For me, a computer is primarily a writing and communications tool. Not infrequently I’ll run across someone praising the iPad for providing a “distraction–free” writing platform. I suppose much—by which I mean just about everything—depends on what sort of writing you’re doing. For much of my prose production efforts, alleged “distractions” (at least some of them) are an important part of the process.

Do you remember the Oregon Trail? Of course you do. It’s been a long time, but you can finally play the sequel to that wonderful game. Now that you’ve made it alive, you can start building your village and getting back to your lives. Also this week, Google rerereleased Gmail for iOS. Is the third time really a charm? And, of course, I found a whole bunch of limited time freebies.

Google released their free Gmail app two weeks ago, but it was quickly pulled due to bugs within the software. However, Google today brought it back to the app store for the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch. Now, Google is offering up version 1.0.2 that, according to the company, brings some new enhancements. People who previously installed the buggy version 1.0.1 are instructed to uninstall before upgrading to the new application. The new version of the Gmail app requires a device running iOS 4.0 or above.

Google has released their Gmail application for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. The app supports push notifications and sounds, improved visibility of important emails, and a user interface built from the ground up for the iOS touch interface. Unfortunately, users have reported error messages on start-up, along with crashes, and Google decided to yank the application out of the App Store.

Finally, Apple’s FaceTime is available on Mac computers in addition to the iPhone 4 and the most recent iPod touch. And if you’re anything like me, you have more than just one of the aforementioned devices, but just one Apple ID. No worries, if your Apple ID is linked to a Gmail account, there’s an easy way to effectively use it with every device you have. This is more of a feature of Gmail than it is of FaceTime, but the two combine extremely well. Gmail supports modifications to your standard email address by adding a plus sign and a string of characters between your username and @.

Google has updated their Mobile App for iPhone with push notifications for Gmail and Calendar. The update is live on the App Store right now, so I suggest you go and grab it right away. The new updates include its ability to not only push notifications to your phone when you have a calender event or new email, but also it can now search weather, flight and stock info, and do money conversions.

As Google will tell you, “Gmail is built on the idea that email can be more intuitive, efficient, and useful. And maybe even fun.” Considering that it’s also free, you may now find yourself with multiple Gmail accounts, and logging into Google to check them can be quite a chore. Thankfully, the good folks over at Applelinks have found a way to make Gmail management quite a bit simpler, direct from the desktop: Mailplane.

Kyle Van Essen of Vibealicious recently made quite a name for himself and his application, Notify, in the Mac and Objective-C development space. With thousands of users behind Notifiy 1.x, a GMail notifier, Kyle has recently been undergoing a complete rewrite of the application. In doing so, he has been very active in voicing his concerns about the current state of paid versus free software and how much time it takes to create a beautiful piece of software.

Many people have been waiting for decent Gmail Push Notifications to come to the iPhone. There are quite a few of these applications in the App Store that try to solve this issue, and there is now also a way to get Gmail emails through Push using Google Sync and the iPhone OS 3.0′s Microsoft Exchange support. PushGmail is just one of these applications (and the cheapest that I can find) that aims to solve this issue.

Today, Google announced that Google Sync has added support for Gmail, meaning that if you have a Gmail account, you can now get your mail pushed to your iPhone. All you need to begin with is an iPhone (with iPhone OS 3.0+) and a Gmail account. Basically, all you’re going to do is add a new email account in Settings with Microsoft Exchange. Okay, follow along now…