From The Back Room

I had an email with an .mp3 file attached, and was surprised to see a Play link next to the attachment.

Clicking the link opens up a dialog window where you'll see a Play / Pause button and a link to download the file.

What will they think of next?

Noticed the new Gmail loading screen? This was introduced sometime in mid-May 2008.

It might seem like nothing spectacular but wait till you read a post on the official Gmail blog explaining how they optimized Gmail's loading code.

You get to learn:

1. Gmail's architecture.
2. Web development tools used - looks like they really like the Httpwatch plug-in for the Internet Explorer.
3. What they did with requests, cookies and icon images to improve performance.

Pretty interesting reading, yes?