Gmail has been slowly but surely rolling out cool new features ever since they started Gmail Labs. If you haven’t taken advantage of the fruits of Labs, here’s a look at 10 Labs features you should enable.
Microsoft’s online troubleshooting and support documents can be useful, but even if you find a help doc, it can still be a pain to follow along with their steps, right? Not anymore. CNET reports that Microsoft has started adding a new Fix it button to a few thousand Microsoft help and support docs that—when clicked—downloads a script that will run through the steps for you, like this support doc for enabling the DVD library on your Vista PC. It seems like a good idea, but as far as we can tell, the Fix it feature is weighed down by some serious cons.
Pros: You may not be required to do quite as much tech support for your friends and family for trivial fixes.
Cons: The “scripts” come in MSI packages that you have to execute on your desktop. God knows how soon we’ll start seeing Fix it icons everywhere offering to fix your common Windows problem with a boatload of malware. I tried the script to restore the IE icon on your desktop script, and it required a restart!
That’s the short list, but I’m sure you can think of a few more. Let’s hear what you think of this new feature in the comments.
[via CNET]Windows/Mac/Linux: If you’re a fan of inline photos and links connecting the content of your emails to the rest of the web, new browser plug-in Zemanta adds a rich email composition tool to Firefox and Internet Explorer. As the video demonstrates, Zemanta reads your email (okay, a little weird) and suggests images, related links, and inline links to Wikipedia. If you sign up for an account with Zemanta, you can finely tune Zemanta to search for images in your Flickr account or search for and add your friends’ content when available. Originally Zemanta was just a blogging tool (it supports Blogger, WordPress, and most other popular blogging services). Now the unobtrusive extension works with both Gmail and Yahoo mail. Using Zemanta is both fun and a little annoying. It’s really cool to quickly and easily add images and links to your email, but it’s also a little irritating to see the Zemanta branding show up next to everything you add. (Maybe it’s just me? I don’t like looking like a shill.) Still, if you’re a rich email junkie, Zemanta is a great tool. Zemanta is a free download, works on all platforms with Firefox and with Internet Explorer.
Zemanta for Gmail and Yahoo Mail [Zemanta via CNET]Windows only: Create CoverSearch searches Amazon, Yahoo, and other sources for cover art to automagically fill the visual gaps in your collection.
Point Create CoverSearch to your music directory and it will return all sub-directories that have no cover art. For each folder, the app displays available cover art in a variety of sizes for you to select from. Create CoverSearch performs exactly as advertised, but will work best for those with consistently organized music collections. You need to give the application a regular expression to use for searching—the default is \$artist\$album\, meaning it expects all your music to be organized like \Black Sabbath\Paranoid\. You can select from two other preset expressions, or input your own variation such as \$artist - $album\, or any combination of the variables $artist, $album, and [$ignore] . So if your music collection is all over the map, Create CoverSearch might be a bit of a fussy pain, lacking any kind of fuzzy search to crawl your loosely-named tunes. But there is at least one work-around—use only the $artist tag and cherry-pick the album covers you want from the discography it returns. For those with uniform naming conventions, the application will speed up album art plugging considerably. Create CoverSearch is freeware, Windows only.
Create CoverSearchWindows/Mac OS X only: Time tracking application TimeEdition tracks your time in a dead-simple and attractive interface that saves your progress to Google Calendar for accessible-from-anywhere results. Using the application is as simple as entering in customer, project, and task details using the drop-down controls and clicking the Start recording button. Your data is tracked across all projects and can be exported in Excel or iCal format—but the real beauty is found in the options panel, where you can choose to sync your activity with Outlook, iCal, or even Google Calendar. Unlike the previously mentioned gCalTasks gadget that only runs in the Vista sidebar, this application lives in your system tray—with an easy-access context menu that can switch between projects on the fly. TimeEdition is free and open source, works on Windows or Mac. Thanks, Tim Stiffler-Dean!
TimeEditionWindows only: Taekwindow adds several key features found in the X-Windows based interfaces common to several popular Linux distros. Resize, move, and manipulate with this portable application. After running Taekwindow you will be able to move windows from anywhere within the window, instead of having to grab the title bar. By holding ALT+left mouse button anywhere on a window you can move it; if you have multiple monitors, you can grab maximised windows to move without re-sizing. ALT+right mouse button allows you to drag the mouse to resize the window, and middle-clicking the title bar of an application pushes it to the background. Like previously reviewed WizMouse., Taekwindow enables the use of the scroll wheel on whatever window the mouse cursor is over, not just the window in focus. All in all, it’s a nice package of mouse tools for anyone disgruntled by window herding. Taekwindow is freeware, Windows only and requires .NET Framework 2.0 and above. Thanks LethAL! Taekwindow
The DesktopGaming web site has created hundreds of retro gaming wallpapers by ripping screenshots from emulated games—and then spicing them up with some photoshop goodness to fit today’s giant monitor sizes.
iPhone only: A bad sync, or a few clumsy finger swipes, can leave you with missing, duplicate, or otherwise messed-up iPhone contacts. iDrive Lite is a free app that stores contacts in the cloud. It’s a simple app that exports your contacts to a space at the previously reviewed iDrive, a web-based file storage site. Hit “backup” to upload, “Restore” to download, and “Share” to share a contact or two via SMS. It doesn’t seem to actually require an account with iDrive to backup, and I had a hard time finding details of what format the backups take. Still, for skipping the bill from MobileMe or anyone lacking an Exchange server link, iDrive Lite might provide free peace of mind. It’s free to download, requires an iPhone running at least 2.0 software, and doesn’t require a sign-up. iDrive Lite [iTunes Store via TechCrunch]
Got a rayon, silk, or otherwise delicate garment that can’t take ironing but gets seriously wrinkled? A sheet of aluminium foil can help straighten out, and do a few other neat tricks. Grab your tube of foil, set up the ironing board, and set up an indirect ironing station: To get wrinkles out of silk, wool, and rayon clothes that can’t take direct heat, place a piece of foil on your ironing board, then lay the garment flat over it. With the steam button down, pass the iron three to four inches over the fabric several times. Wet heat radiating from the foil helps smooth out wrinkles.
Beyond ironing, Real Simple points out that the thin shiny stuff can also reduce TV interference and scrub the heck out of glassware. Hit the link below for more clever uses of a pretty great material. Photo by tanakawho. New Uses for Aluminium Foil Real Simple]
