Add Photos to Gmail Messages

Gmail's rich-text editor has never been very powerful, especially if you look at other web applications like Google Docs or Zoho. An important missing feature is inserting images in a message: you can attach photos, but they're usually displayed at the bottom of the message and not all mail clients show thumbnails. One workaround was to upload the images to a website, open it in a different window and then drag it to Gmail's editor.

Now you no longer have to do this since Gmail added inserting images as a Labs feature. After enabling the feature, you'll notice a new photo icon when you compose a message using the rich editor. You can insert images from your computer and images published online, by typing their addresses. Unfortunately, Gmail doesn't use the new Flash uploader, so you can't select more than one photo at a time.

"Keep in mind that Gmail doesn't show URL-based images in messages by default to protect you from spammers, so if you're sending mail to other Gmail users, they'll still have to click Display images below or Always display images from ... to see images you embed," mentions the Gmail blog.


To enable the new feature, go to Gmail Labs, search for "inserting images", select the "Enable" radio button and don't forget to click on "Save changes".

Tip: if the uploaded image is too large, click on it and choose from the available sizes (small, medium, large) or resize the image by dragging one of the corners.

{ Thanks, Niranjan. }

Google Enhances the Snippets for Review Sites

Google started to show additional information for web pages that include reviews: their date and the rating. For now, this is still an experiment and you may not see the change in Google's search results.

Last year, Google enhanced the snippets for discussion boards and scientific papers, while extracting the published date from many web pages. Google is able to recognize the structure of a forum thread, find the number of posts and the date of the last post, detect the author of a scientific paper and extract the ratings from all kinds of web pages.

It's amazing to see how many useful details can be obtain from unstructured web pages without requiring a special markup.

Find the Sender's Local Time in Gmail

Gmail Labs added a very useful feature for those who receive messages from all over the world. "Sender Time Zone" shows a green phone icon if it's appropriate to call the sender and a red phone icon if it's not a good time for calling (the icon is actually an Unicode character). Click on "show details" and you'll also see the local time of the sender.

"Message headers always include the time sent and often include time zone info too. We use that information to show you these icons. If the time zone isn't included for a given message, this Labs feature won't display anything," explains Gmail's blog. Google saves your timezone in your Google Account and it can be changed from this page.


You can also use Google search to find the time in a certain location.

The PDF Printer from Google Docs

If you open the document properties dialog for a PDF produced by Google Docs you'll notice that Google uses Prince 7.0 alpha 16 to convert files to PDF. It seems that Google has an unreleased alpha version of the software, so that might explain some of the errors.


According to the software's website, "Prince is a computer program that converts XML and HTML into PDF documents. Prince can read many XML formats, including XHTML and SVG. Prince formats documents according to style sheets written in CSS."

Prince is available for free if you want to use it on a single computer, but the server license costs $3800. "Prince is an ideal printing component for server-based software such as web applications and database systems. Using Prince, data in XML can easily be converted to PDF documents that can be printed, archived or downloaded over the web," which is exactly the way it's used in Google Docs.

Håkon Wium Lie and Michael Day gave a talk at Google in November 2007 about the software.

{ Thanks, David. }

Google, a Non-Profit Organization?

"PSAs are non-profit organization ads that are served to pages when targeted ads are unavailable, or when Google is unable to gather content from the page. Publishers do not receive earnings for clicks made on PSAs," mentions a page from Google AdSense's help center.

I noticed a Google ad from a Romanian site that promoted Google search. The ad linked to the Google search results for a historical question regarding the Romanian Independence War, but it was labeled as "Public Service Ad". Since when is Google a non-profit organization?


It's not the first time when Google uses public service ads to promote its own services. Last year, Google promoted a special page about the US elections using public service ads.

According to Wikipedia, "public service advertising is the use of commercial advertising techniques for non-commercial purposes. (...) Such advertising is generally produced and distributed on a cooperative basis by governmental agencies or nonprofit organizations acting in concert with private advertising and mass media companies. In most cases, the nonprofit provides the programming that is to be advertised, while the participating advertising agency and media companies provide creative services, media planning, and dissemination services on a pro bono basis."

{ Thanks, Philipp. }

Google Image Search Color Filter

The option that lets you filter images by the predominant color has been added to Google Image Search's interface. Just click on "All colors" above the search results and you can choose one of the 12 available colors.

Until the new feature propagates to all Google data centers, you can still use the image filter manually and even select two predominant colors.



