Google's Gmail has been slowly adding new features like IMAP and group chat. The latest addition has been a high priority for many organizational obsessed users since the email service's inception.
Gmail users can now assign separate colors for each label. This allows you to easily categorize emails and recognize them at a glance by thee label color. To get started editing labels, you can click the square to the right of your label list and a color palette will appear. Edit name if you wish and click OK.
We've tested colored labels using Internet Explorer, Safari 3 and Firefox 2 and all appear to work.
Are you a designer? developer? Like color? Want to do some cool things with Adobe's Kuler application? Now you can.
The Adobe Labs project Kuler, is a hosted color picker application that allows for inspiration, creativity and sharing, they now have an API for developers. This new Kuler API allows developers to request RSS feeds of the highest rated or most popular color themes, and incorporating them into web project and web sites.
Check out some Kuler API usage in the Showcase. Warning, most do require users to have Adobe AIR installed.
COLOURlovers is a social networking site designed for people who work with and love color. The site monitors color trends and gives users a place to get their color on by comparing different color palettes with other users, commenting on palettes, and readings articles and interviews about color.
The site is designed with creative professionals in mind who are working with color on a daily basis. Product designers, graphic artists, advertising professionals, or people who just want to look at pretty colors can search through different palettes on the site for inspiration and use keywords to filter through the system and find a color scheme that works well for their particular needs. the site also has some sample magazine covers and websites up so you can see a particular color scheme in action.
As far as social networking sites go this one is a pretty useful one. An inspired idea for people who may need a little inspiration.
How many times have you wanted a way to change Windows XP's color scheme? Blue is nice, olive and silver are also good for a change when you get sick of blue, but what if orange, purple, or black is your favorite color, and you want your computer's desktop scheme to reflect that? Do you revert back to that Windows 95 goodness in putrid grey because there aren't so many choices in XP? I hate to say it, but Windows doesn't have a clue when it comes to color. You're not a cave-dwelling ancient, so we've got to find a better way. Stop the devolving!
Windows Vista has soundly answered this unrequited need for beautiful and colorful Windows. The key word here is "customizable." To check out the customizable color options, visit your Vista control panel and click on Personalization (or right click your desktop and choose Personalization). This option used to be "Properties" when right-clicking on the Windows XP desktop, if you chose to block that out. You will see a bunch of new options you didn't have before to customize the look and feel of Windows.
The first option is Window Color and Appearance which will let you change the color of windows with a slider for light to dark blue for example. These options are just one of the things that make Vista a bit more flexible to use and a little more fun. Check out the gallery below for some nice shots of what you can expect to see in Vista's color options screen and the results.
Eight percent of all men suffer from some form of colorblindness, a condition that can interfere with their ability to distinguish things designed for unimpaired viewers. Color Oracle aims to change this by making it easy for designers to see their work as a colorblind person would. Color Oracle overlays the user's screen to simulate three different kinds of colorblindness of increasing severity, the idea being that by designing for the severely colorblind, all your bases will be covered.
It would be great to get some feedback on this app from actual colorblind readers– perhaps even colorblind designer Jon Hicks of Firefox fame?
I'm not sure I've ever understood the web's obsession with color pickers, i.e. apps that help you build color schemes for whatever you're trying to design. Maybe that means I'm good at designing my own color schemes, or maybe it means that I'm really, really bad at it. At any rate, some of them are pretty cool, including kuler, a newish one from Adobe Labs. Characteristically, kuler is Flash-based and has a very slick interface. For creating color schemes you have a lot of help: there are analogous, monochromatic, triad, complementary, compound, shades, and custom modes, most of which are Greek to me but the little multiple-spoked color wheel is fun to play with. More interesting, though, is kuler's social aspect: If you create an account and log in you can save and share your color themes with other users, and rate the themes others have created. Though Flash interfaces aren't always my cup of tea, kuler is fun to use and great if you're looking for a little inspiration.
Yotophoto is a search engine specifically for free-to-use images. Most of the images it indexes have been released under Creative Commons, GNU FDL, or similar licenses, and a smaller percentage are in the public domain. This means you can use any images indexed by Yotophoto without feeling subversive. And if you don't want to go to the trouble of visiting the Yotophoto web site, there's a search plug-in available for Firefox.
Now, are you ready for the really cool part? Yotophoto allows you to search by color. Need an image that matches your site's color scheme? Either use the Javascript color picker to choose from a palette of over 16 million colors, or enter a 6-digit hex code. Yotophoto will find images containing the color you specified. For example, here's a selection of images that match Yotophoto's logo.
del.icio.us is at it again, and this time they've added site thumbnails to the popular links on the homepage. Unfortunately, this is the only place thumbnails exist, but it's at least a step towards catching up to some of their competitors in this particular department.
Also making (another) appearance on the homepage is the re-introduction of popular tags, along with (from what I remember) some minor new UI elements as well. Bookmark counts are now in a more striking blue box, and I just noticed the tag cloud now uses red to denote tags that you share with everyone else (is this new or not?). Finally, on their blog they also hint at "lots of plans" for the recently updated del.icio.us API, but they offer nothing as hints towards whether it'll be a kitchen sink or a bookmarking A.I. that 'marks things for me based on my mood and past bookmarks. I guess we'll just have to wait (im)patiently.
Awhile back I blogged about changing Windows folder icons to make navigation faster. It's a great productivity booster and I've been doing it ever since, but I'm going to have to give iColorFolder a try. Like the folder icons, iColorFolder makes folder navigation in Windows easier, in this case by letting you assign colors to your folder icons, which is done from the right-click context menu. It also lets you assign custom icons and comes with three different icon skins, but it also works fine if you're already using some icon customization/skin tool. Even better, iColorFolder is open source software and takes up little memory.
Google's Gmail has been slowly adding new features like IMAP and group chat. The latest addition has been a high priority for many organizational obsessed users since the email service's inception. 
COLOURlovers
