You’ll Never Believe How Googsystray Revolutionizes Your Google Apps Experience!

If you use Google Apps to manage your work or personal projects, you know how challenging it can be to keep track of all the different tools and features the platform offers. From Gmail and Google Drive to Calendar and Hangouts, the various apps and services can quickly become overwhelming and hard to navigate. That’s where Googsystray comes in!

Googsystray is a browser extension that aims to simplify and streamline your Google Apps experience by giving you easy access to your most frequently used apps and features. With Googsystray, you can customize a launchpad of your preferred Google Apps and easily switch between them without having to navigate through the cumbersome menu structure of Google.

But that’s just the beginning. Googsystray also provides quick access to frequently used actions such as composing a new email or creating a new document in Google Drive. With just a few clicks, you can navigate to your desired action and get your work done faster.

Furthermore, Googsystray includes a reminder feature that can help you stay on track with your daily tasks. You can set reminders for meetings, deadlines, or even personal events, and Googsystray will alert you when the time comes. This way, you can stay on top of your schedule and ensure you never miss an important event again.

If you’re concerned about your privacy, you’ll be happy to know that Googsystray doesn’t collect any personal information from you. It’s a simple and straightforward tool that’s designed to help you work more efficiently without intruding on your privacy.

So, what are you waiting for? If you’re looking to supercharge your Google Apps experience, give Googsystray a try. It’s easy to install, easy to use, and it will help you get more done in less time. Trust us, you’ll wonder how you ever managed without it!

While it may not have the world’s catchiest name, Googsystray is a heck of a useful app. That is, if you use a lot of Google apps like GMail, Reader, and especially Voice. It doesn’t just show you unread counts like so many other utilities, Googsystray integrates tightly with the Google services to give you the ability to make phone calls through Voice or send SMS text messages directly from your system tray. It works on most Linux and Windows systems, and can save you quite a bit of hassle (and several browser tabs).

Note: This article will focus on the Linux implementation. Past the installation step, the usage should be identical.

Linux Installation

The software comes in a tarball for installation. Getting everything done is a simple process from the command line

If you’re returned to the prompt with no errors, installation was successful. Just run

from the command line to begin.

Configuration

At first, Googsystray is unaware of your accounts. It’s got to have at least one to do its job, and that can be added by clicking the Add button in the top right corner of the General tab.

Place a check mark for any Google services you want Googsystray to monitor. From here on out, you can set up individual options for Google Voice, GMail, Calendar, Reader, and Docs.

Once you’ve chosen your preferred services and configured to your preferences, don’t forget to check out the Popup Window section. This is what you’ll see when you go to make calls or texts through Voice, or any other feature that requires a popup.

Go ahead and save your settings. If all went well, you’ll see the icons for your selected services appear on your panel.

The Fancy Parts

There are plenty of things that can show your email count in your panel, and if that’s all Googsystray could do, we wouldn’t bother writing about it. Where things get more interesting is with Google Voice integration. By right-clicking the Voice icon, you can bring up the menu offering several useful Voice options, such as initiating new calls.

Much like calling from the Voice homepage, the applet will call the number you desire and ring the phone of your choosing.

Similarly, you can use the same menu to bring up the options for SMS messages.

If nothing else, these two features alone make Googsystray worth the install for many.

Caveats

During testing, this author encountered a few bugs that caused a complete application crash. This seemed to mostly occur when taking actions quickly, such as starting and stopping a Voice call in a short amount of time. It’s been a few months since the last release, at least according to the Sourceforge download page, so it’s possible some of these issues are being addressed.

While minor, there were some graphical issues as well. The notification numbers are rather shoddy looking, especially at larger sizes. This may be due to the software’s multi-platform nature, as it can’t reliably depend on a particular graphics library. It might also help if the popup window took its color template from the system settings, but once again the platform independence might make that difficult to implement.

Conclusion

While there’s still room for polish, Googsystray is certainly very useful as-is. While it may not integrate very well into my particular OS/desktop combination, it’s nice to know I could run it as-is across any PC in my home with identical results. For those like me who rely heavily on Google for communications, Googsystray is the way to go.

Josh Price is a senior MakeTechEasier writer and owner of Rain Dog Software

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