PaulSpoerry.com » GMail

Drag and Drop Gmail Attachments

PaulSpoerry — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 14:46:44 +0000

Gmail added support for a HTML5 feature that has been recently included in Firefox and Google Chrome: selecting files using drag and drop. If you use Firefox 3.6+ or Chrome 4+, you can now add attachments by dragging the files from your favorite file manager to Gmail. When you drag the files, Gmail shows a drop zone where you need to place the files.

“We’ll enable this for other browsers as soon as they support this feature. For now, you can drag and drop attachments in Chrome and Firefox only,” mentions Google.

The nice thing about this feature is that it no longer uses the Flash uploader, which isn’t very reliable. What I don’t understand is why Gmail still uses the Flash uploader to select multiple files directly from the browser, now that the input tag supports more than one file. If you disable Flash in Firefox 3.6 and don’t use drag and drop, you can only attach one file at a time:

A True Google Branded Phone May Be Coming Soon

PaulSpoerry — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 13:07:41 +0000

TechCrunch is hearing some interesting talk about a true Google Phone. By true Google Phone I don’t just mean another Android device, but a phone designed end-to-end by Google to fulfill their dream of exactly what Android can be.

Of course there have been rumors like this before, but this time there are a few distinct elements that seem credible. This all comes from Michael Arrington’s sources—his article is a bit vague, but points to an outsider-made but Google-dictated device, sort of like how Microsoft’s first Zune was actually made by Toshiba. In the case of the Google Phone there are a couple options for the possible manufacturer. The obvious choice is HTC (PLEASE let it be HTC and PLEASE let it be a slider!) who’s been the major hardware manufacturer of Android devices. However, TechCrunch hears that the source of the hardware will be Korean, not Taiwanese. So we’re probably looking at either Samsung or LG.

Samsung has a long-standing relationship with Apple, supplying tons of parts for the iPhone. Apple may not smile on Samsung for helping create the “iPhone Killer” and may in fact be ramping up to make the next iteration of the iPhone so it’s more likely that LG would step up to the plate and develop this device. LG’s no stranger to Android but has been a minor player up to this point—maybe they’ve been working on this mysterious Google Phone in the meantime, which is supposedly aiming for an early 2010 release.

Via TechCrunch

Google Dashboard Released

PaulSpoerry — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 15:47:35 +0000

Ok so Google services rawk, the problem is their are so many of them and it’s a bit…. spread all over. Google Dashboard is a new service that shows a summary of the data stored with a Google account. You’ll soon find a link to Google Dashboard in the “personal settings” of the “my account” page. This is handy if you use a bunch of Google services like GMail, maps, docs, etc.

The dashboard lists some of the information associated with the Google services you use: your name, your email address, the number of contacts, the number of conversations in your Gmail inbox, your Google profile, the most recent entries from the web history etc. It’s a long answer to the question: “What does Google know about me?”.

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Gmail Adds a Contact Picker

PaulSpoerry — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 12:23:03 +0000

Gmail is probably one of the last Google services that adds a very simple feature: a contact picker. When you compose a message, you may want to see the list of contacts so you can select some of them. But this feature wasn’t available in Gmail, although you could find it in Google Docs, Google Calendar and in almost any mail client and webmail service. Some people even wondered if you can send messages to more than one address: questions like “Why can’t I load multiple contacts when I go to compose?” or “How do I compose using my address book?” were very popular in Gmail’s help group.

“Auto-complete is convenient and fast, and usually does the trick. But sometimes seeing your list of contacts can help you remember all the people you want to include on your email,” admits Google.

The wait is over and now you can finally use the contact picker in Gmail: just click on “To” when you compose a message, select the contacts and click “Done”.

Some of the cool things you can do using the contact picker:

* select contacts from one of your groups: just use the drop-down to choose from “Friends”, “Family”, “Coworkers” and other groups.

* easily remove the contacts you’ve picked by just clicking on them.

* manually add email addresses by clicking on an empty space from the picker’s “to” box.

* if you’ve already typed some addresses in the “to” box, the contact picker will include them when it launches.

* add all the results of a search by clicking on “Select all”.

* the feature also works for “cc” and “bcc”.

Now if they would just add this feature to Google Voice AND make it not happen in a popup (ugh… where’s the modal AJAX love Google?!) we’d be set.

