Google Talk Gadget

Google team just announced a new gadget available for google personal homepage: Google Talk Gadget.
Basically it’s a flash version of the Gtalkr application. It has a lot of features such as share YouTube videos or Picasa WebAlbum pictures…

Does this mean that the google crew has started to look at flash more that in the past? Maybe a new way to remove the “beta” to all its AJAX apps?
Probably also thanks to the linux flash player 9 recent release?

Read the full post here: http://googletalk.blogspot.com/…/google-talk-gadget.html

Google browser sync

I discovered today this great extension for Mozilla Firefox made by Google.

It synchronizes bookmarks, history, cookies and saved passwords continuously across your computers. It also allows you to restore open tabs and windows across different machines and browser sessions.
It allows you to select which setting to be sent using encryption (for example the saved password, even if I just use this extension only for my bookmarks).
Using firefox using different computers every day I always had the problem of bookmarks syncronization. First I used another firefox extension, but I dont remember its name, then I decided to put my bookmark.html file under a CVS repository, but now that I discovered this extension I will definitively use this one.

download the firefox extension here:
http://www.google.com/tools/firefox/browsersync

Adobe and Google

Adobe Signs Multi-Year Distribution Agreement with Google:

Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced the signing of a multi-year agreement with Google Inc. (Nasdaq:GOOG) to distribute the Google Toolbar with various Adobe products over the life of the deal. As a part of the agreement, Adobe and Google today will launch availability of the Google Toolbar with downloads of Adobe’s Macromedia Shockwave® Player. The Google Toolbar will now be offered as part of the Shockwave Player installation process for Internet Explorer on Windows. Under the terms of the agreement, the Google Toolbar will also be offered as part of other Adobe product installations in the future.

Google is fighting agaist Yahoo toolbar already distributed with adobe flash player and also against Microsoft Live search.
for more info read the press release entry

Gmail Drive!

I was told this freeware shell extension by one of my co-workers, and it works great. OS support is for all Windows platforms.
It creates a virtual filesystem on top of your Google account and enables to save and retrieve files stored on your GMail directly from inside Windows Explorer. It literally adds a new drive to your computer under the My Computer folder, where you can create new folders, copy and drag’n’drop files to.
One of the things that I can suggest is; using file type icons would be better instead of system file icons in the virtual directories.
More details are here.
Link: http://www.viksoe.dk/code/gmail.htm

Do you know Google Desktop?

Today I’ve installed Google Desktop Search, a desktop search application that provides full text search over mails, local files, and the web pages viewed.
Once launched the installer, it will create a service which will indexes all your computer (it will took hours the first time), then search can be activated from the taskbar icon. It’s integrated in the browser, in fact it’s the same as using google, but results are files on the computer!
Another cool feature is that When you view a web page in the browser, Google Desktop “caches” the content so that it can be viewed later, the same version of the page, even if its live content has changed or you’re offline.
Google Desktop Search organizes email search results into conversations, so that all email messages in the same thread are grouped into a single search result.
and basically it doesn’t affect the computer performance because it works only when computer is idle.. great
It’s really useful and funny 🙂
Link: http://desktop.google.com/about.html