Earlier in the week Google had announced a touch screen friendly interface for Gmail. This was obviously done with an eye towards making Gmail more accessible for i-Pad users. It has been actually created for the i-Phone and i-Pod touch screen interfaces but it should work for i-Pad. After all it is rumored that the iPad is a oversized iPod Touch.
There is a hack to view such websites including Gmail in its i-Pad friendly format. Here is how Gmail should look like with the hack.
How to get Tablet friendly interface of Gmail with Chrome Browser
- Go to Start Menu and look up Google Chrome icon. Right Click on it and get to Properties.
- Here in Properties you can look up the Target field. The text in the field will end with “chorme.exe”
- Now after “chrome.exe” leave a space and copy- paste the code below.
-user-agent=”Mozilla/5.0(iPad; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B314 Safari/531.21.10″
- Now you need to refresh your Browser. Actually for me personally it worked only after I closed the browser and then restarted it.
Here is a video demo of how I worked with Chorme and got iPad friendly Gmail interface on a laptop with Windows 7.
Do try it out the tablet interface for Gmail and let me know what you think about it. I do not think it is of great use for everyday use but might be useful for computer with very large screens. Remember that now with this change in Chrome you can view any websites default mobile phone friendly version. Do drop in your comments. 🙂
Link: Lifehacker