I
use Google Inbox for my email in Windows 10, but I get tired of having to keep
a browser window open all the time. I often close the browser when I’m done
working with email by accident, and forget that I need to keep it open for
email. I’d love it if I could create some sort of separate desktop application
just my Google Inbox email. Can you help?
This problem is the very reason why
many people use a dedicated email client desktop application, like Outlook,
Windows Mail, or Thunderbird on Windows, or Outlook or Mac Mail on a Mac. If
you want to use the Google Inbox user interface, you need a browser window or
an app on your iOS or Android device (The user interface is awfully nice—check
it out at google.com/inbox, and once you’ve set it up, browse to inbox.google.com.)
There is no client application that presents this user interface to you as a
separate window, at least on Windows. On the Mac, you can use the MailPlane app
(http://www.mailplane.com--Ken uses
this application daily) or several other newly created (and untested by us)
applications that present this Web interface wrapped up in a desktop
application. If you’re a Gmail user on a Mac, Ken can’t recommend MailPlane highly
enough—it’s a wonderful wrapper around Gmail, including Inbox and Calendar—that
works exceptionally well. Highly recommended!
But back to the point—on Windows,
you’ll need some extra help to set up Google Inbox in a separate window. The
goal would be to have Google Inbox act like a standard Windows desktop
application, and you can do this, with the right tools! A browser application
that looks and acts like a desktop application is called a “site-specific
browser”—it’s a way of making a browser window work like a desktop app, and
that’s the goal here. Google Chrome, the browser from Google, makes this
relatively easy, on Windows (not on the Mac, for reasons unknown to us).
Start by ensuring that you have a
recent copy of Google Chrome installed on Windows (http://www.google.com/chrome). Start
Chrome, browse to the Google Inbox site (or whichever site you want to create a
site-specific browser for), and click on the three-line menu in the upper-right
corner of the browser window. (That icon is often called the “hamburger”—no
kidding!—because it kind of looks like a hamburger with bun and filling. We
don’t make this stuff up.) From that menu choose More Tools and then Add
Taskbar. The Add Taskbar menu pops up a dialog box that displays what the
application will be called—change it if you want—and make sure to check the
Open in Window checkbox. Click Add. This action adds a new item to the Task
Bar. That’s it! You now have an icon on the Task Bar that you can click at any
time to open a browser window specific to Google Inbox (or any other site). It
looks and feels like any other desktop application.
For more information, check out the
article here: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/use-chrome-create-windows-10-app-website/