Gmail Alerts in Windows 7 Taskbar with Gmail Notifier Plus

PaulSpoerry — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 14:05:39 +0000

Gmail Notifier Plus rests in the new Windows 7 taskbar and allows you to easily access several components of Gmail quickly. The app uses Gmail’s secured RSS feed to retrieve mail. The notifier has two major features that make it a good implementation into the new taskbar.

Jumplist Access:

Right clicking on the Gmail Notifier Plus icon will bring up a jumplist that lists your most recent unread messages. A counter is shown at the top but the jumplist only allows for 10 maximum titles to be displayed. Below are some common tasks that increase productivity.

Message Preview:

Probably the coolest feature of the notifier is that if you hover your cursor over the icon, it will activate thumbnail previews that show an excerpt of your unread mail. The app makes great use of the thumbnail feature to display other alerts as well.

Note that the application is only at version 1.0, and may contain some bugs. Providing feedback will probably help the programmer to improve on the app.

The Gmail Notifier plus was created by daty2k1. You can download it from the Neowin forums here. (Requires registration)

Here’s an alternate mirror link you can use to download as well:
Gmail Notifier Plus Alternate Mirror Download

Create a Permanent, Icon only GMail tab in FireFox

PaulSpoerry — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 13:27:51 +0000

Yes, I’ll admit it… I *heart* GMail and FireFox; I use them everyday. I wish that GMail didn’t take up a full blown tab in FireFox tho (especially when on the netbook where screen real estate is precious!) You can permanently affix the Gmail (and Reader) tab in your tab bar, reduce it to show the tab favicon only, and display the number of unread items in each using a collection of Firefox add-ons (of course you can… that’s why we LOVE FireFox). See what it looks like in the image above: the Gmail and Reader tabs are on the far left, icon-only, with unread item counts–19 unread messages and 1k+ unread items (yikes!)–on the icons themselves.

To reproduce this setup in your own copy of Firefox, you’ll need four Firefox add-ons which Gina Trapani has put all together in a single collection. Install all the add-ons in the Icon-Only Perma-Tabs for Gmail and Google Reader collection. Restart Firefox.

Then, in Better Gmail 2, make sure “Unread Message Count in Favicon” is checked. In Better GReader, make sure “Show Unread Count in Favicon” is checked. Open Gmail and Google Reader in new tabs. Right-click on those tabs, and choose “Faviconize tab.” Then, to make them permanent (i.e., open automatically every time you launch Firefox), right-click again and choose “Permatabs->Permanent Tab.” Once you’re done, whenever you launch Firefox or even hit “Close All Tabs,” your icon-only perma-tabs containing Gmail and GReader will persist.

THANX GINA!

Google Wave Starts to Open to Public on September 30th

PaulSpoerry — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 13:48:57 +0000

According to the Official Google Wave Developer Blog, they’ll be extending 100,000 invites to regular old users on September 30th. Google launched Google Wave at its Google IO conference at the end of May, but so far the Web giant has restricted the service to 6,000 or so developers.

Google Wave is a unique hybrid of email, chat, and a blog, and some expect it to eventually replace some of Google’s other applications. No word yet on how invites will be handled or who will be getting them.

Google Officially Releasing an OS – Google Chrome Operating System

PaulSpoerry — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 12:30:06 +0000

Rumors spread yesterday about how Google was going to make a “Chrome Operating System”. Of course there have been rumors of a Google OS for years now. In early 2006, Ars reported on Google’s denial that it was prepping an OS distribution of its own based on Ubuntu. More recently, the (relative) ease of porting Android to netbooks led to plenty of speculation that Google’s full computer OS, when it appeared, would be based on Android. It turns out that’s not the case… it’s NOT going to be Android (though Google won’t preclude third-party adopters from using Android).

Last night at 9:00pm Google’s official blog raised the flag indicating Google was getting into the OS race. So what is the OS? It’s being Google Chrome OS and the operating system will center on Google Chrome and be targeted for netbooks (initially). It will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips and we are working with multiple OEMs to bring a number of netbooks to market next year. While speculation was wild a few days ago about a Chrome OS, what wasn’t understood was how Chrome, a browser, could BE an OS…. a browser isn’t actually an operating system, what about hardware drivers, memory and processor management, and other red herrings. It turns out Google is cranking out a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel – welp, that solves issues about drivers and such.

