Posts Tagged ‘google’

Gmail’s Priority Inbox feature changed the way I read mail. Instead of simply starring messages or going through the hassle of tagging and storing my email somewhere in a long list of folders, I was suddenly able to chose those communications that were most important, have them displayed at the top of my inbox list, and even have Gmail learn from my choices to automatically determine what future messages should be considered top priority. It was one of those updates that refreshes a product and provides practical–if not indispensable–new functionality.

Over time, I, like many of you probably did, found myself hanging onto those prioritized messages for far too long. I still wanted them at the top of my inbox, but new, lower priority messages were slipping past my radar–a First World problem of the highest order.

Google is addressing this conundrum with a new set of Gmail tabs that allow you to snap back and forth between inbox styles with a single click. They call it…Inbox Styles, and it allows you to alternate between Classic, Priority, Unread, Important, and Starred message sorting. Boom!

The downside is that, once you’ve selected a style and settled on it for a week, the tabs disappear. Though I will be switching many times a day, I find this last bit to be kind of a drag. Why not provide the option to have the tabs displayed for good? The style can be changed under Gmail’s settings menu, but the tabs are far more convenient.

The tabs will turn up in your Gmail account in the coming weeks. If you find the perfect style, just keep on working and the tabs will disappear. If you like constantly switching modes, the tabs should remain indefinitely.

Via Gmail blog

Have you been invited to Google+? Well, I’ve already been invited and I think it’s awesome but Facebook gonna do something about this. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has today announced that Facebook is about to launch something awesome next week, Reuter reports.

Chief Executive and founder Mark Zuckerberg told reporters in a visit to Facebook’s Seattle office on Wednesday that the company planned to “launch something awesome” next week.

He said the project had been developed at the 40-person Seattle office, Facebook’s only major engineering center outside of its Palo Alto, California headquarters.

Reuters suggests that it may be the much-much-waited Facebook app for iPad. It could be also the photo-sharing app, something like Instagram or PicPlz. Reuters asked Facebook to comment but they prefered to keep this things private. May be a dislike button?

Thoughts?

Google is doing great efforts to satisfy its users and here’s something it’s doing right now. Google is officially pushing new GMail interface. Thanks to Google’s users’ feedback, they could launch a new interface with two new themes to try out as a sort of sneak peek at what we’re up to.

Here’s what one of the new themes currently looks like:


And in conversation view:

 

Starting today, you’ll see the “Preview” and “Preview (Dense)” themes in the Themes tab in Gmail Settings. Why two themes? Our new interface will eventually expand dynamically to accommodate different screen sizes and user preferences, but until then you can pick the information density that you prefer.

To try it now, simply go to Gmail Settings, click on the Themes tab and select “Preview” or “Preview (Dense)” as your theme to try this yourself then tell us what do you think?

[via GmailBlog]

Image

A year back, Gmail started letting users drop images from their desktop right into the compose window.

“Now, when you are running the latest version of Google Chrome, you can paste images right from your clipboard too,” Google announced.

“So if you copy an image from the web or another email, you can paste it right into your message. This is especially handy for passing around screenshots — you don’t have to save the files any more (I have been using Ctrl-C on my windows to save screenshots directly to the clipboard). While this currently only works in Chrome, we hope to enable it on other browsers soon,” Google added.

I’ve discovered a huge drawback to the Twitter messaging system: it does not store links. The Twitter site itself will identify URL’s in messages and convert them into clickable links for you automatically. But the magic ends at Twitter’s borders; anyone who wants to do the same on their site is on their own.

So I consulted the almighty Google. I found plenty of raw regex, javascript, and Twitter-focused discussions on the matter, but I found the offered solutions and tips lacking. I wanted to do this up right, transparently via PHP in the background. No JS required.

Finally, I found a small PHP script that accomplished what I needed. Here’s a renamed version—all code intact—that will find and convert any well-formed URL into a clickable <a> tag link.

function linkify( $text ) {
  $text = preg_replace( '/(?!<\S)(\w+:\/\/[^<>\s]+\w)(?!\S)/i', '<a href="$1" target="_blank">$1</a>', $text );
  $text = preg_replace( '/(?!<\S)#(\w+\w)(?!\S)/i', '<a href="http://twitter.com/search?q=#$1" target="_blank">#$1</a>', $text );
  $text = preg_replace( '/(?!<\S)@(\w+\w)(?!\S)/i', '@<a href="http://twitter.com/$1" target="_blank">$1</a>', $text );
  return $text;
}

Copy that into your code, then run your text containing unlinked URL’s through it. :

    <li><?php echo linkify($status->text) . '<br />' . $time_display; ?></li>

Google has just added the ability to drag-and-drop images from the desktop into a Google Docs document.

The new feature works with the latest versions of Google Chrome , Firefox and Safari, and Google says it plans to add support for other browsers soon. The feature works exactly as you would expect. Rather than importing an image using the web uploader, entering in a URL or doing a Google Image Search, you just drag the item from your desktop into your Google Docs document.

Drag-and-drop uploading is actually a pretty big win for a web app like Google Docs. Competitor Zoho supports drag-and-drop for some of its apps, but dragging an image into a Zoho Writer file just ends up inserting a local file address into the document.

The process works pretty well and we had no problem taking images from our Mac desktop and putting them in a Google Doc using both Safari 5.0.2 and the latest release of Google Chrome.

 
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Google Operating System reports that Google is testing a feature for signing in using multiple accounts.

While the post itself has a screenshot (which you can see above), it does not include any instructions on how to enable this functionality. This is obviously a limited or closed-beta test; the question is just how limited it is.

This functionality is not just “useful” – it is often vital. I have one account tied into an AdWords account, another account tied into Analytics, and yet a third Apps account. Merging them is impossible, especially as long as Google Apps doesn’t support Reader. Having a way to sign into all three at the same time from the same browser would certainly make things less irritating.

This howto explains howto install Google Chrome Web browser on Fedora 12, Fedora 13 and Red Hat 6 (RHEL). Best way to install and keep up-to-date with Google Chrome browser is use Google’s own YUM repository.
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I’m always amazed that more people don’t know the little tricks you can use to get more out of a simple Google search. Here are 19 of my favorites

  1. Use the “site:” operator to limit searches to a particular site. I use this one all the time, and it’s particularly handy because many site’s built-in search tools don’t return the results you’re looking for (and some sites don’t even have a search feature). If I’m looking for NetWidZ..! posts about iPhone, for example, I could try this search: iPhone site:netwidz.com.

  2. (more…)