that if he had (by the end of the day) 590 plays in total that his average daily play count would be 0.5…which Last.fm rounds up to 1 per day.

Even considering the account had been reset, should they not be able to correctly calculate track plays? Maybe their servers are just having a few hiccups, but either way I thought it was funny enough for a post.

Also, if you don’t understand the joke in the title then you’re really missing out on an old clip about Maths! You should take a quick moment to have your daily laugh.

If you’re not using a capable browser while viewing this post then you won’t see much (read: nothing special). The web is slowly evolving and minimizing the "drug like addiction" to Adobe’s infamously unstable Flash player which is used for various popular web content including YouTube videos and time wasting Flash games.

One super cool example of WebM, which is the video technology behind HTML5 video, comes from SkyNews and should appear below if you’re using a browser worth your time using. I recommend Opera!

WebM is a video container which allows for a very simple method of embedding video on a web page that will eventually be adopted by all major web browsers. The video above displays an example of live streaming WebM video and goes to show that the new video tag is very powerful and useful!

I’ve been looking forward to HTML5 video for some time now and am happy to see such neat and useful demonstrations pop-up across the Internet to set such great examples!

The next major step that I’m waiting for is for Google to officially replace flash videos on YouTube and Google Videos with new HTML5 WebM videos. Popular video sites such as YouTube and Vimeo have recently shown off demos of the new video format, but neither have made the leap from flash content to relying on the browser. Depending on how long it takes for other web browsers to adopt and perfect support for this feature, it could be a long wait.

Features such as fullscreen mode have yet to make it into Opera’s web browser, but will certainly be added in a not too distant release. Hopefully sooner than later.

Thanks to a friend in IRC for bringing this to my attention (windsong@irc.opera.com).

If you’ve been wanting to use voice and video chat on Linux (our top video chat request), then we have good news for you: it’s now available! Visit gmail.com/videochat to download the plugin and get started. Voice and video chat for Linux supports Ubuntu and other Debian-based Linux distributions, and RPM support will be coming soon.

Video chat in action..

That’s one small step for Google; one giant leap for the Linux community.

One less menu, yet more control..fantastic!

This is a welcome update for me as it reduces redundancy among the menus and gives the sound indicator menu a little more purpose. Looking through the Rhythmbox Plugins, I’ve also stumbled across the ReplayGain plugin (some how avoiding looking right at it and missing it though I look through the plugins regularly).

This elusive feature is highly valuable!

While this isn’t a new feature to Rhythmbox, or many other media players for that matter, if you’ve never used it then I highly suggest you enable it! If you’ve ever noticed that some of your audio files are just way too loud compared to others and you’re constantly adjusting your speakers then you should look into ReplayGain. I’ve been watching the a couple of Rhythmbox features that I’m highly anticipating as they’ve been progressing thanks to Google Summer of Code. If you’ve not been keeping up with the mailing lists, you’ve been missing out on “DACP in Rhythmbox” by Alexandre Rosenfeld and “Improved Last.fm Plugin” by Jamie Nicol.

Connecting a remote device to Rhythmbox.

The code for both of these is available on Gitorious if you’re looking for a sneak peak. I’m not sure how long it will take before they are packaged with Rhythmbox by default, but I think its fairly safe to say that they won’t make it in time for Ubuntu 10.10. Let’s hope I’m wrong.