Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on February 22, 2008 by CyberNet.

If you use Gmail, you may or may not have noticed Web Clips at the top of your inbox.  Until recently even though I’ve been a user for quite some time, I hadn’t noticed it. Web Clips are news headlines, blog posts, RSS and Atom feeds, and relevant sponsored links found at the very top of your inbox. Below is a screenshot of my inbox which shows a Web Clip:

The thought to go check the web clips in my spam folder never even crossed my mind until today when I saw an article posted at the Official Gmail Blog titled “Del-eat your Spam.” Associate Product Marketing Manager Miriam Schneider who’s worked with the Gmail team for six months now explained her new discovery:

Even though I’ve worked on the Gmail team for about six months and have been a fan for years, I continue to notice new things in the product all the time. Like the other day, when out of curiosity, I checked out my spam folder to see what kind of bank scams or enlargement pills were being filtered from my innocent eyes, and I noticed something below the search box. Was that really a recipe for spicy SPAM kabobs?

It sure was a recipe for Spam Kabobs! As it turns out, members of the Gmail team decided that it didn’t make sense to show RSS feeds and sponsored ads in the Spam folder and so they decided to include some spam recipes to make use of the Web Clips feature. Check it out for yourself, there’s a whole slew of different recipes that include spam. Here are a few recipes I came across:

• Spam Skillet Casserole
• Spam Vegetable Strudel
• Spam Quiche
• Spam Hashbrown Bake

I’ve never even tried Spam before, but if you’re someone who eats it, and likes it for that matter, your Gmail Spam Folder is going to be more useful than you ever knew it could be!

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Lackluster Gmail support has been a real pain point for BlackBerry users, and we’ve really been hoping that this new “Enhanced Gmail Plug-in” would solve all that. It’s out as of today, and we’ve certainly gotten some improvements, like support for archiving messages, marking spam and managing labels / stars. Unfortunately, these new management features are only live synced one way, from the phone to the Gmail server, so many of the actions that take place desktop side won’t be reflected on the phone once that particular message has been picked up by the BlackBerry Internet Service. There’s also the small problem of installing the thing: we haven’t been successful so far on two different BlackBerries, and you have to make sure to uninstall the existing Gmail Plug-in. Meanwhile, in BlackBerry Enterprise Server land, the Google Apps Connector has now gone live, which means Google Apps users get push Gmail and what seems to be much tighter Exchange-style syncing. Let us know if you get either of these things working with your particular setup.

[Via Boy Genius Report]

Read – Enhanced Gmail Plug-in now available
Read – Google Apps Connector for BES now available

Filed under: Cellphones

Enhanced Gmail Plug-in for BlackBerrys arrives, but only syncs one way originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 22 Aug 2009 15:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Push. It’s not just a verb that sends people careening down a flight of stairs. It’s also not just for guys in suits diddling on BlackBerrys. You hear it featured on new iPhone apps every week. So, what is it?

Well, push describes a lot of things. Push is simply an action. Versus, say, pulling. Maybe that’s horribly abstract, so try this: If information shows up on your phone or neural implant or messaging program without you (or your wares) asking for it—that’s push. The info is pushed to you, versus you pulling it from the source. There are tons of ways push can be (and is) used.

Email’s a pretty good starting point for grasping the difference between push and the other stuff. You probably know good ol’ POP3—you log into your mail server and pull down new messages. Maybe it’s on a frequent schedule, so it feels automatic, even instant, but you’re still reaching out to the mail server every time to check and see if there’s new mail to download.

IMAP is a little fancier than POP, where all of your folders and email are the same on all of your computers, phones and other gadgets, and any change you make on one shows up on the other, since it’s all happening on a remote server somewhere. But with the standard setup, it’s still the same deal—your mail program has to log in, see what’s new, and pull it down. IMAP does have a pretty neat trick though, an optional feature called IMAP IDLE, that does push pretty well—it’s what the Palm Pre uses for Gmail, for instance. Essentially, with IMAP IDLE, the mail server can tell whatever mail app that you’ve got new messages waiting, without you (or your app) hammering the refresh button over and over. When the app knows there’s new messages, it connects and pulls them down, so it gives you just about the speed of push, without matching the precise mechanism.

While different systems do things differently (obvs), what true push services have in common is that they generally insert a middleman between you and the information source.

RIM’s setup for the BlackBerry is probably the most sophisticated. When your BlackBerry registers with the carrier (which has to support BlackBerry), the details are handed to RIM’s network operating center, so the NOC knows where to send your mail. The NOC watches your mail server, keeps tabs on the phone’s location, and pushes email through to your phone whenever you get new stuff.

What makes it push is that your phone’s not actually polling a server for new messages to pull—it only receives them when they hit your inbox, and are then pushed to your phone by RIM’s servers. This means you save a lot of battery life that’d be wasted by making the phone constantly hit the servers for updates. The flipside is that when RIM’s servers blow up, you don’t get email, since it’s all routed through their system—hence the other panic that grips dudes in suits once every few months lately.

The other biggie is Microsoft, who has Direct Push, part of Exchange’s ActiveSync. It’s architected a little bit differently, so it doesn’t need the precise kind of data about where your phone is that RIM’s NOCs do: The phone or whatever you’ve got sends an HTTPS with a long lifespan to the Exchange server—if new mail arrives before it dies, the Exchange tells your device there’s new stuff, so it should start a sync. After it syncs, the device sends out another long HTTPS request, starting it all over again.

