If you want to check your Google analytics data from desktop, then here is a very good Adobe Air app called Trakkboard. It let’s you check Google analytics data of different website accounts from your desktop. You do not have to keep your browser open all the time and be logged in at Google Analytics anymore.

How to Download Trakkboard

In order to download the Adobe Air application, you have to first register with the site. Just head over to this page and submit your email address to request a key.

Hit the “request Key” button and you will receive an email containing the verification link to verify your email address. Click the verification link and you are done with verifying your email address.

Once you click the link, you will be redirected to a page containing your Trakkboard license key. After that click the “install now” button and the application will start  to install Trakkboard in your computer.

Immediately after the installation you will receive another email containing your Trakkboard license key. Do not lose this License key as you will need it to start the desktop application.

That concludes the installation part. Now let’s see what Trakkboard has to offer.

How to use Trakkboard to View Google Analytics reports from Desktop

After the installation is complete start the application and put the Trakkboard license key and hit next.

The next step involves choosing a password for Trakkboard. This password is not your Google analytics account password. Instead, this password is used to protect your Trakkboard data in case anyone else wants to sneak peak into it.

After choosing your password, you have to enter your Google analytics account details. This will be used to Login to your Google analytics account and let you see the website data from desktop. If you have multiple Analytics account, don’t worry as you can always add another account later on.

That’s it. Hit the Finish registration button to complete the installation. Now you are ready to use this amazing software.

Using Trakkboard – Features , Widgets and Interface

The entire Trakkboard interface works in widgets. You have to select a website profile from the upper bar and select the corresponding widgets to display them into the application.

Just select a time span and the widget type. After that click save and your widget is placed in the application panel. Here is how the Trakkboard panel looks with all the custom widgets set up.

You can drag and drop widgets to your preferred locations. If you feel the application is getting cluttered with too many widgets, you can always open a new tab and organize your data.

Available Widgets in Trakkboard

There are quite a number of widgets to choose from. And they are :

1. Total visits over a definite time span.
2. Total number of page views
3. Traffic sources
4. Medium
5. Top Keywords
6. Bounce rate
7. Time on site

I guess all these features are more than sufficient for you to analyze the data. However the benchmarking feature hasn’t been implemented yet.

Adding a New Google Analytics account

If you have multiple Google analytics accounts, then you can add them up from the control center.

Well that’s about it. Have you tried out the new desktop client for Google Analytics ? tell us what you think about it.

How to Manage Multiple Google Analytics Accounts from Desktop originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

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1. Removing keywords

A common websearch function applied to email. You can filter out items containing certain words. For example, if I want to get a list of all my MakeTechEasier messages, but not those relating to pingbacks, I can remove items containing that word from my results with the minus sign.

2. To: and From:

Probably the simplest and most often used search function is the ability to specify sender or recipient. By specifying a name or email address you can narrow results to items written by (or to) a name or email address. In this example, I’m trying to get all the emails I’ve written about MakeTechEasier to Damien.

3. CC:

Much like To: and From:, you can filter to show messages with a certain person in the cc or bcc fields. Here I am searching for all party-related messages that involve my good friend The Dude.

4. has:attachment

This one’s pretty self-explanatory – you can get only the results that have a file attached. In this example Im looking for all emails from my sister that may have pictures of her kids.

5. filename:

Similar to #4 above, but this time you can specify an exact filename, or even just part of a filename in an attachment. I can improve upon my previous search by specifying that I want only results with pictures attached.

6. OR

No search system is complete without at least a few boolean operators, and GMail is no exception. While AND is implied in most searches, sometimes you need OR to get the results you want. In this example, I’m trying to get messages about Christmas plans from both sisters.

OR, by the way, does have to be in caps.

7. is:

Another very handy one, is: lets you see only messages in a certain state, like read, unread, or starred. Here, I’m trying to get any emails from Damien which I had previously marked as important (starred).

8. label:

Labels are already a very useful GMail feature, and the search function only makes it better. You can tell the search to return only messages with a particular label attached. If I have a Work label for all my work-related emails and I want to find a message relating to last year’s company picnic, I can use label: to avoid getting messages relating to my countless other picnics of 2008.

9. (Parentheses)

I just recently learned about this, and I’m very glad I did. Using parentheses you can group items for use with things like OR. Parentheses can shorten what might otherwise be a long search string. Let’s say I’m searching for the XBox Live names of my friends Adam, Galt and Joe. I could write out three separate from: statements much like #6, or I could use parentheses to group items together.

