Posts Tagged ‘Google’

PDF viewing has been with us in Gmail for a while now, and since many times I just need a quick info or two from a pdf, it became quite comfortable being able to open it right in my browser from Gmail. The Official Gmail Blog just announced that they have added tiff and ppt support as well!

I don’t really use tiff a lot, but scanned files are often saved in tiff, which can be a multi-page document that some software has problems with. I didn’t try this myself, but apparently Gmail will have no problem with these documents, they will open in the same way as they were intended to, multi-page images.

The ability to view presentations on the fly, in the same viewer, is also great, no need to download and open with office, or go to a separate viewer, it will open right there in your browser. Again, on my end I usually do not need to actually have these saved, I use ppt-s for data flow information and so on, no need to have them constantly on my hard drive.

As someone who does most of his work for people in the US while living in Europe, it’s sometimes hard for me to see who is “message-ready” at times, when I should post so that people can see it immediately and so on. Gmail has just introduced a cool labs feature to display the sender time in the sender’s time zone.

Just go to settings and labs to find the feature, one you enable it you can see green icons next to people who are probably up and about, and a red one next to those who aren’t. Red is shown between 9:00 and 18:00 by the way. If you click on the message details link, you can also see what time it is in the sender’s country.

Very handy to see if a person will probably respond before you go to bed, or if you want to see if you can call him and so on. I can think about some cool features to add here, specifying “red-time” for example, I mean most of my contacts can be reached well into the evening, like 20:00 – 21:00. Or it would also be cool to be able to set your own “red-time”, so that if you set it to 13:00-15:00, people will only get green icons for that time for you.

I’ve done this a couple of times and it never really struck me as a good tip, but now that I actually saw it written down, I realized that using Google Image Search as a translation tool is really great for words which are very visual and specific. Don’t expect to find good results for words like “serenity” or “nefarious”, but words for “elephant”, “gorilla”, “chair” and so on work very well.

In fact even if inputting concepts and notions you will at least get a “feeling” for what it means. In any casem Google Image Search was not meant for translations, but if you just need a quick word or two it might just save your buttox.

If you need a fully functional dictionary I’m sure you can find plenty online, but there are some great English specific tools, which I will write down now, so I can fill up the space, so if you click on the article to go to the single page, it won’t just be the add, and then minimal text, a blogger’s life is hard! (phew, that took up pretty much, great!)

If you need to look up a quick word, what it means, either use dictionary.com, or a quicker alternative is to just use Google and type “define: theword”. Another great tool is synonym.com, which will let you look up synonyms for a word, very useful for blogging selectively (not that I do this), and you can also look up antonyms, probably also useful for something.

Google Labs has now been rolled out to Gmail and Google Apps users as well, and one of the features I am using most is Superstars. This feature elaborates on the starring system, by allowing you to assign twelve different “stars” to messages. What really makes this feature great is the ease of which you can manage your mails and actions using the great design of the icons. I use four icons only myself, and here is my method of putting them to good use.

I use your basic star, a blue star of the same design, a tick, and an exclamation mark.  First of all, I keep a completely clear inbox. If I will not respond to something, or it doesn’t need my attention I do not keep it around. I either throw it out, or archive it right away, so I actually only have starred messages in my inbox now. Also, I read all my messages at once, and you’ll see this doesn’t mean I really know what’s in them in detail, but I have a good idea. This enables me to sort out ones I don’t need, and gives me the basis for starring.

I assign the yellow star to emails which I haven’t read really well yet. I know what they are about, but it requires my attention further. I use the blue start to flag messages which I have replied to, but I am still waiting for an answer. If the answer is not important, meaning I either don’t care, or the answer will probably be along the lines of “ok, thank you”, I remove the star before I send it off and use another Labs feature called Send & Archive, which will put the sent message in the archive straight away.

Finally, I use the exclamation mark star to flag messages which need my attention action-wise. This means I don’t need to read it, I actually need to do what’s in it (complete tasks for a webpage, write about this or that, etc). Once a task is complete I remove the star or mark it with a tick and archive it.

You could use this system really well by sending yourself tasks by email, you sort of have a whole task manager at your disposal. Your productivity is further increased by the ability to filter by star type. For example you could write “has: red-star” in the search bar to see only messages with a red star. You can take a look at their names in the settings panel by hovering over them.

You can choose which starts you want to use by dragging and dropping them between the “in use” and “not in use” lists. Also, be aware that the order in which you put them will be the order the starts cycle through when you start clicking. Brilliant feature and implementation!

Google is rolling out offline mode on all its products using the cool Google Gears technology they developed. The first one to use it was Google Reader if I remember correctly, allowing you to read your feed list offline.

A few days ago they rolled out offline mode for Google Calendar, probably one of the applications most “in need” of such a feature. If you have loads of appointments there is no need to use Outlook as well now, since you can view them offline using Google Calendar just as if you were connected.

There is of course a drawback, or rather a lack of features, you can’t actually modify entries or create new stuff. I’m thinking they will be rolling this out later, but this obviously requires a some more coding. I myself appreciate that they decided to roll this out early on, even the fact that you can view your calendar is a huge help!

A few days ago the official Gmail blog had some great new about a new feature in labs named Send & Archive. This is an extremely simple, but very handy feature, it enables you to automatically send a message to the archives once you’ve sent it.

This is a great time saver and inbox cleaner for me, as many times I want to do this anyway. Whenever someone send you a reply you get a new unread and unarchived message anyway, so in a sense you can clear your inbox with this method safely. If you need a message to hang around after sending you can always just send normally.Great feature, I recommend this one to everyone out there!