Apple’s weak-sauce substitute for multitasking works pretty similarly: The developer has something its wants to send an iPhone, when its application isn’t actually running, like an IM. It sends the notification to Apple’s push servers, which send the notification to the phone through a “persistent IP connection” the phone maintains with the servers. This connection, which is only maintained when push notifications are turned on, is needed to locate the phone, but still doesn’t draw as much power as constantly pinging the mail server.

Of course, those aren’t the only push systems around, and it’s only getting more and more important as stuff gets shifted to the cloud. We haven’t mentioned Android and Google Chrome, but both utilize push (or will) in different ways. Suffice it to say, Google Sync will soon be a major player in this game. But basically, all kinds of different data can be pushed—calendars, contacts, browser data, hell, even IM is a kind of push—and they all work more or less the same broad way. Just don’t ask us why there isn’t push Gmail on the iPhone yet.

Still something you wanna know? Send questions about pushing, shoving and pancake massacres to tips@gizmodo.com, with “Giz Explains” in the subject line.

This article was written on June 06, 2008 by CyberNet.

Google has decided to take a few risks with Gmail by introducing Gmail labs. They say that they receive a lot of ideas for Gmail from both users and employees at Google, but they don’t always have the time to develop and implement them all. For this reason they started Gmail Labs which they say, “is a way for us to take lots of the ideas we wouldn’t normally pick and let you all decide whether they’re good or not.

For now it’s just offered in standard Gmail, and not for those using Google Apps. That’s not to say that they won’t offer this feature in the future for Google Apps users though. We could easily see this turning into something like iGoogle where everyday users, not just Google employees, will be able to submit their own work which would be great.

At this point, the Google Labs feature is available to those in the United States and the United Kingdom. You’ll know if you have it by logging into Gmail and clicking on the Settings tab. If you see a section at the far right labeled “Labs,” you have it. Just click on it to browse through the features that have already been made.

Of course you can view all of the different new features here, but we’ll quickly run through them so you can get an idea of what’s available:

• Quick Links: Adds a box to the left column that gives you 1-click access to any bookmarkable URL in Gmail. You can use it for saving frequent searches, important individual messages, and more.
• Superstars: Adds additional star icons. After enabling this feature, you can choose which icons you wish to use in the “General” Settings page.
• Pictures in chat: See your friends’ profile pictures when you chat with them.
• Fixed width font: Adds an option to the reply dropdown menu that lets you view a message in fixed width font.
• Custom keyboard shortcuts: Lets you customize keyboard shortcut mappings. Adds a new Settings tab from which you can remap keys to various actions.
• Mouse gestures: Use your mouse to navigate with gestures. Hold right-click and move the mouse left to go to a previous conversation, move it right to go to the next conversation, and move up to go back to the inbox view. Works best on Windows.
• Signature tweaks: Places your signature before the quoted text in a reply, and removes the “–” line that appears before signatures. Can’t use this and the “Random signature” Labs feature at the same time.
• Random signature: Rotates among random quotations for your email signature. Can’t use this and the “Signature tweaks” Labs feature at the same time.
• Custom date formats: Adds options to the general settings page allowing the date and time format to be changed independent of language. For example, you can use a 24-hour clock (14:57) or show dates with the day first (31/12/07).
• Muzzle: Conserves screen real estate by hiding your friends’ status messages.
• Old Snakey: Kick it old school with Old Snakey! Enable keyboard shortcuts and hit ‘&’ from the main page to play a game of snake.
• Email Addict: Lets you take a break from email and chat by blocking the screen for fifteen minutes and making you invisible in chat.
• Hide Unread Counts: Hides the unread counts for inbox, labels, etc.

Before you go and opt-in to some of these features, just note that they may not always work perfect. They are experimental features, and Google even notes that they could change without notice, break or disappear.

Thanks for the tip Cory!

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on July 07, 2008 by CyberNet.

Windows only
A few weeks ago I received an email from the developer of a Windows application called gAttach, and it looked pretty cool. At the time, however, the program was new and I wanted to give it some time to mature before I gave it a whirl. Since then it has had a handful of updates, and it is on its way to becoming a handy little program.

What is gAttach? It makes it possible to email attachments right from your Windows desktop using your Gmail or Google Apps email account. You can right-click on a file in Windows Explorer, click on email links in your browser, use the email option in Windows Live Photo Gallery, and much more for sending files through Gmail. It basically acts as your default desktop email client.

One of the nice things with this is that it can even handle multiple attachments, which means adding a dozen or so different files to an email isn’t such a pain anymore. Your attachments still have to be under the 20MB limit that Gmail imposes, but you can send quite a bit in that size. After it is done attaching the files all you’ll have to do is check the “Drafts” section in your Gmail account to finish sending it.

There are some downsides to the program though. The biggest one is probably that it uses Internet Explorer to log you in. If you’re not logged in Internet Explorer it will prompt you to do so, and sometimes it would tell me that I needed to login even after I already did. Plus there is no way to rapidly switch between multiple accounts. Hopefully we’ll see these things fixed for a future version.

Are you a Yahoo! Mail user? No problem. The developer has also created a version of the applications that works with Yahoo! Mail dubbed yAttach.

Get gAttach (for Gmail) or yAttach (for Yahoo! Mail)
[via FreewareGenius & Lifehacker]

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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