Find Interesting Places in Google Maps

When you search for the name of a city or an address, Google Maps lists interesting places from that location and illustrates them with excerpts from Wikipedia articles. To find other locations that have Wikipedia articles, click "More" on the map and select "Wikipedia".

But even if Google highlights very few data layers, you can add to the map many other layers from the directory. For example, you can add the Webcams Worldwide layer to find webcams, the Virtual Tourism layer to explore 400 locations using YouTube videos or find places of interest.

First Screenshot of Google Chrome for Mac

The Windows version of Google Chrome was launched in September 2008 and many users asked for Mac and Linux versions. The work to port the Windows version started soon after the initial release and it will soon show some visible results.

A document from Chromium's site includes a list of remaining features that need to be implemented. "The purpose of this document is to help organize and coordinate the effort to get a browser window up and running on Mac and Linux using as much of the code that is already there as possible (with temporary header and link scaffolding, plus ifdefs) as opposed to writing a bunch of throw-away code that duplicates what already exists on windows. Our goal is to get a double-clickable app with a working browser window using the real multi-process infrastructure (not TestShell) by mid-February."

Mike Pinkerton offers more details about the Mac port, which will certainly be released before the Linux version. "We made a list early in the week of the key classes on the critical path to getting a renderer launching and showing bits on the screen. Our goal was to have a renderer being spawned by launching the browser by the end of this week. The list is now almost all green and as of this morning we hit our goal (one day early!) to have renderer processes launched. In fact, we launch a new renderer with each tab, and when the tab is closed, the renderer goes away!! You can see it come and go in Activity Monitory. All this goes through the cross-platform infrastructure with a Cocoa front-end."

Even if there's still some work for creating a proper user interface, here's the first screenshot of Google Chrome for Mac:


And another screenshot via Mike Pinkerton: "Now mind you, clicking doesn't work, and the renderers crash like nobody's business, but the other great thing is that the user interface stays running even if they do. Just open a new tab and keep going! It's important to point out that's part of what's taken us so long to get to this point. The WebKit that ships as part of Mac OS X can't run this way -- it took a lot of work to marshall it to do so. In addition, the UI clearly needs much love, but it's an indicator of the clean and simple direction we're heading."


More about the progress of Google Chrome's Mac port:

* Mac Detailed Status: "Our new goal is to have a multi-process browser limping by the end of the quarter."

* Build instructions: "Right now, the Mac build is a work in progress. The TestShell project builds and is able to render web pages, and this area is currently under active development, but work has yet to begin on the user interface of the main Chromium application."

Edit Google Spreadsheets on a Mobile Phone

Until now, the mobile interface for iPhone of Google Docs was only useful to read documents, spreadsheets and presentations. This is about to change now that spreadsheets can be edited: you can add rows, edit an existing row, filter the columns by value and sort the columns.

The new editable list view for spreadsheets is available for iPhone, T-Mobile G1 and Nokia S60 phones, that is for mobile phones that have WebKit-based browsers.

Screenshot from Firefox with an iPhone user-agent.

Tip: If you like the list view, there's an easy way to enable it for any spreadsheet, even if you're using a desktop browser. Just replace

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=ID

with

http://spreadsheets.google.com/lv?key=ID .

{ Thanks, Daniel. }

Gmail Tests PGP Signature Verification

Sean Leather spotted a new Gmail feature that checks if the PGP signature attached to a message is valid.

"A major benefit of public key cryptography is that it provides a method for employing digital signatures. Digital signatures enable the recipient of information to verify the authenticity of the information's origin, and also verify that the information is intact," explains PGP's documentation.


Gmail's code reveals that Google uses a Java applet to perform verification. Here are some excerpts from the code:

function zOb(a){var b=a[dd](/(-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----(.|\r?\n)*?-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----)/); ... var DOb="PGPApplet",EOb="exp/799/pgpapplet_0.jar";OZ[k].wbc=function $aRa(){var a=document[Qi](M);d(a,WNb({code:"com/google/caribou/pgp/PGPApplet.class",name:DOb,archive:EOb})); ... kOb="Click to verify PGP signature in this message.",lOb="Verify signature",RZ="vPzQab",mOb="Info",nOb="No valid PGP signature found.",oOb="Warning!",pOb="Invalid key entered.",qOb="Applet not loaded. Is Java enabled?",rOb="wrClmc",sOb="Success!",tOb="Your message was verified successfully!",uOb="Verify again",vOb="The signature was incorrect! This message may not be authentic!"

