Web Apps — James Poling

Gmail Adds Drag and Drop Attachments

August 4, 2010 By James Poling Leave a Comment

Gmail is starting to love the drag and drop. It was a little more than a year ago when they added drag and drop functionality to their labels. Earlier this year they added the ability to add attachments to an email by dragging them from your hard drive into your email. Now they’ve added the ability to drag attachments you receive in an email and drop them onto your desktop (or anywhere else you’d like).

I’m a huge fan of Gmail and I’ve used it to manage all of my email for the past 6 years, I don’t think I’m alone when I say that I’d like to see Google put some serious time and effort into a major refresh of Gmail, not only with features but with its UI as well. Sure, Gmail raised the bar when it launched back in 2004 but since then it has remained largely stagnant, while Hotmail and Yahoo have been doing major overhauls to their platforms. I’m not holding my breath though.

Filed Under: How To Tagged With: attachments, email, gmail, Web Apps

Five Chrome Extensions That Will Make Your Life Easier

July 20, 2010 By James Poling Leave a Comment

One of the reasons I was so hesitant to move from Firefox to Chrome was that I had my FF tricked out with so many custom plugins that it really slowed me down to try and surf without them.

Now that Chrome has opened up the floodgates and allowed extensions, the playing field is starting to even out. Here are five quick and easy Chrome Extensions that come in handy and will make your life easier.

Webpage Screenshot – While not as slick as Firefox’s ScreenGrab! it still does the job. This is probably one of my most used extensions.
AdBlock – Basically the same concept as the FF version but since Chrome doesn’t fully support the code it’s not quite as effective as it is on FF but it still gets the job done.
MeasureIt! – I love this extension. This is actually one that I could never find on FF and have always wanted. MeasureIt! is a simple tool that let’s you measure the width of something right on your browser. It’s a lot easier than doing a screencap, firing up Photoshop and measuring it that way. This app will save you lots of time when trying to figure out the dimensions of something you like.
Google Mail Checker – It’s simple, that’s exactly what it does. You don’t have to worry about keeping Gmail open in your browser, Google Mail Checker lets you know how many unread emails you have in your inbox and once you click on it, it opens a new tab and takes you right to your inbox. Pretty handy, especially if you’re waiting on an important email and don’t want to keep hitting refresh all the time.
Eye Dropper – This is another app I use a lot. Again, it’s not quite as good as its FF companion but it still does the job. If you need to find the color on a page this will definitely get the job done for you.

Honorable Mention: Web Developer - This didn’t make the list because I think it still needs a little bit of work. The Web Developer add-on for Firefox is arguably one of the best plugins out there for anyone building websites. This plugin has a lot of potential but still seems a little clunky and harder to use.

There you have it, enjoy. Let me know what some of your favorite Chrome extensions are and maybe I’ll check them out.

Filed Under: How To Tagged With: browser, chrome, extensions, google, How To, Web Apps

Microsoft Launches New and Improved Hotmail

May 18, 2010 By James Poling Leave a Comment

Since I signed up for my first Hotmail account in 1997 (which I still have) I’ve been a total sucker for webmail. I’m still a sucker for web apps in general so whenever Microsoft does a complete overhaul of one of the world’s first, and most successful, webmail services it’s probably worth taking a look.

The first thing I noticed when going to login to Hotmail was that, once you’re logged in, it takes you straight to your inbox. They’ve gotten rid of that default news type landing page (which I think Yahoo Mail still uses) and gotten back to the basics. Email. If you’re a Hotmail user, that alone is reason to celebrate, but that’s just the gravy.

Conversation View:

If you like Gmail’s threaded conversations then you’ll be a fan of Hotmail’s conversation view. The new Hotmail gives you the option to turn this on and off which is something Gmail doesn’t do. Personally, I don’t understand why all mail apps don’t offer conversation view, it’s a far better way to keep track of your email history.

Office Web Apps Integration:

Microsoft has integrated Office Web Apps and Skydrive into Hotmail. You can now edit documents and presentations right in Hotmail without even having to download them. Hotmail is also using Skydrive to store photos so you can attach and view large photos right in your email app.