10. Combinations

A few of these examples have combined the search options into single queries. GMail gives nearly unlimited flexibility when combining complex search options. You can get extremely detailed results by combining the options to return exactly what you want. The following is an attempt to bring up all messages from both of my sisters about all our prior Christmas plans, that also have pictures attached, but not including our trip to Kentucky.

10 Useful GMail Search Tips originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

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Message Management

One of GMail’s strengths is its ability to handle large volumes of email while allowing you to keep things organized. Wave built on GMail’s experience and has also included some useful features for keeping things in order. For starters, you’ve got Folders which work like GMail’s labels and everything else’s… well… folders. You can drag and drop waves into these folders and they will not show up in your inbox. To view that message you can either click the title of the folder or choose All at the top of the Navigation pane.

As you can see in the screenshot, you can also colorize each of the folders individually. I can see how this could be helpful if you have a LOT of folders and want to use colors to group them together, or if there’s a particular folder you want to keep highlighted to catch your eye.

In addition to managing waves through folders, you also have two ways to essentially forget about a message until it’s needed. First, you can Mute a wave, so that it no longer shows up as unread even when it has been modified by others. If you just want a wave out of your inbox but still want to know when it’s been updated, you can Archive that message. You won’t see it until someone makes an update to that wave. Both muted and archived waves will show up in searches and in the All section.

I’ve found it useful to archive almost everything. When a wave has pretty clearly ended, I’ll set it to Archive and leave only messages I intend to keep alive in my inbox. If anyone happens to update one of those waves, it’ll pop right back up in my inbox like normal. Without this I think it wouldn’t take long for Wave to feel a bit overwhelming, if you use it frequently.

Embedded Replies

One messaging feature I really like is the ability to embed a reply inside the original message. In this example, Tara wrote the original message, and instead of creating a separate reply or copy & pasting her words, I can choose any spot in her message and insert my reply.

Private Branches

Let’s say you’re in a wave with everyone at the office. Your boss is discussing the importance of TPS reports. Suddenly, a witty remark pops into your head, and you have a choice. Do you uphold your status as the office comedian, or bite your tongue to keep your job? Wave provides a third option – create a private branch. Only the people specified in that branch can see those messages. In this example screenshot, there are many people in the wave but only the person I included in my private reply can see what I wrote.

Managing Contacts

The only really notable feature about the contacts is that you can do an incremental search for people in your contact list, as demonstrated below. My only complaint is that Wave does not apparently include GMail type status messages with the contacts. I’ve seen no word so far on whether or not that will be a feature in future Wave revisions.

Extensions

We covered extensions briefly in our first report on Wave, but there’s plently more to be said. Extensions can be installed and removed through the Extensions Gallery, which is a wave itself. For me, the extension gallery showed up in my inbox the day after I activated my Wave account. In it is a list of available extensions you can choose to install.

One of the most notable aspects of Wave in regards to extensions is they Google strongly encourages independent developers to create their own Wave extensions. The recommended language is Java but they also have a Python client library. As a fan of Python I think this is great news.

Bottom Line

With the many clever options Wave provides for message management and extensions, Wave is clearly going to be a contender for online communications. Right now the biggest obstacle is establishing a firm user base, as Wave is only useful if all your friends and associates also use it. Leaving the system open will work to Google’s benefit in that sense, as future users won’t be limited to just the official Wave website and client, but will be able to communicate over any wave-compatible platform. I, for one, look forward to seeing what the future holds for Wave.

Google Wave – Round 2 originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

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Slowly but surely Google has been adding a feature here and a feature there. Some have been bigger steps than others; all of them are chipping away at the reasons you need to buy an office suite. I’m not going to get on a soapbox and shout to the world. I will however, give you a few nifty tips to make using Google Docs spreadsheets a little easier.

1. Lookup

Much like other spreadsheet programs, Docs can do calculations and formulas. The question to ask is the other programs would be, “Do you have built in Google search?” No? Hmmm…. well anyway, here are a couple handy formulas to enter into the desired cell to utilize Google’s search. Make sure to keep the quotation marks surrounding the terms you are adding.

The values will automatically update as the information changes; imagine the possibilities.

=GoogleLookup(”entity”; “attribute”)

Replace entity with something like Ireland and attribute with population.

=GoogleFinance(”symbol”, “attribute”)

An example for this function would be:  =GoogleFinance(”AAPL”, “Price”) The result would end up being what ever the current stock price is.