The new feature quickly vanished from Sean's account, so it's safe to assume that it's not ready to be publicly released yet. PGP signature verification is the perfect candidate to be the next Gmail Labs experiment.

Update: Expect to see this feature in Gmail Labs. Look for this image:

Options for Caching Attachments in Gmail Offline

Offline Gmail has been updated to version 0.2 and you can now specify a maximum size for the downloaded attachments. If you don't need to access attachments when you're offline, you can disable the download of attachments.

A user of the Gmail Group has a workaround for those who don't have the new version. "It seems to me that for existing users it'll appear only when you disable and then again enable Gmail offline. And you won't have to download your emails again; you can always choose them not to be removed while disabling Gmail offline."


{ Thanks, Steve. }

Download and Buy Videos from YouTube

YouTube includes a new section for "My Videos": a list of purchased videos. A YouTube help page has more details about the new feature:

You have the option of downloading and storing your favorite Partner videos and watching these videos even without an internet connection. To download Partner video:

1. Find the video you'd like to download.
2. Below the video's play bar in the lower left hand corner, you'll see a 'Download' button.
3. Click the 'Download' button to indicate that you'd like to download the video.

Videos are available to download in the MP4 format and some of them can be downloaded for free and they're even licensed as Public Domain or Creative Commons. An example of channel that offers Creative Commons-licensed video downloads is Stanford University. If the download requires payment, you'll be directed to a Google Checkout page where you'll find the price of the video.


Google Video had a similar option that has been discontinued in 2007, but it used DRM and it required to be online in order to authenticate your credentials.

Related:
Greasemonkey script for downloading YouTube videos

Update: YouTube's blog has more details. The downloading options are a test for US partners and there are 5 licenses for the downloaded videos:

* Personal, non-commercial use
* Creative Commons (Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works)
* Creative Commons (Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike)
* Creative Commons (Attribution)
* Public Domain (no copyright protection)

Better Search in Google Contacts

One of the most significant limitation of Google's contact manager was that most of the contact fields weren't searchable. This problem has been addressed and you can now search for any information included, from titles and companies, to locations and phone numbers.

"We've heard you loud and clear, and contact search now works much better: instead of just searching contact names and email addresses, it now includes phone numbers, notes fields, and mailing addresses as well. So, if you're visiting the Bay Area and looking for friends to catch up with, you could try typing "650" or "415" in the contact manager search box," suggests Gmail's blog.


Gmail should also include an advanced search option for contacts, so you can find more precisely the contacts that work for a certain company or the people who sent you more than 3 messages in the past month. Some of these searches could be saved and used to create dynamic groups.

Google Search Pages Load Faster if You Use Google Toolbar

Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer implemented Shared Dictionary Compression over HTTP (SDCH), a technique that speeds up loading web pages. According to Google's proposal (PDF), SDCH is "an HTTP/1.1-compatible extension that supports inter-response data compression by means of a reference dictionary shared between user agent and server".

The proposal explains that "retrieving a set of HTML pages with the same header, footer, inlined JavaScript and CSS requires the retransmission of the same data multiple times. [SDCH is] a compression technique that leverages this crosspayload redundancy."

One of the sites that benefit from this extension is google.com and Google decided to add support for SDCH in Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer.



A Google help page provides a way to remove the feature by disabling the "Google Dictionary Compression sdch" add-on, corresponding to the file fastsearch.dll from Google Toolbar's main directory. There's even an example when the dictionary compression doesn't work well.

The developer versions of Google Chrome implement SDCH as well. Here's an example of dictionary for google.com.

Show Your Location in Gmail Messages

Try this simple exercise: send an email from an Yahoo Mail account to a Gmail account (you can also use almost any other mail client or service). When you receive the message, click on the small arrow from the top of the message and select "Show original". Check the Received header and you'll find your IP address, which could be used to find your location.


Now send a message from your Gmail account to a Yahoo Mail account and select "Full Header" in Yahoo Mail. If you look at the Received header, you'll notice the IP address of Google mail server, like 64.233.170.191.


The conclusion is that Gmail doesn't send your IP address and here's why: "Personal information, including someone's exact location, can be gathered from someone's IP address, so Gmail doesn't reveal this information in outgoing mail headers. This prevents recipients from being able to track our users, or uncover what may be potentially sensitive personal information. Don't worry -- we aren't enabling spammers to abuse the system by not revealing IP addresses. Gmail uses many innovative spam filtering mechanisms to ensure that spammers have a difficult time sending bulk emails that arrive in users inboxes."