Single Contact List:

This may be the coolest new feature in any webmail app out there. “The new Hotmail brings all your online contacts into one convenient place — even those from services like Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace. Send an email to anyone, and if you want to you can manage your contacts by creating categories such as Friends or Co-workers to easily organize your address book.”

Exchange ActiveSync:

Gmail started offering this late last year and it works great for iPhones and Blackberries. I suspect heavy Hotmail users will be just as happy as I was to start using this with their mobile devices.

There’s a lot more new features including the ability to flag, move and manage your emails intuitively based on who they’re from. In the end I have too much invested in gmail to move away now, but I can honestly say that I’m impressed at where Hotmail is headed. This update has been a long time coming and you can really see that Microsoft wanted to make significant, deep changes in hotmail and they have definitely done that. These aren’t minor, cosmetic changes.

But what do I know, all of these changes are live so go login to your old Hotmail account or go sign up for a new one and let me know what you think in the comments section.

Filed Under: Reviews, Uncategorized Tagged With: email, hotmail, microsoft, Web Apps, webmail

What Not to Do if You’re the CEO of a Company Trying to Generate Buzz with Social Media

December 1, 2009 By James Poling Leave a Comment

Almost a month ago I wrote a post about DeadCellZones.com getting it’s server crushed by receiving a link from LifeHacker.

As of today the site is still down. I simultaneously received a comment on my blog and on Twitter from the CEO of DeadCellZones.com telling me that in fact Dead Cell Zones is not down for the count but would be resurrecting in a matter of days. Both comments explicitly asked me if I wanted to check out a preview of the new site.

Below is the very brief and very bizarre email exchange between me and Jeff Cohn, CEO of DeadCellZones.com:

Me: Hi Jeff, I saw your comment on my blog. I would definitely be interested in taking a look at what you guys have coming out.

Jeff: How could we benefit from you seeing it? What is your interest in the space and how could you help / or hurt us?

Me: Hmm, well you asked me if I wanted to see it. I answered you. The way it normally works if I see something I like I share it. I usually don’t waste my time writing about things just because I don’t like them. Your story was interesting because I was able to use it as a lesson on how to be prepared for traffic. If you are comfortable with taking a look at the preview that’s fine, if you’re not that’s also fine. I’m not out to hurt anyone. I’m also not going to promise anything just to see it.

Me: On second thought I’m not really interested. Good luck with the launch.

Jeff: If you are willing to write a corrective post if you like what you see I am happy to send you some screen shot maps of the upper east coast.

Screenshots? I’m supposed to write a corrective post about a site that, as of now, is still down based on screenshots?

Me: No thanks. There’s nothing to correct. When I wrote the post the site was dead. It still is. Frankly your approach is a bit offsetting, I’m actually writing a post about that now. Again, good luck with the new site.

Jeff: Why didn’t you send an email asking why we shut it down? That is good reporting.

Me: I knew why you shut it down. The original image you displayed on your site after the crash said as much. You got linked from a high trafficked site (LifeHacker I think) and you weren’t prepared for the influx of people. It seemed pretty straight forward to me.

Jeff: Not exactly. Have you ever published a map with lots of data?

At that point I just didn’t know what else to say so I just stopped writing back. I was shocked that someone trying to seemingly generate buzz for their site that’s about to re-launch would be so rude. Don’t ask me to preview something and then ask what I can promise you or do for you in order to actually see the preview. It’s tactless.

So, if you’re the CEO of a company try not to engage someone and then be defensive and confrontational when they try and connect with you. By the way, I’ve also posted the original image you had posted on your site after it crashed. Why would I send an email asking you about something you’ve already told the world? Of course you’ve since changed your image, but the message is still the same.

There’s my take on the re-launch. Hope that helps Jeff.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: ceo, dead cell zones, jeff cohn, Social Media, Web Apps

Brizzly: What Twitter would be with a Facelift and on some Steroids

November 20, 2009 By James Poling 10 Comments

For the past year or so I’ve been making a concerted effort to move everything I do into the cloud. I love knowing that I’m not tied down to one machine. It’s very freeing to know that I can log on from any computer in the world and have access to virtually everything I need.