=GoogleTranslate(”text”, “source language”,”target language”)

The translation function is really cool. It allows you to translate a word or a few sentences from English to Modern Greek or Chinese to Spanish. The most difficult part is having to use ISO 639-1 country abbreviations.

For easy access check out this list of all the functions available.

2. Google Doc Forms

A Google Docs Form is a very simple way to add a survey to an email or website. The basic idea behind these forms is to gather information and automatically aggregate the results into a spreadsheet. You also have the choice to get an email notification when someone completes the form or add a gadget to your iGoogle page to track all of your surveys.

Creating a form is really straightforward.

1. From the main Google Docs screen, choose New — Form

2. If you don’t like the plain blue and white color scheme, you can pick a new one by clicking Theme.

3. Click apply on the new theme to start editing.

4. From there, simply type in the question, choose the type of question you’d like it to be and if it is required to complete the survey.

5. If you click the Share button, there is an option to email the survey or even get the code to embed it into a web page on your site.

3. List View

List view is a fast loading version of a spreadsheet you can publish or embed to your website. The settings you determine in the Share menu will carry over to the spreadsheet you embed.

One of the coolest parts is the spreadsheet is auto-updating. If, for example, you have stock quotes or dollar amounts from a fundraiser; these will all be updated on the embeded version instantly.

If you are a Google Sites user, you can add a editable version of the spreadsheet onto the page by going to the Insert menu.

List view provides a few basic ways to modify data:

• edit cells
• add rows
• filter and sort data
• cells with formulas can’t be edited in this view

4. From Your Mobile

If you have an Android, iPod touch/iPhone or Nokia S60, you can access and manipulate your Google Doc spreadsheets. I was a little disappointed there isn’t a Blackberry or Windows Mobile access, but I’ll live.

• Create shortcuts to your spreadsheets on your home screen
• Edit cells
• Add data
• Sort columns to give you relevant data first

5. Styling

Even though it isn’t an option in a drop down menu, the forms can be modified. You do have over 70 themes available, but if that isn’t enough for you, here are a few tips to spice them up even more by Gill Smith.

What are your productivity tips for Google spreadsheets and forms?

image credit: TaopaiC

5 Tips for Google Spreadsheets originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

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So what is it exactly?

According to Google:

Google Wave is an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration. A wave can be both a conversation and a document where people can discuss and work together using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

Intriguing, but not very specific. Suffice it to say, each “Wave” is like an email thread or message board post. The difference is that you’re not just posting a series of replies (though you certainly can use it that way), you’re making changes to a single document. Each change becomes a branch of the original message. You can roll a wave back in time to see how the conversation has evolved. If you get added to a pre-existing wave, you get the whole thing – the document (or thread) as-is, along with its entire history. Waves can be embedded into blogs, so any time a change is made to that wave it can show up in something like Blogger in near real time. We’ll cover the most interesting Wave features in more detail as we go.

Using a Wave

The Wave exists online, and can be accessed a few different ways. The most common would probably be through a “Wave Client”, ie a GMail-like web app that displays your Waves in the browser window. Here is an example of the main wave.google.com

On the far left we’ve got a pretty familiar webmail style menu, with the usual Inbox, etc. Below that is your contacts. Wave seems to have imported my GMail contacts and added those who are also signed in here. The center pane shows your message history much like any email client, including the pic for each participant in the wave.

Things get more interesting when we get to the right pane. Here we can view, edit, and create waves. In this example, I wrote a Kurt Vonnegut quote to Crystal. She responded not by creating a separate reply, but by editing my original words. When I get back to Wave and see her message, Wave highlights the changes she has made.

This means you could use a single wave to have multiple people, say, write a paper for school or collaborate on a family Christmas list. All changes are essentially real time, each change creating a new branch with a complete backup history. In fact, Wave provides a playback feature that allows you to step through the document from creation to the present.

Extensions

Wave expects and encourages user-developed extensions. As it’s still in development, there aren’t many choices yet. The extensions that do exist are all fairly useful. First, you can perform a Google search and include the results in the wave. No real surprises there.

Next is the single-click Yes/No box. Of all the things to include in an early release I’m a little surprised the Yes/No box was one of them, but I suppose it demonstrates some of the things you can do with extensions.

The results were unanimous.

There is also a Maps extension, which is another single click surprise. I have to admit, this would make it a lot easier to exchange directions.

