iPad-iPhone Interface of Google Applications on Linux Desktop

Monday, April 5, 2010
Very recently Google has released special 2-pane interface of Gmail for iPad, which is kinda cool looking. Also other google services are available for iPad and tablet computers. These interfaces are highly customized for tablet like interface and touch-screen.
But how about using them on your desktop? That would be worth checking. Lifehacker ran an article on how to use this Gmail for tablet interface on desktop. It describes how to do it in Firefox with "User Agent Switcher" extension.
But how about running it on Google chrome browser on Linux. Just tried it and it looked awesome. Check it out.
Remember, no keyboard shortcuts on this interface (oh, iPad and tablets do not have KBs).

I checked the other Google apps; e.g. google calendar, docs, talk, buzz etc. But liked the Google Docs and Calendar ones. Pretty neat.

Google Docs iPad look

Google Calendar iPad look

So, whenever you get tired of the conventional looks of Google applications, use these ones instead.
You can run it directly from command line like this
/opt/google/chrome/google-chrome -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" --app="https://mail.google.com/mail"

Also, here is the desktop file to start up Gmail automatically in iPad look. Save it as gmail-ipad.desktop in your desktop.

3 comments:

  • Unknown

    very informative and liked the Google Calendar iPad look.............thanks for sharing.

  • gizmo

    Why Linux? You can do it on any OS by changing the browser agent strings. Thanks for the idea ;)

  • techzarinfo

    nice info for iphone.......... thanks for sharing

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