The more I use Twitter, the more I’ve been searching for the perfect web app to handle my Twitter needs. A few days ago I wrote about Seesmic’s Twitter Web App, which has pretty much become my default app of choice. But as I mentioned, Seesmic is still missing some basic functionality that I’d like to see added and until I find an app that can handle everything I need I’m always going to be on the lookout for new innovations.

The other day I got an invite to another Twitter web app called brizzly and I have to say, wow. Not only is the design drop-dead gorgeous, it’s loaded with features. It’s by far the most powerful Twitter web app I’ve seen. Not only does it have many of the features some of the more robust desktop clients have, it even has some unique features that are pretty cool too.

Brizzly not only supports multiple accounts it has facebook integration as well, both of which are big pluses in my book.

Screencaps and more details after the jump.
[Read more...]

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: brizzly, twitter, Web Apps

Posterous Adds Built in Retweet and Flickr Compatibility Continuing Trend of Awesomeness

November 15, 2009 By James Poling 2 Comments

I’ve been a huge fan of Posterous since it first launched back in 2008. I wrote a post here detailing my dry run using Posterous as my full-time blog.

Since I wrote that post there have been a few major developments over at the Posterous camp. Perhaps the most profound change has been the opening up of the CSS for Posterous to allow you to change your theme or completely customize it yourself from the ground up.

I’m still not sold that Posterous is powerful enough that I would feel completely confident in moving there full-time again, but they are definitely making some exciting headway. Two of the most recent announcements I’ve been really excited about are the Flickr integration:

Just paste the URL, e.g. from the address bar:

into a post or an email, and you’ll automatically get the Flickr embedded slideshow, shown below.

and the Retweet functionality built into default themes.

First you’ll need to go into your customize panel and activate the retweet button.

Once you’ve done that you should see the retweets showing up on all of your posts. Not only your future posts but past posts as well. The implementation is top-notch as well. You don’t even have to leave the blogs comment page to retweet a post.

The co-founders of Posterous have been giving the impression that there are a lot of cool new features coming down the pipes over the next few months. If one of those improvements is a more powerful web dashboard for publishing posts, I may be chomping at the bits to get over to Posterous full-time once and for all. Right now I’m still extremely excited to watch the changes unfold on my mobile blog jamespoling.mobi.

Filed Under: Blogging, Reviews Tagged With: Blogging, flickr, posterous, retweet, twitter, Web Apps

How to keep your photos safe like an Enterprise-level organization on a recession proof budget

November 12, 2009 By James Poling Leave a Comment

I have a 19-month-old daughter that I have taken about a million pictures of since she was born. Obviously these photos are very important and extremely valuable to me and something that I hope to someday pass on to my daughter, so it’s my responsibility to make sure to keep them as safe as possible.

Anything that you have that exists only on your hard drive is in constant danger of being lost forever. Is it likely to happen? Perhaps not, but trust me, you don’t want to be the one who finds out the hard way.

I am a photo freak. I, like everyone else who owns any sort of camera, fancies myself an unpolished, amateur photographer. I love taking photos of what’s going on around me. I am constantly amazed at how easy technology has made it to instantly immortalize what is going on in at any given moment in time.

I want to make sure that ever photo I take is safe. I have enough going on in my life that I don’t want to have to worry about whether or not I could suddenly lose every photo I have of my daughter if my hard drive decides to crap the bed.

You don’t have to be a huge corporation to utilize backups and extra storage to keep your photos safe. Here are a few of the tools I use to do it.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: How To Tagged With: google, hard drives, photography, picasa, picasa web, Web Apps

Google Boosts Their Paid Storage Quotas

November 11, 2009 By James Poling Leave a Comment

It’s no earth shattering secret that storage has become cheaper and cheaper over the past few years and since there’s probably no one on the planet with more storage capacity than Google, it’s nice to see them spreading the wealth so to speak.

