Keep the Default Notifications when You Sync iPhone's Calendar with Google Calendar

If you want to synchronize iPhone's calendar and contacts with Google Calendar and Gmail Contacts, Google recommends to use Google Sync, which "uses the Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync protocol to synchronize the data on your phone with your Google Account".

The option works well and it even supports multiple calendar, but there's an important issue: ActiveSync lets you add a single alarm and Google Calendar converts each alarm to a "pop-up notification". That means you can't receive SMS notifications or email notifications when you create events from your phone.

Fortunately, there's another way to sync iPhone's calendar with Google Calendar: CalDav. It's limited to one calendar for each account *, it doesn't support push updates, and it only works with iPhone OS 3.0, but at least you can use the default notifications from Google Calendar. If you haven't changed your default notification settings, this help page explains how to change them.


Here's an interesting comparison between ActiveSync and CalDav:

Google Sync (ActiveSync)
—————————————

Pros
-Supports Push to devices
-Supported by iPhone
-Supports multiple calendars within one account

Cons
-Can only have one ActiveSync account set up on iPhone at one time
-Can't choose calendar colour
-Not currently supported by iCal (will be in Snow Leopard)

CalDAV
—————————————

Pros
-Supported by iPhone, iCal and other clients
-Supports multiple calendars within one account (use /user on iPhone)
-Allows control over calendar color, and color syncs across accounts

Cons
-Doesn't push updates. Fetch only
-Setting up multiple accounts is a bit clumsy compared with ActiveSync, and they appear as separate services in the iPhone settings and "choose calendar" views.

* Even if it appears that the CalDav sync is limited to your main calendar, you can add multiple calendars. The process is tedious, but it can be simplified by installing a configuration utility.

iGoogle Themes Explorer

iGoogle didn't make it easy to change your themes: you had to visit a separate page, find a theme, add it and then repeat the process until you found a great theme.

Now it's easier to pick a theme: click on "Change theme from [insert current theme's name]" and you'll see a small list of themes. You can select a category, sort the themes by popularity or recency and even type a query like [puppy], [flowers] or [batman] in the search box.

Translate Google Documents

Google Docs is now integrated with Google Translate so you can translate documents directly from the word processor's interface. Click on the "Tools" menu, select "Translate document" and choose the destination language. Google will translate your document and offer two options: "Replace original document with this translation" and "Copy to new document".


The problem is that in both cases there's no link between the original document and the translation. To better translate documents collaboratively, Google should integrate Google Translator Toolkit into Google Docs.

If you want to translate documents, but they're not stored in Google Docs, you can upload them to Google Translate.

Tip: Probably the best way to translate a web page, including a Google Docs document or presentation, is using the new Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer. Even if IE is not your favorite browser, you should try it because the Google Translate integration is brilliant. Unfortunately, you can't export the translation.

{ via Google Docs Blog }

Google ASCII Art

If you Google [ascii art], you'll find an ASCII representation of Google's logo next to the search box. It's a geeky Easter egg closely related to the witty use of the "did you mean" feature to help you understand recursion.


{ via Marissa Mayer }

Google Health OneBox

Search Engine Land reports that Google added an OneBox for health-related information that's only displayed in the US. If you search for [flu], [ADHD], [autism] and other medical conditions, you'll see an excerpt from a Google Health article and links to other services: Mayo Clinic, Medline Plus, WebMD.

Most likely, some of the keywords that trigger the OneBox are displayed on this page. Google Health's articles combined information licensed from reputable sources with information from scholar papers, news articles and other web pages.

Gmail Adds a Contact Picker

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".

Google Maps Mobile Users Send Traffic Data

If you use the mobile Google Maps application on a phone that has GPS, you're sending Google real-time traffic information. "When you choose to enable Google Maps with My Location, your phone sends anonymous bits of data back to Google describing how fast you're moving. When we combine your speed with the speed of other phones on the road, across thousands of phones moving around a city at any given time, we can get a pretty good picture of live traffic conditions," explains Google.

It's an interesting way to use GPS information on a grand scale to solve practical problems. Many other Google services collect data that help Google develop new features: GOOG-411 collects voice samples that train Google's speech recognition systems, Google queries anticipate flu activity, while query refinements improve Google's "did you mean" feature.

Google Mobile's privacy policy includes a long list of information that could be collected by some of Google's services: your phone number, your carrier, basic usage stats about your device, your location, voice samples. It's worth pointing out that iPhone's mapping application "does not support traffic crowdsourcing", so you won't improve Google's traffic data by using it (iPhone's map application is not developed by Google).

Apparently, this new source of data allowed Google to expand the traffic feature to arterial roads. "Commuters have long relied on traffic sites to help them determine their last-minute path around poor traffic on the highway. But if the traffic looks bad on the highways, you'll probably want to know how it looks on the alternate routes through arterials," explains Google LatLong.


For now, Google Maps provides live traffic data for a small number of countries (US, UK, France, China), but crowdsourcing could expand its availability.

New Languages in Google Translate

Google's machine translation service added new languages: Afrikaans, Belarusian, Icelandic, Irish, Macedonian, Malay, Swahili, Welsh, Yiddish. Some of these languages have a small number of speakers: for example, according to Wikipedia, only 320,000 people speak Icelandic.


Swahili is a language spoken in Eastern Africa, Afrikaans is spoken in South Africa and Namibia, Yiddish has 3 million speakers in the Orthodox Jewish communities, Malay is an official language in Brunei, Malaysia, and Singapore. Welsh is spoken in Wales, England and Argentina, Irish is spoken by a small minority of the Irish population, Macedonian has less than 3 million speakers and many enemies, while Belarusian has 9 million speakers.


The number of languages supported by Google Translate is 51, which is impressive, but there are still many popular languages that aren't supported. At least not yet.

{ via John Mueller }

Interesting Reads in Google News

"Interesting Reads" is a new Google News section that includes opinionated, thought-provoking articles from news sites. Some titles: "The Daughter Deficit", "America's Food Crisis and How to Fix It", "7 Reasons to Avoid Windows 7".

It's not exactly Arts & Letters Daily, but it's an interesting departure from Google's goal of aggregating and clustering news stories.


Update: The feature has been launched and the section has been renamed to "spotlight". "The Spotlight section of Google News is updated periodically with news and in-depth pieces of lasting value. These stories, which are automatically selected by our computer algorithms, include investigative journalism, opinion pieces, special-interest articles, and other stories of enduring appeal. To access the stories in this section, just click Spotlight on the left side of the page," explains Google.

Clicking on a YouTube Video

What happens when you click on a YouTube video? Well, it depends. If the video is embedded in a web page and it's already playing, a click on the video will open a new tab and send you to YouTube's page. Until now, this behavior was annoying because the video started to play from the beginning and you had to pause it or pick up from where you left off. Now YouTube's player is smarter: it pauses the video and opens a YouTube page that continues to play the video seamlessly.

You can try the new feature using the video embedded below. You'll notice that YouTube uses a URL format that lets you link to certain sequence from a video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Umj1lvgoI68#t=1m15s

(where 1m15s is the start time)



Another change is that YouTube's watch page lets you pause videos by just clicking on the player.