If you read through comments on the Guardian’s piece, you’ll see comments ranging from desperation to have the technology and also “I would not want to live in such a world.”

I find the latter kind of comment particularly amusing – the author seems not to appreciate that engaging in a computer-mediated global discussion is exactly the kind of thing they seem to be against.

Augmented reality is something that has, in truth, been around a long time.  I happen to know a little bit about flying, and about the “instrument  rating” – the qualification that allows a pilot to fly at night or in bad weather.  When you are flying at night or in cloud, you can’t see the horizon and your senses can deceive you as to which way is up and what direction you are moving.  The reason that pilots don’t fly straight into the ground or mountains is that they use their instruments as an extra layer of understanding on the situation around them.  This is a fairly clear form “augmenting reality.” If you’re overly obsessed by the specifics of having such information planted right there in front of your face, rather than having to look at a dashboard, then picture the kind of HUDs (heads up displays) that have been in use in military aircraft for many years.

The expansion of these technologies both in scope and use, should hardly be surprising or even taken as some kind of revelatory experience.   Really an overlay on reality is a new and slick interface, and will have all sorts of uses, but the *real* revelation is having a smartphone in your pocket that (aside from the visual overlay) can more or less do everything the video demonstrates – contact people all round the world, video conference, set reminders, search localised information, and so on.

All that being said, I’d quite like one :)

It’s definitely worth going one step beyond google’s own instructions on the matter and correctly configuring the drafts, sent and trash folders in both clients:

Mail.app

Choose the google folder for drafts in the sidebar. From the os x menu bar at the top of your screen choose ‘mailbox’ and then ‘use this mailbox for’ and then ‘drafts’. Do the same with the other folders.

iPhone Mail

Having done the basic setup, go to the settings app, choose ‘mail, contacts and calendars’, navigate to your mail account and choose ‘advanced’ and then setup the ‘mailbox behaviours’ as required.

NB if you are a fan of ‘labels’ in gmail, bear in mind that these equate to copies of the email in IMAP folders. That means that if you have, as I did, several thousand labelled emails from a different account you will have more than one copy of each downloaded to mail.app, assuming you chose to download your messages- and who wouldn’t?

The iPhone seems to work pretty flawlessly, but mail.app sometimes seems to take a while to catch up with changes (especially emails you’ve read on the iPhone while mail.app was offline) although it always seems to get there in the end.