Not enough pale purple Comic Sans text on a white background in your email inbox?

Google announced today that they’re enabling colors, fonts, hyperlinks and- sigh- images for email signatures. The feature will undoubtedly come in handy for businesses who use email, and for the plug-in savvy folk who have been using various workarounds because they really need to have a logo in their signatures. Of the new feature, Google said:

The next time you log in and visit the Settings page, you’ll see a rich text editor in the signature section. Here, you can customize your signature by adding pretty formatting, links, and images — or decide to leave things nice and simple.

Along with the new signature options, you’ll be able to associate distinctive signatures with each individual address linked to your GMail account so you can get fancy differently for each one. You won’t be able to use the new signature formatting with mobile GMail, older GMail or the HTML version, though.

Fair play to Google for the initiative- but while the feature is probably welcome to many people, is anyone else anticipating a flood of blinking fairies, baby due dates, harder to read text and generally slow to load emails? And when are we going to get the ability to schedule email delivery, GMail Labs?

GMail adds rich text signatures, without plugins is a post from: The Inquisitr

No, “Google Goggles” aren’t something off Urban Dictionary that you can drop into an e-mail when you’ve ended up in bed with a wealthy geek.

Google announced plans today for a new visual search, allowing searchers to submit queries via photograph, drawing on the powerful database of information behind Google Image Search. Vic Gundotra, Google’s VP of engineering, described the initiative:

“It is our goal to be able to identify any image,” he said. “It represents our earliest efforts in the field of computer vision. You can take a picture of an item, use that picture of whatever you take as the query.”

Gundotra fleshed out the merits of the visual search function with a dinner-party anecdote. Gifted with a bottle of wine he was clueless about, he used a visual search to quickly crib knowledge about it and properly express gratitude. During the event in which Google Goggles were announced, Gundotra also used them to correctly identify the Itsukushima Shrine in Japan- one of those things you’d know if you saw but not know the name of unless you’re some kind of trivia dork… clever.

Now, before you privacy humpers get all stressed out, facial recognition is not on the agenda for Google Goggles… yet. Scarily, the function works well to recognize faces, but Google’s wisely chosen not to allow it, which just made a whole bunch of girls on the C train breathe a bit more easily.

At the event, Google also demoed an English to Spanish translation using a cell phone.

Google shoots for visual search with “Google Goggles” is a post from: The Inquisitr

Gmail Tasks, now found under the “Labs” setting tab, lets you click to add any reminder to yourself, then check off items as you finish them.

The function is also built into messaging. Once you activate tasks, you can select any e-mail, then select “Add to Tasks” under the “More Actions” menu to directly move the entire message into a Tasks item.

The Tasks lists can also be popped in and out of the main Gmail browser window, much like the way the Chat option works.

Gmail Tasks is certainly nothing groundbreaking, but it’s a nice functionality that had long been missing from the service. For people who have replaced their standalone e-mail clients with Gmail (or who might be considering a switch to a Web-based platform), its addition will no doubt sweeten the deal.

The Inquisitr’s Steven Hodson has some concerns, though, about how Tasks’ debut could affect smaller applications such as Remember The Milk (RTM) that had offered similar functionality with Gmail integration. You can read his thoughts here.

Google Adds “Tasks” to Gmail is a post from: The Inquisitr

First, the new release: Chrome version 0.3.154.9 is expected to go out to users automatically within the “next few days,” according to a blog posted last night. It implements a substantial security fix, as well as improved Flash and Silverlight performance, touchpad scrolling support, and some changes to the interface.

Now, the counterintuitive effect: Chrome seems, at this point, to be helping the other browsers on the market. After its initial draw, recent reports show Chrome’s numbers dropping and the number of users on other browsers climbing. Opera CEO Jon S. von Tetzchner sees it as a direct effect. In an interview with GigaOM published today, von Tetzchner said the publicity surrounded Chrome essentially gave him free exposure to an audience who didn’t know his product existed.

“The effect of Chrome so far has been 20 percent more downloads every day,” he told GigaOM. “It’s fairly logical when you think about it, because the biggest hurdle we have is all those people that don’t realize there’s an alternative in the market. Now, with the launch of Chrome there’s focus on the choice of browsers in the market.”

So what’s in the cards for Chrome’s future? Our Inquisitr poll last month asked you what you thought.

• 39 percent of you believe Chrome will stick around and carve out its share of the market.
• 29 percent said it will stick around but never see widespread success.
• 32 percent said it will eventually fade into Google Lab oblivion.

To be fair, Google’s first foray into the browser world is still in beta, so we may be jumping to early judgments on its ultimate success. Then again, Gmail’s still in beta, too, and it’s doing just fine. Chrome came into a market with several popular and relatively advanced browsers, so finding a sizable userbase willing to abandon Firefox, Safari, or Opera may prove extra challenging for Google. So far, though, the team is showing no signs of giving up yet. Let’s see if their efforts pay off, or if — as a third of you predicted — Chrome vanishes into the final resting spot of so many Google projects past.

Chrome Releases Third Beta — Competitors Excited? is a post from: The Inquisitr

The good news: despite a TechCrunch report suggesting that Gmail Labs was georetarded to the United States and United Kingdom, I’m seeing labs here in Australia.

Gmail labs offers a variety of optional extras, including layout tweaks, shortcuts and even a game titled “Old Snakey.” Taken alone it’s a traditional Google Labs style offering: throw some things up, get some feedback, run with the popular ones as standard eventually, and I have no issues about the model what so ever. But..well…it’s just not exciting. Nothing in Gmail Labs is a radical change from what Google is offering on Gmail now and all the options are window dressings, nothing more. And of course they still haven’t enabled drag and drop, the one feature that would further turn Gmail into a killer business/ enterprise mail app.

My recommendation: don’t spend more that 5 minutes playing with this. Gmail Labs is accessible via the Settings Menu within Gmail.

I Want To Be Excited About Gmail Labs, But…Well…. is a post from: The Inquisitr