Hi,

We wanted to let you know about some exciting changes to your Google paid storage plan. While storage costs have dropped naturally in the past few years, we’ve also been working hard to improve our infrastructure to reduce your costs even further. On Tuesday, November 10th, we increased the size of each of our tiers to make storage even more affordable and accessible. For the same $20.00 per year, you’ll now get 80 GB, 8 times as much storage as before. Your current plan will be automatically upgraded and your new quota will automatically show up in your account in the next 24 hours.

We hope you’ll like the extra space, but if it’s more than you need you can always change your storage plan or renewal preferences for next year in your Google account settings: www.google.com/accounts/purchasestorage. Feel free to visit our Help Center for more information.

Thanks,
The Google storage team

This is great news for me because while 17GB of storage for my email is probably enough to last me a lifetime, I use Picasa Web to back up all of my photos and I was starting to run out of room.

Filed Under: How To, Tech Tagged With: gmail, google, picasa, storage, Web Apps

Chrome 2 Adds Some Serious Speed and a lot of New Features

May 22, 2009 By James Poling Leave a Comment

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rubd9bqjS64&feature=player_embedded

I’ve had Google Chrome installed since it was still in beta way back in November (it rolled out of Beta in November as well).

From the beginning I’ve said that my two favorite things about Chrome are it’s speed and it’s clean, friendly interface. Even in beta Chrome was by far one of the fastest browsers I had ever used and now, with the release of Chrome 2, it’s even faster and more stable.

One of my early complaints with Chrome was its weak contextual menu. If you’re a blogger and you use Firefox, you’re probably very familiar with the shortcuts your contextual menu provides you. While Chrome is still not quite up to FF standards their new contextual menu is beefed up quite a bit and definitely has many more of the basic necessities.

Surprisingly, one of the most requested changes that Google received about Chrome, and which has actually been addressed in Chrome 2, is the ability to hide the thumbnails on your tabs page. Now you can have all the joy of being able to quickly navigate to some of your most visited sites without all the embarrassment of friends coworkers being able to see that said site is The Hills Gossip Fan Club Blog.

Chrome 2 also features form autofill. This one is pretty much self-explanatory.

Chrome 2 may well work its way up to becoming my default surfing/blogging browser of choice but when it comes to taking care of business, Chrome can’t hold a candle to FF with Web Developer Toolbar and Firebug. Those are pretty much essential tools when I’m working on a project, which is practically daily. It’ll be interesting to see if Google even tries to make any headway in that area of FF.

All in all, if you’re not dependent on a lot of Firefox add-ons for your job, Chrome may well be a light, fast and intuitive option for your browsing needs.

Filed Under: Reviews Tagged With: browsers, firefox, google, google chrome, Web Apps

Facebook Reaches 10 Billion Photo Milestone

October 16, 2008 By James Poling Leave a Comment

A pretty huge announcement came in the form of a post on the Engineering @ Facebook’s Notes section of Facebook yesterday.

We recently hit a really cool milestone, our users have now uploaded over 10 billion photos to the site. Now, that’s a big number, but we actually store four image sizes for each uploaded photo, so that’s over 40 billion files.

To celebrate, we got a bunch of cupcakes and handed them out to our engineering and operations groups. One of our engineers calculated that if we had gotten one cupcake for each of our photos, and lined them up side by side, the line could reach halfway to the moon.

Some other cool stats about the over 10 billion photos hosted on Facebook:

3,456,271,892 of the photos are of incredibly drunk people.
1,982,120,427 are of minors that look like street walkers.
4,398,284,589 are of attention whores/cougars.
163,320,042 are of people who think their baby is the cutest baby on the planet.
3,050 are of normal people who actually use Facebook for networking.

It’s all true. I’ve done my research.

Filed Under: Tech Tagged With: facebook, photos, Web Apps

Note to Firefox: Please Put “Add Tab” Option Back in the Toolbar

October 16, 2008 By James Poling 2 Comments

After using Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 for a couple of days I have one request. Please, for the love of god, add the option back to have an “Add Tab” button next to the other toolbar buttons. I mentioned earlier that in this version they have removed this option and relocated it to actual tab bar. It sucks. I’m sure that left there I would eventually get used to it but why shouldn’t I at least have the option?

