Tech Stuff

The Gmail team has rolled out version 2.0 of their mobile client for J2ME-supported and BlackBerry phones.

Gmail has rolled out new emoticons to choose from when words just can describe what you are feeling.

Gmail announces a new Lab feature for Advanced IMAP Controls.  These new options will allow you to better control your IMAP experience down to the label level.

Do you have a tendancy of sending emails late at night that you really shouldn’t?  Maybe after a long night out drinking?  Well the Gmail team has just rolled out Mail Goggles which may come to the rescue.  Once activate Gmail will prompt you with a couple simple math problems before an email can be sent.  By default this safeguard is only in place late at night on the weekends when we all know we are most vulnerable to this. However, you can adjust the time frame to meet you needs.  Now if there was only something for that cell phone.  Maybe the new Android OS will have this option.

If you were not aware of it today is Talk Like a Pirate Day.  To help ensure that Pirates can search for the content they are looking for online Google has added support for the pirate langauage to their search engine.

This week Gmail made availible in the Labs one of the more helpful options, the Forgotten attachment detector. Atleast twice a month I seem to forgot to attach a file and it always seems to be one of those more important emails.  Hopefully this will help.

Google released a comic book to help explain Chrome.

Google recently announced the launch of their new browser.  I downloaded it as soon as it was availible.  I have been very impressed with it.  I figure if I am running GMail, Reader, and Analytics in a browser I might as well do it in a browser designed by Google.  Good to see some more innovations in the browser space.  The JavaScript engine that it is using (V8) was designed for speed.  I don’t know if it is the fastest out there as I have seen some speed tests where it did beat Firefox, but in some others it did not.  With more and more sites using JavaScript and Ajax to improve the user experience and make online applications more like desktop ones hopefully Google as a player will help push along the development of JavaScript Engines. In term allowing even more interactive sites.

Google adds a new setting to Gmail to allow the user to specify that all their activity should be done over a SSL connection.  You could change the URL before manually from http to https, but now you can have it done automatically.  This allows you to encrypt the data the transfers between your computer and the Gmail server just like you do when working on your bank’s website.

One of the things I have found annoying with GMail is that it would automatically create contacts based on my email activity.  I have ended up with a full contact manager that has some people in there many times.  Well the GMail team announced today that you can now turn off the auto create function in your address book.  Now I can go back and clean up my contacts.