As I write this, a new wave just arrived in my inbox for the Google Wave Extension Gallery. I can browse and install new extensions from within the wave. Presumably the wave will be updated as new extensions come out.

Conclusion

There is FAR more to Google Wave than I could possibly cover here, and this is still a fairly early development version. For those who want all the details, you can find a LONG (80 minutes) video of the tech demo here. For something with so drastically different from email on the technical side, Wave manages to feel surprisingly comfortable. The technology is certainly impressive, and it’s easy to adjust to the Wave way of doing things once you’ve spent a few minutes using it. As for usefulness, that’s a little harder to judge. From what I’ve seen, Wave only works if everyone else is also using it. As great as the map feature may be, the recipient would of course need to be a Wave user as well. Not that this is a flaw in Wave exactly, but it does place a limit on how useful it can be. I think it’s got a lot of potential, and I’ll be keeping a Wave tab open for a while to see how things go, but I won’t go closing my webmail tab just yet.

Google Wave – The Future of Email? originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

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Many are in their Labs stage of development. A lot of the sites you have grown to love have been in Google Labs at some point. Google Maps, Reader, Docs and Alerts are just a few. Here are a few cool sites you may not be aware Google has in the lab.

Trends

Trends is a very handy research and comparison tool. Typing something like [VW, Ford, Fiat] into the search bar results in graphs, location of searches and related news displayed. By comparing multiple search terms simultaneously, time is saved importing the data into spreadsheets or a graph. All of the information is right at your finger tips.

I have also used Trends when quickly comparing keywords (although much better tools are available) to get a general idea for the popularity of the search term.

Specialized Search

To help narrow your search, Google offers specialized search engines for different topics. An example might be if you are looking for Linux how-to information. You could go to the Linux search and type in your search term there. This will filter out all of the Windows server information, in-turn cutting down on the amount of sites you might have to look through.

The current specialized searches are: Mac, Windows, Linux, BSD, US Government and University Search lets you to search to a specific school website for things like enrollment info or course schedules.

News Timeline

Search a date in the past to find out what happened. The advanced search allows different criteria to be set up such as a specific newspaper, magazine, blog or baseball scores.

While using Google News Timeline, I did come across some issues. One problem is the magazine or newspaper must have a digital version available in Google’s Book Search or the News Archive. This may be a little bit of a snag if you are trying to do an in depth search for something.

Google Moderator

Moderator is a really simple idea. Create a “series” and invite general public to ask questions, give tips, make suggestions or just about any thing else you can think of. It is kind of a mashup of a forum and crowd-sourcing. Your audience will ask questions, then the same people will vote on the question letting you know how many people agree or disagree with what was asked. With some creativity, this could be a great proving ground for products, ideas or services.

Fast Flip

A quick way to scan through different news sources at the same time. The news feeds can be narrowed by a topic, source, most viewed and several other options. Fast Flip shows a small screenshot of the page usually just big enough to see the major headlines. When you spot something, just click on it to make the page large enough to read. If you could customize the sites and save your choices, it would be pretty cool RSS reader.

City Tours

Offers a variety of attractions mapped out using Google Maps. Directions, approximate time to see the attraction, walking times to the next destination, ratings and hours of operation. It pretty much takes the guess work out of planning a touristy trip.

What kind of app or site would you like to see Google make next?

6 Google Sites You May Not Know About originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

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By following this tutorial, you can also configure it to sync your contact and calendar.

Before you start, please note that Google sync only work with iPhone firmware 3.0 and above.

Getting Started

1. Tap on the Settings.app icon on the home page

2. Scroll down and open Mail, Contacts, Calendars.

3. Tap Add Account

4. Select Microsoft Exchange.

5. In the Email field, enter your Gmail address.

Leave the Domain field blank.

Enter your Google’s Username and Password.

Once done, tap Save. You might see the “Unable to verify certificate” error message. Select Accept.

6. A new Server input field will now appear. Enter “m.google.com“. Tap Next to continue.

7. Select the Google services that you want to sync. For me, I activated all the available synchronization services. Tap Done.

Your Google sync Push notification services is now set up.

To activate the push notification, you need to turn the Push feature on in the iPhone Settings section.

At the Mail, Contacts, Calendar section, tap Fetch New Data

Make sure that the Push is turned to ON.

Done.

Few things to note:

1. Google sync requires you to be constantly connected to the Web. You have to keep your 3G or WIFI connection ‘Always ON’ for the best result.

