Google just introduced Gmail Labs — 13 new optional features that you can try out on your Gmail account. To get them go to your settings and click the Labs button. Let's check the new features out.

If you're an Adobe kuler user, you need try out this cool Color Picker add-on — Mondrianum.

While kuler membership is not necessary to run this add on, unfortunately the beta only runs on Leopard — another reason to upgrade.

Apple Color Picker is available in more Mac OS X applications, including Photoshop. In PS you just need to switch from the Adobe picker in General Preferences.

Mondrianum adds another way to pick colors besides the already default 5 other ways, such as color circle, sliders, swatches, image and crayons.

Mondrianum downloads color sets right from kuler using tags or you can select from the popular, highest rated and newest color sets.

Tag search means if you come up with a unique tag and share it with your friends you can effectively share color sets across multiple work stations.

Here are a couple of tag searches and their results:

I checked out the free beta of Iris, which promises to be the future of image editing on the Mac platform. According to the site:

Designed from the ground up specifically for Mac users, Iris provides a powerful, intuitive, and easy-to-use solution for all your photo editing needs.

Programmed to perform with a unique and elegant one-window interface, Iris renders confusing multiple palettes obsolete.

It certainly delivers on being easy-to-use and elegant, however I didn't feel it being particularly fast even though it's an only 4MB download.

I like 3 things in particular about Iris that Adobe developers should consider integrating into Photoshop.

There is a neat documents dock on the bottom of the screen that allows for quick switch between open documents.

It also features a useful little zoom button that switches between common states and an iPhoto style slider that helps find you the correct magnification easily.

Under the File menupoint there is a New from Clipboard option that simplifies this frequent task.

While I don't think the application is ready to replace Photoshop, it's going to be a great tool for those who can't justify the cost of a professional image editing application.

Against all odds the brand new MacBook Air isn't an ultrathin WiFi MacBook. Hey, we've had WiFi for like 10 years, what's new about that? It's so much more cooler than that!

The new MacBook Air features a sophisticated electronic nose called iSmell. It can detect smells and lead you to them via the brand new Mac OS X app SmellCompass.

The iSmell is a similar device to iSight and it comes built in all Apple laptops now called MacBook Air and MacBook ProAir. For your Cinema Display's and now completely obsolete MacBook's you can buy an add on iSmell device that sits neatly on the top of your laptop and sniffs periodically. When it detects an interesting smell if alerts you on the screen and you can move around your MBPA to find the source of the smell. While some say iSmell is a little bulky we at creativebits don't mind as the nostrils double as pencil sharpeners. It's clear that Apple never forgets his main target audience — the designers. It's the little things, like these sharpener nostrils that make Apple products great!

It was expected from Apple to focus on the next area of sensory input after iTunes, iSight and iTouch. But I expect iSmell to be a flop, like the iPhone was. Nobody will buy a an electronic nose for 600 bucks... — commented Dworak.

Critics noted that the product name iSmell isn't particularly lucky as it sounds like you're confessing your geek hygiene habits, but the Apple marketing dept dismissed saying: "After the Wii anything goes!"

It is great when you're on the road and feel like having a Double Latte Grande Frapuccino and can't see the huge Starbucks sign in front of you. And, it's life saving at the Airport when you are desperately trying to find the public restroom. Love the innovative arrow device in SmellCompass that shows you where to go. It's all about user experience and Apple delivered again. — said Pogue.

Rumor says we can expect a brand new product called iLick in late 2008, which is essentially a trackpad that lets you taste objects on the screen while being able to navigate the cursor at the same time with your tongue. Some sources indicate a joint promotion with Hustler to launch the new product, but of course we don't care about rumors. I will only believe if I can lick myself!

Update: i6thsense will be released shortly after the keynote without an announcement. It will not be available at the Apple Store or anywhere else publicly, but according to a TUAW insider you will instinctively know where to get it.

Once it launches, it will be fun to check out this new project called Aviary, which is a set of many different design tools. It is targeting a semi-professional market, so it's not really us. And, it's unlikely you gonna replace your Adobe CS suite for Aviary anytime soon, but I'm sure we will find a few interesting elements in this new package that can be used together with our traditional applications.

Apparently the flagship application Phoenix is a Photoshop clone with much of the functionality ported. Another exciting title is Peacock, a powerful pattern generator. Check out the sample images. It would be interesting for me to explore the 3D app called Hummingbird and Toucan the color swatches and palettes creator. Check out the whole long product range of Aviary.