It’s like when IE6 came out and completely redid their design and moved the refresh button over to the right side of the address bar. I rarely use IE and still haven’t gotten used to it’s new location.

The first thing I always do after downloading a new version of Firefox is edit the toolbar and put the “Add Tab” button in the exact same position every time. Having it gone is just a pain and it seems silly to not give users the option to have it there if they choose.

Filed Under: Tech Tagged With: beta, browsers, firefox, functionality, Web Apps

Gmail Struggles to Remain Relevent in Mobile World (EOM) Style

October 15, 2008 By James Poling Leave a Comment

It’s really no secret to anyone that knows me that I’m pretty much a gmail fanatic. If I am looking to hire someone I am far more likely to pay attention to someone with a gmail.com address over someone trying to pawn off a yahoo.com or *gasp* hotmail.com email address. Maybe it makes no sense, but it’s the way I work. I know what I need done and if you’re still using hotmail, I don’t think you’re the person to do it.

Anyhow, I digress. In our ever changing, constantly connected world even I find myself struggling to use email. Between text messages, Twitter, Facebook and instant messages, email has almost become as archaic as letter writing and snail mail to me. Sure it helps that gmail has the built in chat interface, but since my workplace pretty much soley uses AIM, I’m stuck on Trillian all day.

Often times when I actually do get to use my email I want to get straight to the point. Often times the point I need to get across is easily conveyed in the subject line. Now gmail has added functionality that allows you to include “EOM” at the end of a subject line that is in fact the entire content of your email. Adding “EOM” will help you avoid that annoying pop up reminding you that the body of your email is empty.

For example, say you send out four or five emails a day with only a subject line like “Meet for Lunch?” or “Where the hell are my socks?” or “Go Yanks”. Normally, when you go to send that message you would get this popup reminding you that the body of your email is empty.

After a while that could get pretty annoying. Now by adding “EOM” or “(EOM)” at the end of your subject line gmail recognizes that the subject is in fact the End Of your Message. It’s also good practice to use EOM since it alerts whoever you’re sending a subject only email to that they need not waste time opening your bodiless email.

Filed Under: How To, Tech Tagged With: eom, gmail, How To, Web Apps

Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 is Looking Pretty Sweet

October 14, 2008 By James Poling 1 Comment

I have to admit, I’ve gotten more and more comfortable with using Chrome as my everyday browser while at home. There are however a few key features in Firefox that I’ve grown extremely accustomed to which I have indeed been missing. So, of course, word of FF 3.1 Beta 1 coming out was enough for me to drop Chrome for a while and come back home so to speak.

One thing that took me a few minutes to figure out was the “new tab” button missing off the toolbar. I usually add it on manually and have grown accustomed to using it fairly regularly, even though I know I should be using the ctrl+t keyboard shortcut. Don’t bother, that option is gone from your toolbar icons. replacing it is a permanent spot over on the right side of the tabs. The “+” obviously opens new tabs and the little arrow next to it allows you to skip to any open tab as well.

From a GUI point of view, one of the cool new features in FF3.1B is the ctrl+tab 3D feature to cycle through open tabs, which is sort of similar the alt+tab feature in Windows which cycles through open programs, and maybe even more similar to the cascading desktop feature in Vista.

FF 3.1 beta uses the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine which is most of the reason it’s so much faster than the current version of FF3 and more on par with Chrome for its Javascript rendering speed.

For whatever reason though, this feature comes disabled by default. It’s fairly simple to turn on in three easy steps.

Type about:config in your browser’s address bar.
Type or paste javascript.options.jit.content into the filter.
Double-click the preference to set the boolean to true.

FF3.1B will also be introducing geolocation awareness which is something you could get with FF3 but not without an additional plugin. 3.1 will have it baked right into the main product.

You can download and test drive a copy here. Beware though, it will brick all of your plugins. I’m sure those will be fixed soon enough and for now it’s nice to see an even faster version of FF rolling out with brand new features to boot.

Filed Under: Tech Tagged With: beta, browser, firefox, mozilla, Web Apps

Gmail Adds Drag and Drop Attachments

Five Chrome Extensions That Will Make Your Life Easier