This weekend I finally joined the massive number of people who forward all their mail to Gmail. The main reason I finally switched can be credited to the sidebar gadgets that were launched in October (but that I only found out about recently).
Although the Google Calendar and Google Docs gadgets are excellent, I also wanted a Google Tasks gadget shown in the sidebar as well. Unfortunately, there’s no such option to enable from Gmail Labs. I’m guessing because Tasks was just launched in December.
However, with a little poking around the tubes, I found out there is a way:
- In Settings on the Labs tab, enable the Add any Gadget by URL feature (if it isn’t already)
- Click the Save Changes button at the bottom of the page
- After the page reloads, go to Settings, then the Gadgets tab and enter the following URL and click Add: http://www.google.com/ig/modules/tasks.xml
When the page reloads, you should see a Tasks (Labs) gadget in your sidebar.
Although the main reason I finally switched to Gmail is due to the sidebar gadgets, I’ve found that I’ve been missing out on some other nice features as well like keyboard shortcuts, labels (instead of folders), global searching, and conversations. These features have intrigued me all along, for years, but I just couldn’t take the leap to Gmail for fear of losing control of my data. I guess at some point recently, the value of all the features overtook the fear.
tyler
Awesome!
May 19th, 2009 at 6:42am
chzplz
is there a way to add Google Tasks to the Google Desktop Sidebar?
November 6th, 2009 at 1:30am
Seth M. Baker
Thanks for taking the time to write this up.
October 19th, 2010 at 10:27pm
Stephen
Thanks! that worked great!
January 2nd, 2011 at 12:13pm
Gary
Thanks for that, worked a treat
January 19th, 2011 at 3:05am
Ell Waude
Brilliant fix. Thank you very much, just saved me a lot of time!
April 5th, 2011 at 6:06am
morg7801
Great, any idea how to move it over to the right-hand sidebar?
April 22nd, 2011 at 1:38pm
mw
Awesome! Thanks so much!
May 11th, 2011 at 6:43pm
Artaraxl
This trick doesn’t seem to work in the new Gmail.
You can add the URL to Gadgets, but Tasks doesn’t appear even after saving changes.
December 20th, 2011 at 11:22am
Artaraxl
I take it back…it does work, but not very elegantly, at least in Firefox. Not so useful.
December 20th, 2011 at 12:12pm