Have I mentioned the most interesting part about the project? It's web based. Ironically the whole platform is based on Flex, which is an Adobe product to create rich internet applications. While I can imagine vector editing on a web based interface, but I'm highly skeptical about opening a 500MB image or editing a 10GB video in a browser.

I can't imagine an application made to run in a browser — no matter how well written — can outperform a desktop application in speed. But I can see how these set of tools can bring value into your work process in other ways. I can see your productivity soaring because you can use the power of internet connectivity to share and collaborate with your friends and coworkers to work on projects together. Same way as Google Doc's limited feature set is more useful than using the desktop MS Office or iWork packages in a highly team oriented environment, I can imagine Aviary to be a good tool to create and trade design work by collaborating online within a community.

You can sign up for a beta test here: http://a.viary.com/login/

Here is a handy little application that improves efficiency if you work a lot with html, css and graphics under Mac OS X.

Color Picker Pro as the name suggests is a beefed up color picker with a magnifying glass and a container for picked colors. Here are the steps on how you are supposed to make use of it:

1. Hover over the graphics on your screen with your cursor and locate the pixel with the color you want to pick.
2. Press Apple-X to copy the color to the picker.
3. If you're happy with the picked color drop it into one of the containers below.
4. Once all the colors required have been collected you can start working on your code.
5. Whenever you need the hexadecimal code of a specific color, instead of remembering and typing it, just drag and drop the small colored square from Color Picker Pro's containers to the text editor.
6. Color Picker Pro will insert the hex code including the # sign right into the document.

Keep CPP open when you code and use it whenever you need it. It's quick and visual. I find it much easier to use than goofing around with Photoshop for this simple purpose.

You can make CPP float above all other application if you don't want to keep switching to it, while you click around in windows.

Also, it's important to note that you can customize the textual output the way the colors are described. This can be useful when you're developing an identity guideline book and you don't want to use the technical HEX colors to describe the RGB values.

CPP has one additional small feature that you may find useful. With the key combination Apple-D you can set the Desktop color to the active color being picked.

Default Folder X is a very important little add-on application that will save a lot of time and effort in your daily work. Let me give you a quick review of the main features.

The name isn't very descriptive as Default Folder X does much more than the name suggests and does it in a real simple way. The main feature of the application is that it tries to simplify finding the right folder you want to work with when you use the open or save dialog boxes. There are 6 ways to find the right folder and five of them are represented by the five icons that appear around the open or save dialog boxes. Let's take a quick look at each of them.

Check out skitch, a Max OS X application, that is only available with an invite at this stage. It's like the free ImageWell application on steroids. It not only allows you to create quick screenshots and edit them, but also gives you server space and a platform to store those images online so you can view them on your skitch page (here is mine). Alternatively you can embed them into your blog or forum post. And, of course I'll give away the invites I have. I got only 2 so far, so please drop a comment if you want one.

Click read more link below to check out the video for more details.

With a mailbox of 1GB you never have to delete email? Not true. I have two gmail accounts and I still had to periodically delete emails with attachments. Not anymore though. Google just launched a pay service to expand the available space up to 250GB. Here are the prices:

• 6 GB - $20.00 per year
• 25 GB - $75.00 per year
• 100 GB - $250.00 per year
• 250 GB - $500.00 per year

You can purchase space for your Picasa albums and it is promised to become available for Google Docs & Spreadsheets too.

You can upgrade your Google account here: https://www.google.com/accounts/ManageStorage

I just bought 6GB upgrade for one of the my Gmail accounts and I'm pretty sure I will upgrade further within a few month. It takes 24 hours for the service become active. I'll report back on the success.

Update: The extra 6GB has been assigned to my account. It doesn't show up as extra space on the bottom of the email interface, but only shows in percentage on the manage storage page. As you can see I still have about 800MB left from the 2.8GB that Google provides for free so I'm not using any of the extra 6GB yet. Oh, the ads are still appearing on the gmail interface, I guess it doesn't matter if I'm a paying customer or not.

If you have to type the same pieces of text over and over every day, it is worth taking a look at an application that accelerates your typing by expanding short abbreviations to full text. Dreamweaver can do it on code and Textmate is a text-editor that have such functionality. But, if you want a system wide solution that is extremely easy to set-up try out TextExpander.

It's a system preference and it is really easy to setup. You just need to create pairs of abbreviations and full text entries. Once TextExpander is enabled every time you type the abbreviation it automatically expands it to full text.