If you do want to show your location when you send a message, try the newest experimental feature from Gmail Labs: "Location in Signature", which adds your locations to your signature. After enabling the feature, go back to the Settings page and select "Append your location to the signature". Gmail will use the IP address to approximate your location, but you can get better results by installing Gears. "The Gears Geolocation API can make use of network servers to obtain a position fix. The server determines the client's position using a set of data provided by the client. This data includes the client's IP address and information about any cell towers or WiFi nodes it can detect," informs a document about Gears APIs.


Google has at least two other services where you can show your location: Blogger, which lets you geotag posts, and Latitude, that shows the locations of your friends.

{ via Gmail Blog and Paul Buchheit }

Merge Gmail Contacts

The feature is not yet automatic, so you need to find the contacts you want to merge, but it's useful if you don't have too many duplicates. Just select two or more entries for the same person, click on "Merge these contacts" and Google will combine the information from the selected contacts.

All the email addresses from the merged contacts will continue to be available in the auto-complete feature, so you'll still be able to choose one of the addresses.


Try this new feature in Gmail's contact manager.

{ via Blogoscoped Forum }

Update: To make things even more confusing, Gmail added a new view titled "All Contacts". So now you have:

* My Contacts - "a place to import, store and view all of the contact information that's important to you"
* All Contacts - "these are all of your contacts"
* Suggested Contacts - "the people you have contacted frequently"
* Most Contacted - "contacts you email and chat with the most"

The descriptions are not clear enough to distinguish between all these views and I wonder if all of them are really necessary.

Google Sync, Available for iPhone and Windows Mobile

If you have an iPhone or a Windows Mobile, you can now synchronize Google Calendar events and Gmail events using Google Sync. "Once you set up Sync on your phone, it will automatically begin synchronizing your address book and calendar in the background, over-the-air, so you can attend to other tasks. Sync uses push technology so any changes or additions to your calendar or contacts are reflected on your device in minutes," explains Google Mobile Blog.

Google Sync already works on BlackBerry. For the rest of the mobile phones, you can only synchronize contacts if there's support for SyncML. Contact synchronization should work on some Nokia and Sony Ericsson phones, for example Nokia N-Series and Sony Ericsson W-Series.



Before synchronizing data, read the known limitations of the initial release and follow the instructions from Google's site.

Google mentions that the service available for iPhone and Windows Mobile uses the Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync protocol. "When setting up a new Exchange ActiveSync account on your phone, all existing Contacts and Calendar events may be removed. Please make sure to back up any important data before you set up Google Sync."

YouTube Feed View

There's a new option to customize YouTube's homepage when you are logged in: the feed view. YouTube orders chronologically the videos from all the other sections you've selected: featured videos, promoted videos (which can't be disabled), videos from your subscriptions, recommendations, friend activity.


Unfortunately, YouTube's promoted videos can't be filtered, recommended videos constantly change and there's no actual feed generated by YouTube. You can obtain a feed that aggregates the latest videos from your subscriptions using a Yahoo Pipe.

YouTube shows a similar recent activity view in your channel, but you need to explicitly make it public. The activity view can show your latest ratings, recent comments, video uploads and subscriptions.

Import Contacts and Mail to Gmail

Gmail includes some options that let you import contacts and messages, but they're not very easy to use and migrating data to Gmail is not straightforward. But things are about to change: Google has partnered with TrueSwitch and Gmail will start to include a simple migration tool that works with some of the most popular mail services (AOL Mail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail and many services provided by ISPs and mobile carriers).


"If you're switching to Gmail from another email provider, importing contacts and messages from your old email account can help you make the transition without having to do a bunch of housekeeping," explains Google. You can import the contacts from your old account, import the existing messages and the messages you will receive in the next 30 days and create a new label for the imported messages.

Of course, you can also import contacts by first exporting a CSV file from your old account, there's also the powerful mail fetcher that downloads messages from services that support POP3 and you can auto-forward messages to Gmail if your old service has this feature.

The new option should be added to the new Accounts and Import tab from Gmail's settings page.


If it's not there yet, then you'll have to wait until it's available for everyone. One thing is clear: when this option is available, it will be much easier to migrate from Yahoo Mail and Hotmail to Gmail and that could the increase the adoption of Google's mail service. "Between December 2007 and December 2008, Gmail's number of unique monthly visitors in the United States grew 43%, from 20.8 million to 29.6 million, according to ComScore. Windows Live Hotmail lost 5% of its unique monthly visitors during this period, falling from 45.7 million to 43.5 million," reports InformationWeek.

{ Thanks, Kevin. }