A simple minimalistic Gmail skin.

The web interface of Gmail is down but you can access your email using IMAP or POP

We know many of you are having trouble accessing Gmail right now — we are too, and we definitely feel your pain. We don't usually post about minor issues here (the Apps status dashboard and the Gmail Help Center are usually where this kind of information goes). Because this is impacting so many of you, we wanted to let you know we're currently looking into the issue and hope to have more info to share here shortly. If you have IMAP or POP set up already, you should be able to access your mail that way in the meantime. We're terribly sorry for the inconvenience and will get Gmail back up and running as soon as possible.

When composing an email, if you don't like choosing contacts using the auto-complete feature of gmail, now you have another option as google added a contact chooser for gmail. Click the To: link (or Cc: or Bcc:) and a list of contacts opens in a new window. By default it displays the most used addresses with the option to choose other lists, if you've created any, or all contacts.