2. The push notification can be very draining on your battery life. If you value your battery life much more than the push technology, turn the Push feature OFF for optimal performance.

How to Set Up Push Notification For Gmail in iPhone originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

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Here is a quote about the Labs add-ons from the top of the Gmail Labs page:

“Gmail Labs is a testing ground for experimental features that aren’t quite ready for primetime. They may change,break or disappear at any time.

If (when) a Labs feature breaks, and you’re having trouble loading your inbox, there’s an escape hatch. Use http://mail.google.com/mail/?labs=0.”

I apparently have nothing better to do with my time than add fancy features to my Gmail. I’ll go ahead and save you the time of figuring out which of the Gmail Labs add-ons you should head for and give you the top 10 to get you started.

1. Send and Archive

This add on is great if, for example, you send a group email. Even if you have the original message in a folder and labeled, replies will often show up in your inbox. Instead of clicking on the send button when you send a follow up reply, click the Send and Archive button. Doing this will remove the message thread from your inbox making it viewable in the labeled folder.

2. Mark as Read Button

You would think this is a feature that was built in from the start, but it wasn’t. Having this button will let you batch mark all of the selected emails as read. Big time saver if you don’t want to open them all individually.

3. Hide Unread Counts

I don’t use this one anymore because I worked out a good system for automating most of my incoming emails. This feature, however, is a good one for people who leave everything in their inbox, yet hate knowing how many unread messages you are ignoring.

4. Canned Responses

Think of canned responses like a vacation or out of office reply. You can have this pre-thought out reply sent to anyone with selected keyword, email address, in response to an ad you posted or in reply to the contact form on your site. When setting up your filter(s), one of the actions you can select is to send a canned response.

5. Mail Goggles

If you are have poor math skills when you are not tired or haven’t been drinking, this add-on should probably be avoided. Here is how Mail Goggles works. If you try to send an email during a user specified time period, say 10 PM to 4 AM, you will be asked to do a 3 simple math problems. This may seem simple enough. If you get the problems wrong, the email is saved to your Drafts folder instead.

When basic addition and subtraction seem like quantum physics, it may be a good indicator you need to catch a couple hours sleep. Odds are your seemingly well crafted email, is probably not quite ready to be sent.

6. Text Messaging (SMS) in Chat

Sending a quick SMS is a nice little addition to the mini chat gadget in your Gmail navigation bar. When you hover over the contact you wish to SMS, a pop up box appears. In the “More” drop down is an option to send an SMS. If the person signs into to Gtalk, you have an option to toggle to chat. This keeps the previous conversation in the same window.

The SMS feature is currently for USA phones only.

7. Navbar Drag and Drop

Drag all of the widgets in the left sidebar to the order that makes sense to you.

8. Undo Send

How many times have you wanted to unsend an email because you forgot to add a file. Maybe you said something you instantly regret saying. This little gem gives you the chance you to unsend the email for up to 10 seconds after you sent it. You CAN actually take your words back.

9. Offline

If you activate this add-on, Gmail will place an optional shortcut icon on your Desktop. Each time you open up Gmail while you have an active internet connection, Offline will sync your email to your computer. You will have access to the majority of the features you need like composing, reading, searching, moving things into folder, etc.  You obviously can’t send or receive new emails if you do not have a network connection. When you reconnect, all of your changes are synced and composed emails are sent.

10. Filter Import/Export

Exporting all of the filters you have worked hard to create is just plain smart. Imagine having to redo all of them over again, one by one. I have about 40 filters so this is a huge time saver if anything were to happen. After you export the XML file, you can email it to yourself for safe keeping.

For those of you who aren’t using any of the additional 50+ add-on features Gmail has to offer… shame on you! Don’t you know there are needy people using Hotmail that would love to have what you have?

How have you personalized your Gmail inbox?

Top 10 Gmail Labs Add-ons to Increase Your Productivity originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

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The main idea behind using aliases in Gmail is to help you automate organizing incoming emails. Most people I know have separate folders for different people or projects. When an email is received, it eventually gets manually moved to the folder in which it belongs. Some who use desktop programs like Mail or Outlook may have rules set up. Few people however, take the time for this with their web based email accounts. This is one of the reasons people spend so much time dealing with email everyday.

By simply giving your client, work, contest entry forms, social media site… an alias to your email address, you can have it automatically sent to a specific folder. This will save immense amounts of time sorting the messages in your inbox.