So what’s the intention here? Google intends that the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using existing web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform. If you do a lot in the cloud now then as TechCrunch put it “Don’t worry about those desktop apps you think you need. Office? Meh. You’ve got Zoho and Google Apps. You won’t miss office. Chrome plus Gears plus Google Wave plus HTML 5 and web platforms like Flash and Silverlight all combine into a single wonderful computing device. The Internet Is Everything. All the OS has to do is boot the damn computer, get me to a browser as fast as possible and then stay the hell out of the way.”

The timing of this couldn’t be any more bitter sweet for Microsoft. Windows 7 RTM lands next week with the full release for October. I have to wonder if Google was trying to take a bit of wind out of Microsoft’s sails since on of the things touted was how well Windows 7 runs on netbooks. The Google Chrome OS will only become available for consumers in the second half of 2010 – not that far behind the release of Windows 7.

Does this spell the end of Microsoft Windows? I’d say don’t count them out yet. Chrome OS will be new and will essentially require cloud computing. Sure, for most things I could get by on that, and as the web gets faster, HTML 5 hits, etc we will be able to do more and more in the cloud. In addition to the Microsoft has been developing “Gazelle” as an alternative to Internet Explorer. The browser acts like a self-contained operating system (sounds like Chrome OS) and is designed to address the fact that browsers like IE and Chrome have not been built by design to handle multiple processes and web applications in a secure manner. The browser relies on a “browser kernel” (5,000 lines of C# code) that helps enforce security rules to prevent malicious access to the PC’s underlying operating system. Built by the Microsoft Research team, company officials have been dropping hints that they are ready to talk more about Gazelle recently – perhaps as the Worldwide Developers Conference.

Google’s official blog post on Google Chrome OS

Google Voice Adding 1 Million Phone Numbers

PaulSpoerry — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 12:52:32 +0000

Last month Google reserved an additional 1 million phone numbers with Level 3, who has been providing numbers for Google Voice since it was announced. Many are speculating it’s release to the world in general is eminent. A public launch has been anticipated since Google said in March the service would be “open to new users soon.” Many believed the new numbers would be unleashed on June 18th, but Google Voice Product Manager Craig Walker quickly dispelled that on his own Twitter stream.

Google Voice is the re-branded GrandCentral. Google Voice provides a lot of the functionality of a full blown PBX and wraps it all into a user friendly interface. Many believe it will provide “One Number To Rule Them All” where you have a single number that rings any or all of your phone. You can also decided which calls go to which numbers, screen incoming calls, use SMS, and have your voicemails transcribed and sent to you (though this isn’t 100% perfect it works pretty darn well). The full list of features can be found on the Google Voice “About” page.

Last week, TechCrunch reported that Google would add number portability later this year to Google Voice, which would let users keep one of their existing phone numbers as their Google Voice number. For example, users could make their cell phone number their Google Voice number.

I don’t know that 1 million numbers is enough to satisfy the demand for users wanting to get their hands on Google Voice, especially once number portability is integrated. I know people who check almost daily in an attempt to get a Google Voice account (lucky for me I’ve had an account since it was known as Grand Central). What we may be seeing is Google ramping up for the first round of public beta’s. Perhaps they will do like GMail and let the first 1 million number out, and then only additional numbers via invites from existing users. We’ll see soon enough as Google seems to be adding more and more features and gearing up for some type of release in the near future.

Google Wave makes a splash

PaulSpoerry — Fri, 29 May 2009 20:25:09 +0000

Google announced today a new, experimental idea aiming to reshape the future of communication on the web. It’s called Wave, and if you believe its Google, it’s “what email would look like if it were invented today.” Oh ya… and the whole thing is Open Source; the protocols will be available to anyone. Wave is about jazzing up real-time communication on the web.

What is a wave?

A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.

A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

According to Google Wave will allow:

Real-time collaboration – Concurrency control technology lets all people on a wave edit rich media at the same time
Natural language tools – Server-based models provide contextual suggestions and spelling correction
Extensible – Embed waves in other sites or add live social gadgets, thanks to Google Wave APIs.

If you have an hour and twenty minutes to burn you can watch the entire thing explained by the folks at Google.