Mailplane has simply become one of my “can’t live without” Mac apps after shortly installing the trial, followed promptly by a purchase…

How so?

Mailplane is a desktop app that completely integrates your Gmail/Google Apps mail into a desktop email client that even adds functionality to Gmail, not just letting you access it, which you can do with things like Fluid.app.

So what makes Mailplane so great? First off, you don’t need a browser window open all the time. Second, you don’t have to use Mail.app. Mail.app is fine… but doesn’t give you threaded conversations, and labeling and starring of messages (both of which are reasons you would choose Gmail). Mailplane lets you have access to all of these, right in the app, no browser required. Pic of Mailplane.app running below!

Growl notifications: This is a huge one for me. If you don’t have Growl than you should, plain and simple, the first thing I install on any Mac. You can add Growl notifications to Mail.app with tricky hacks (that aren’t Leopard friendly), but Mailplane just does it better. You get quick, easily readable message notifications (and other notifications). Fantastic!

Image plugins: Mailplane perfectly integrates into Mac OS imaging to let you quickly browse and add files to an email, and you can ever send images directly from iPhoto with automatic resizing.

All in all, Mailplane lets you use a desktop email client in THE way you should in 2008, not using a “pull” mail app, which is getting very “year 2000″ incredibly quickly these days…

If I could some up Mailplane perfectly I would say it is a perfect extension and integration of Gmail into Mac OS. Nothing is better than perfect integration! Bravo!

Finally… Mailplane (download here) is $24.95 for a single user (2 Mac) license, but can be had for $17.95 if you are a college student. Thanks for discounting for us college students! I wish more developers did this…

Today Google announced that they will start rolling out offline access to Google Apps (Docs, Gmail, Calendar, and Talk) and Google Docs using Google Gears. Users no longer will have to be connected to the internet to access their Google Apps and online data. This integration will be rolled out over the following weeks.

Google Gears is a Firefox plugin for Mac OS X (Safari support coming), Linux, and Windows (IE also supported) that allows users to navigate to their regular Google Apps url’s as you would online, but but be able to access them offline just like you would normally, with the data syncing up when you reconnect later.

To me this is another logical yet significant step in making your online information accessible to you anywhere, anytime, and that is true connectivity and mobility at it’s finest. Good job Google, keep it up!

P.S. If you haven’t checked out Google Apps yet, you are missing out! iSKUB mail, docs, and calender all run on it! Did I mention it is FREE?

iSKUB live; a new feature on iSKUB launching today!

Powered by Qik, iSKUB live will deliver LIVE streaming video onto iSKUB.com from anywhere that I have my Nokia S60 handset has internet connectivity, which in my case is my trusty Nokia E51.

Whenever you go to iskub.com/live you can see what I am streaming LIVE real-time or the last video recorded when I was online.

Services like Qik offer a fantastic way to bring internet content production from a write-publish-read system to a live-immediate system. Just go to the site, and it is there. Nothing gets easier than that. So check out iSKUB live and let me know what you think. It also has it’s own comments section for viewer feedback. Post those comments!