It is really quite simple to add an alias. All you need to do is add a [+] then your a word or abbreviation to your notmal email address. Here is an example. Let’s say your email address is john.doe@gmail.com. If you wanted to add “jm” for junk mail, your junk mail alias would look like this john.doe+jm@gmail.com

You may want to write down the additional words or abbreviations you use so you can use them more than once. Here are some examples of short additions. There really isn’t a character limit for the alias, but you don’t want to go overboard.

eb = ebay
sc = soccer team
jm = junk mail
bt = beta trial
ja = job applied for or job application

There’s really no limit as to what you can use for the alias. The sky is the limit.

Examples Uses

1. Job Hunting – This can be a super handy feature to use when seeking employment. You could have your john.doe+ja@gmail.com alias on your resume and applications you fill out. This way when you get a reply, it will be aggregated into your “job hunt” folder.

2. Selling Online – Give an alias link such as john.doe+cl@gmail.com for your contact information in an ad on Craigslist.

3. Sports Teams – If you are on or manage a sports team (yes, even a fantasy football team counts).

4. Collaborating on a Project - Have all of the emails for different projects go into different folders.

Setting Up a Filter

Setting up a filter is pretty important. If you don’t do this part, it makes using an alias pointless. For those of you who don’t know how to create a filter and label, here’s how.

1. Click the Settings tab in the top right of your Gmail inbox page.

2. Click on Filters

3. Click on Create a new filter

4. Type your email address with your alias in [To:] field

5.  Click Next step

6. Check the boxes for the actions you would like. In this case I chose the following options:

• Skip the Inbox (Archive it)
• Apply Label – Job Hunt (If you don’t have a label created, click “Create new label” and choose a name.)
• Never Send it to Spam

7. Click Create Filter

In the end, you should see something like this.

What are the ways you plan to use aliases?

Image credit – Adria Richards

Better Manage Your Gmail Inbox With Aliases originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

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Below, I will explain the layout of the site, then get deeper into a few of the main features. There are several other features to this service if you’d like to check them out for yourself here.

The Basics

The simplest explanation of how Google Voice works is this. Give out your new Google Voice telephone number to people. (Unfortunately, yes you need a new phone number.) When someone calls that number, it will ring all of your phones/ phone numbers. If you do not answer the call, it goes into a common voice mailbox.

The set up is really easy and only takes a few minutes to complete. You are asked to enter a zip code, then pick a new phone number, PIN for your voicemail. The next step is adding in your other phone numbers which you can be reached. Google displays a one time numeric code on the screen. You will receive an automated verification call where you are asked to type in the code. That’s all there is too it.

The layout of the homepage looks similar to a basic Gmail account.

At the top left of the page on the homepage, reside two tabs. One says Call, the other SMS (text message). If you click the Call tab, a window pops up with the option to dial a number and have the call sent to the phone you choose. If the SMS button is clicked, it offers to send a free text message right from your computer.

Farther down the left side are the options to click on the inbox, trash, history and Spam. Yup, that’s right, you have a Spam folder for your phone now. (More on that later.) You can also see the contacts, voicemail, SMS and other tabs down the left side.

SMS

The text messaging feature is pretty cool. Aside from letting you send messages via the home page, it also logs them. Inside your inbox, you can see both their text and your reply. This feature may be very useful for a person who sends a small to moderate amount of messages. On the other hand, if you text like most people under the age of 25, you may have a very full inbox when you sign in.

Call Screening

The screening option is something that should have been around a long time ago. When someone calls your Google Voice number, if they arent in your contact list, they will be asked to say their name. When you decide to take the call, you are presented with four options: take the call, send the call to voicemail, send the call to voicemail and listen to the message as it is recorded or record the call. If you don’t have a need to screen your calls, this feature can be turned off in the settings.

Contacts

Since everyone already uses multiple Google apps in every other part of your web experience, it makes sense that Google Voice would be in sync with your Gmail contact list. If you have them separated into groups for personal and business for example, you can set up a different voicemail message for each group. If they are not in a group or even in your contact list, you can have a generic message for these people.

Spam

Okay, in my opinion this one is the second best feature. (I’m saving my favorite for last.) Just like an email, if you choose to, you can select a person or phone number as Spam. From that point on, when they call they are sent right into voicemail.

Voicemail Transcription

That’s right, you did read that correctly… Google Voice will email and/or SMS you a written copy of what was said in the voicemail. If you are anything like me, you dread listening to your voicemail messages; people either leave way too much information, or not enough. In your email or Google Voice inbox, you are able to both read and hear the voicemail. SMS and voice messages can be archived and starred just like in in your Gmail inbox. This feature alone was enough for me to make the switch.