Google Image Search has previously added filters for photos, images that contain faces, clip arts, line drawings and I expect to see even more options that rely on image analysis. The Neven Vision acquisition will certainly bring some interesting visible results. "Neven Vision comes to Google with deep technology and expertise around automatically extracting information from a photo. It could be as simple as detecting whether or not a photo contains a person, or, one day, as complex as recognizing people, places, and objects."

{ Thanks, Chris. }

New Version of Gmail Mobile for iPhone and Android

Google launched an updated version of Gmail for iPhone and Android phones that takes advantage of some advanced features from their browsers. Gmail's mobile site can now be used even when you're offline thanks to iPhone's offline storage and Android's implementation of Gears. "If the data network drops out on you, rest assured that Gmail won't. You'll still be able to open recently read messages and to compose over a flaky, or non-existent, network connection."

Some other enhancements: Gmail loads faster, there's a floating toolbar that includes options like archiving or reporting spam and the interface is more consistent.

"When we make it broadly available, people are going to see this as the first HTML 5 mobile application. It'll be like Gmail in 2004. It was a great watershed moment for Ajax apps," said Google's Vic Gundotra last week. While mobile Gmail is not the first web application that takes advantage of HTML 5 features, it's one of the pioneers.


There's also a new version of Google Calendar that lets you edit events and has an option to cache previously-viewed events. Both updated applications work only for iPhone OS 2.2.1+ and all Android phones.

Timeline of Articles from a Google News Cluster

Google News enhanced the presentation for the clusters of related articles: after showing options to filter the articles, a search option and feeds, Google News added a graph that shows the number of sources covering the story. There's also a timeline that lets you understand how the story developed.

"Our grouping technology takes into account many factors, such as titles, text, and publication time. We then use various clustering algorithms to identify stories we think are closely related," explains the help center.

Google Image Search Suggest

Google started to show suggestions when you type a query in Google Image Search one week after the worldwide rollout of Google Suggest for web search. The suggestions from Google Image Search include many specific words like "paintings", "pictures", "wallpaper", "cartoon", "photos", "landscape", "logo", so they're obtained by analyzing the most popular queries from the image search engine. It's worth noting that Google Image Search shows suggestions on the results pages as well, not just on the homepage.


Google Suggest is now enabled by default in 3 Google search engines: web search, image search, Google Video and it can be disabled from the preferences page or by appending &complete=0 to the URL.

Since August 2008, when the suggestions were first enabled at Google.com, some people complained that the feature is annoying, distracting and it disables browser's autocomplete. Others find it useful: "I rather enjoy this feature, it sometimes helps me form a more coherent search term that yields more results, and it also reduces the number of keystrokes since it finishes words for me even if I've never searched them before". It's also an idea generator, a way to explore trends, attitudes, reactions, and a tool that helps you type complicated queries.


Now that most browsers and toolbars, all major search engines and many other important sites (Amazon, eBay, YouTube) offer query suggestions, people will expect to see them in any search box.

Disable Google Chrome's New Tab Page

Google Chrome used to display a special page that included nine thumbnails for the most frequently visited pages, a list of recent bookmarks and recently closed pages. The feature couldn't be disabled from the interface and you couldn't remove the thumbnails you didn't like.

Google Chrome 3 updated the new tab and you can now hide the thumbnails and the list of recently visited pages. Just click on the small arrow at the top of the new tab page and disable the features you don't like. You'll still see Google Chrome's logo and some tips, but the page is almost blank.


The recent builds of Google Chrome include support for user scripts and it's not very difficult to write a script that hides all the content from the new tab page.

If you use Google Chrome 2 Beta, the developer version or a recent Chromium build, you can easily enable the user scripts support by following the instructions from this page: find or create a shortcut for Chrome's executable, right-click on the shortcut, select "Properties" and append to the value from the Target field --enable-user-scripts (include a space before the flag). Create a directory named User Scripts in one of these locations and save this user script in the directory. You may need to restart Google Chrome if it's already running.

Another useful user script for Google Chrome is AdSweep, a basic version of AdBlock Plus without user interface and subscriptions. "AdSweep is a small addon that aims to hide advertising from the web pages you visit like Adblock. In technical terms, AdSweep is a user javascript that defines CSS rules based on the web site you are visiting to hide elements of the page that show advertisements." If you are familiar with JavaScript, you can edit the script and add or remove some patterns.