When Brian wrote about the new Gmail Compose back in November, it was an optional interface. At the end of March, it became the new default compose behavior for Gmail users.
The new interface is deliberately minimal, according to Jason Cornwell, a lead designer at Google. By making the window smaller and hiding the text formatting options that used to make your email compose screen resemble word processing software, Cornwell suggests that the new interface will “give you permission to write shorter messages.” (To access the text formatting options in the new interface, click on the underlined capital A next to the Send button.)
Many productivity experts like Leo Baubauta of Zen Habits and the crew at five.sentenc.es have been arguing that overly long emails larded with quoted replies deter good communication and often languish unread.
If you’re like me, you probably have more than a couple of tabs open on your browser of choice. If you’re a lot like me, then you actually have three different browser windows open with the number of tabs in each window ranging from five to thirty-seven. There are a lot of reasons to have all those tabs open, we tell ourselves: it’s for a blog post; it’s for my research; it’s something that won’t save well in Pocket or Instapaper. And all of those things may be true. But what is also true is that all of these tabs take a toll on your computer’s performance.
What you real need is the ability to get all of these tabs summarized into one handy place. A way to keep them as a list without having to copy and paste URLs, so you can get back to what you want to read when you have the time. What you need, it turns out, is OneTab. OneTab is a free, simple extension for the Chrome browser. The…
Not long ago, Google did some spring housecleaning. Among other things, they announced the the demise of Google Reader, effective on July 1 of this year.
To say that this caused quite a stir would be an understatement; my Twitter stream more or less exploded in response to the news. Reader itself has received more than a few mentions in this space, and many of the applications we use depend on it.
One of those is Zite, which Erin reviewed a little over a year ago. I personally rely heavily on Zite for my regular reading, so I was glad to see its creators move very quickly in response to Google’s announcement. The very next day, they released a re-working of the way their service interacts with Google, which they’d managed to put together in just six hours.
There are some limitations, which they note in their announcement (there’s no automatic syncing of feeds, for instance), but…
It seems a lot of us here at ProfHacker find timelines useful for teaching purposes. Ethan’s covered BeeDocs Timeline, Konrad’s had a look at TimelineSetter, and Billie’s introduced readers to a variety of timeline tools for PC users. Brian’s written an entire tutorial on building a timeline using SIMILE. I’ve even covered timelines myself, taking a look at Dipity a couple of years ago. (And I’m happy to report that Dipity can now handle BCE dates.)
Recently, I’ve had reason to be looking for a timeline tool again, for use in a group project for class. My teammates and I settled on a new (to us, at least) tool that we learned about after searching around for a bit: Timeline JS.
Clicking the “Examples” tab on their site and perusing the timelines listed there provides a good overview of what the timelines look like. Timelines can handle a variety of content types:…
Now, you might think that there’s not a lot that you need to know about searching with Google. It more or less does what you want it to: find what you’re looking for on the Internet. But then again, I’m betting that ProfHacker readers know a thing or two more about searching than the…
This month Google’s Niantic Labs quietly released a location-based game called Ingress that plays with data on multiple levels. The game, currently in invite-only beta, invites players to join either the Enlightenment or the Resistance and move through the physical world hunting “Exotic Matter”, and coincidentally generating data and pictures for Google on the way. These XM hotspots often center on places of actual historical or cultural significance, encouraging players to venture out into these locations.
Ingress opens with the warning: “Saving the world is dangerous. If you do not want to assume this risk, now is the chance to close this app and go back to your normal life.”
The next generation of augmented reality might look like something out of a science fiction movie, complete with head-mounted displays or constant data overlays transforming what we know at any given time. But…
Nearly two years ago, I wrote about Google’s App Inventor. Unfortunately, Google discontinued it in December of last year (though, happily, MIT now maintains it).
Recently, Google releasedBlockly, another visual programming editor. I found it pretty interesting, and it wasn’t too difficult to figure out how to use the tool itself. (Figuring out actual programming is another matter entirely, which is why I’m sure the program visually represented in this post’s lead image will look just awful to anyone who actually knows what she or he is doing with code. All I can say is, it works.)
The most difficult part for me turned out to be figuring out how to actually run Blockly. Fortunately, YouTube user Dennis Daniels (a.k.a. “pleabargain“) was able to help me out:
He was using Linux and I was using a Mac, but he was able to give me enough to go on. All I did was copy the line…
It’s no secret that many of us here at ProfHacker are fans of (and regular users of) cloud storage. We’ve written quite a bit about services such as Dropbox, Box.net, and Google Drive. Each of these services offers a reasonable amount of storage for free, with additional storage available for purchase.
Though some who have substantial storage needs choose to stick with one service and pay for additional storage, others have found that they can acquire sufficient storage space by splitting their files across services. It’s not a bad strategy, but it does have one downside: How on earth do you remember which files you’ve stored where?
Enter Otixo, a service I recently learned about thanks to a post at LifeHacker. Otixo lets you log into multiple cloud services from the same place, allowing you to view and manage all your files in one dashboard (including moving files from one service…
When Google first made its entry into the mobile market with the launch of Android, they also set about to create a new tool to allow would-be app developers to quickly migrate to the new ecosystem and get their projects working on Android phones. The resulting project was Google App Inventor, a graphical user interface for building mobile apps using drag and drop elements and building block code. Amy wrote about the Google App Inventor beta back in 2010, before the project was shut down and set free as an open source project but without the support of Google’s servers. Thankfully for those of us who were already excited by the idea of a simple tool for rapid mobile prototyping, App Inventor has re-emerged.
MIT recently resurrected App Inventor and expanded it with particular attention to educational use, and the new hub for the tool includes the beginnings of a section of resources a…
On Tuesday, this little company called “Google” announced its newest service: Google Drive. While you might think that this means we’re all getting self-driving cars, it turns out that Google Drive is a syncing service, designed to keep all of your files synced between the different computers, tablets, phones, and other devices in your life. As so often is the case with Google, they’ve got a really nice video explaining the service: (more…)
is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Associate Director of MATRIX: The Center for the Humane Arts, Letters, and Social Sciences at Michigan State University.
Budget restrictions are an ever-present threat to innovation on college campuses. Learn how top technology companies are working with institutions to advance online learning as programs continue to expand on campuses across the country. This special sponsored section features resources available to help develop a successful online education program at your institution.
Not long ago, Google did some spring housecleaning. Among other things, they announced the 
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Budget restrictions are an ever-present threat to innovation on college campuses. Learn how top technology companies are working with institutions to advance online learning as programs continue to expand on campuses across the country. This special sponsored section features resources available to help develop a successful online education program at your institution.