How do you feel about Google managing your telephone needs?

A Hands-on Review of Google Voice originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

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Nokia advertises it as an “Internet Tablet” rather than a PDA, so perhaps they expect you to rely on cloud services, such as Google Calendar.  Very well, we will, but we will do it with style.  mCalendar is a small application for the Maemo operating system that allows you to have an appointment calendar on your tablet and also sync it with your Google Calendar.  It is finger-friendly and easy to use.  It is available for Maemo/Tablet OS2007 and OS2008 and should work on Nokia 770, N800, N810, and N810 WiMax models.

Installation

The easiest way to install mCalendar is to go to maemo.org and click the big green “Install” button next to mCalendar.  This will add the extras software repository and also install the application.  If you prefer to add the software repository yourself, simply open your Application Manager, open the menu, click on Tools and click “Application catalog…”.  Click the “New” button and add this repository:

Catalog name = maemo Extras
Web address = http://repository.maemo.org/extras/
Components = free non-free

Setup

1. Start mCalendar.

2. Open the menu and click “Preferences”.

3. Click on the “Google Syncronization” tab.

4. Enter your Google login (usually your email address) and password.

5. Click on the “General” tab.

6. Optional: You can select “google popup reminder” to receive notices of appointments and “auto sync” if you want to keep mCalendar automatically in sync with your Google calendar.

Start Syncing

You should test synchronization to make sure it works.

1. Add an appointment to your calendar and save it.

2. Open the menu and click “Synchro”.

3. Open a browser and login to Google Calendar.

4. Check the appointment to make sure that it is the right day and time.

5. Edit the appointment and re-sync to make sure two-way communication is working.

Alternatives

While mCalendar is quick and easy, it is hardly robust.  If you prefer a calendar with a few more options, such as GPE Calendar, you can use a third party application called Erminig to sync it with your Google calendar.

Erminig is in the maemo extras repository and is configured in roughly the same way as mCalendar’s sync function.  One advantage is that you can sync with a specific calender from  your Google account and a specific GPE calendar, if you have more than one.  You can then setup multiple entries and sync all of them at once.  Furthermore, it has a “read-only” feature, if you prefer not to make changes on the tablet side.

Beyond the tablet

Once you have your tablet synced with your Google calendar, you might also want to sync with your desktop calendar.  I have not found an easy way to sync directly from the Nokia internet tablet to the desktop.  Instead, you can sync it with your Google calendar and then sync Google with your desktop, using GCALDaemon.

KDE4’s data backend, Akonadi, currently only supports read-only functionality with Google Calendar.  If that is all you need, you will not need GCALDaemon.  There are plans to add read-write functionality in KDE 4.3

Now you have the ability to wirelessly sync your calendars on the move.  This certainly does not come close to full PIM synchronization, but you will at least have your important appointments in order.

How to Sync your Nokia Internet Tablet with Google Calendar originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

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5. A Hands-on Review of Google Voice

Let’s say you open up Google and enter a query like “Princess Bride Cast”. You’d get results linking to several pages with info on who was in that cinematic masterpiece. It would probably look something like this:

Pretty good, right? You’ve got a list of pages that probably all have the info you’re looking for.

Wolfram, on the other hand, doesn’t give you the pages with the info, it gives you the info! That same query in Wolfram gives results like this:

This approach to search opens all kinds of possibilities. Want to know the population of Guam? How many mililiters in a gallon? The current time in Dublin? The radius of the sun in yards? Of course it can’t handle queries that simply don’t make sense (it couldn’t figure out quite what I meant by “Bugrit! Millenium hand and shrimp!”).

You can even lookup weather, stock values, and mathematical formulas, like this one:

Delivering information in this way is a flashback to those old sci-fi movies where a character walks up to a terminal and asks it something like “Computer, how long until we reach Alpha Centauri?”. The creators of Wolfram|Alpha have cited this as a direct inspiration behind the design of their system. Any why not? With the vast quantities of information available to us, why not make the computer sort and process that information to give us just what we need?

Firefox Addons

Now that you’ve got a good idea how and why to use Wolfram, let’s integrate it into Firefox for easy searches. First is a plain old search box entry that lets you use Wolfram from the search box in the top-right corner of your browser. The Wolfram|Alpha extension can be installed easily according to the instructions on the page, and it’s immediately ready to use.

A slightly different approach was taken by the other extension I tried. Wolfram|Alpha Google integrates Wolfram|Alpha results into existing Google results, giving you both options side by side, as shown below.

WARNING: Opinions ahead!

Many of the articles surrounding Wolfram|Alpha have portrayed it as a Google-killer. I think this is extremely inaccurate. For starters, the two have entirely different purposes. Sure, many of us use Google to find information, but we also use it to find pictures, files, news, articles, reviews, and of course web pages. All these things that Wolfram simply isn’t designed to handle. Calling it a Google killer is like saying the popularity in skateboards will kill the trucking industry. Sure, both can get you from A to B, but they’re two different things with different uses.

That being said, I’ve been extremely impressed by Wolfram|Alpha’s capabilities so far. It certainly does have the potential to pull some of the simpler queries away from Google, but as long as it remains a “computational knowledge engine”, we’ll still have the good old search engines.

How To Use Wolfram|Alpha Search and Firefox Extension originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

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Microblogging has because pretty popular recently with Twitter being the best known of these services. I personally haven’t signed up for Twitter specifically, however the basic concept has spread to other services. I’ve never been a big fan of personal blogging, but I’ve found over time that my GMail status messages tend to give a pretty good idea of what I’m up to. I also use the status message as an excuse to share some of my favorite quotes and links. A while back, I decided to try to record all of my status messages so that I could go back later and find an old link I posted, or see what day it was that I had made an announcement. I began looking online for a service that would automatically read my GMail status message and log it for future use.

I never found exactly what I was looking for, but I did find juick.com. Yes, it’s in Russian, but that actually doesn’t really cause a problem for what we’re going to be doing today.

Juick is a web service that takes XMPP messages and creates a microblog using those messages as entries in the blog. There’s no registration, no signup, no hassle. You simply send a XMPP message to “juick@juick.com” and it creates a blog based on the username you sent from and begins recording submissions.

1. Add “juick@juick.com” to your contact list in your Jabber client or GMail.
2. Prepare whatever message you want juick to record
3. Send your message

That’s it. Juick will respond immediately telling you the message has been posted, and will provide you with a web address to view your new entry. To view your blog as a whole, send juick a message with just the word “LOGIN” (all caps) and it will reply with a link to your blog.

Without any hassle, I can now record all my witty remarks and Beastie Boys quotes in one place. Ideally, I’d like something that would automatically read my status messages and update the blog on its own, but with juick there’s just one additional step of pasting my status message into a chat box.

Those who have Twitter accounts may want to take a look at tweet.IM. I haven’t tried it as I don’t have a Twitter account, but it looks to be about the same type of thing as what we’ve talked about today.

How to Microblog From Your Gmail/Jabber originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

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5. How To Access Gmail on your Desktop

1. GMDesk

GMDesk is a Adobe Air application which runs on your desktop. With GMDesk, you can access most of the Google services, including Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Picasa and Maps. A good thing about this software is that it is cross-platform compatible and you can access your Google services under your own domain name. The only issue you might face with GMDesk is that some of the fonts in Gmail are smaller than the original one and could be straining to your eyes.

Screen shots illustrating the use of GMDesk

Preferences and setting for GMDesk Application

GMDesk preferences and setting

Access to other Google services using GMDesk

Installing GMDesk

• If you have not installed Adobe Air on your system, download the installer and install it. Ubuntu users can follow this guide to install Adobe Air in Ubuntu Intrepid.
• Either go to the GMDesk home page and click on the GMDesk Flash Installer to install, or if you prefer a manual method, download the AIR application from Google code.

2. Google Gmail Desktop Gadget

Google Desktop is an application that enables the user to search the desktop like how you search in the browser. It also allows you to install little widget-like gadgets such as calendar, clock, games and weather information on your desktop. The Gmail gadget is one of the thing that you can install on your desktop for easy access to your Gmail account.

You don’t really get the full-fledged Gmail, but it will enable you to read your emails and star it without logging on in the browser. In the event that you need to write a new mail, there is a shortcut link to Compose that you can click to access your Gmail account (in browser) quickly and easily. Other shortcuts include Search and Signout.

The Gmail gadget is only available for Windows platform with Google Desktop 5 or above.

Installing Gmail Gadget

• Install Google Desktop
• Download the Gmail gadget and install it on your Google Desktop

How To Access Gmail on your Desktop originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

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