the life and times of a code monkey
This is one feature that I’ve been wanting for ages!
Hello, you’ve reached Chad’s mailbox. Thanks for your email about the latest Labs feature: Canned Responses, or email for the truly lazy. I’m on paternity leave so I won’t be able to respond personally. Instead, I hope you’ll enjoy this automated message.
via CNET - Announcement
Yesterday was a big day for advanced mobile phones - Android went fully open source.
I really like the iPhone (it will be my next phone) - it’s the most complete device out there, but I would love to see a truly open platform like Android have a great handset underneath it and really take off - it’s the only thing I can see that stands a chance of really taking on the iPhone. (Future unreleased editions of Windows mobile etc. don’t count - we’re looking at the here and now, these platforms won’t stand still while others try to catch up…)
Today is a big day for Android, the Open Handset Alliance, and the open-source community. All of the work that we’ve poured into the mobile platform is now officially available, for free, as the Android Open Source Project.
You’ll be hearing a lot about Android devices. We’ve all put a lot of effort into the first Android device, and I’m really happy with the way it turned out. But one device is just the beginning.
Android is not a single piece of hardware; it’s a complete, end-to-end software platform that can be adapted to work on any number of hardware configurations. Everything is there, from the bootloader all the way up to the applications. And with an Android device already on the market, it has proven that it has what it takes to truly compete in the mobile arena.
This is a worthwhile install if you’re a Wordpress user (or any other gears enabled system) on the mac - great to see some Safari lovin’. 
We’re really excited to announce the official release of Gears for Safari on OS X (minimum requirements are Leopard 10.5.3 or Tiger 10.4.11).
You can download it today from http://gears.google.com.
This means that you can now access all the Gears-enabled sites (such as Zoho office, WordPress, the new YouTube uploader and Google Docs offline) in Safari.
via Google Mac Blog
I’m already a lover of Spanning Sync, version 2 promises to have contact syncing between all your Google apps with the Mac address book. This could be very very good. Check the link for a video of it in action.
People know Spanning Sync for its ability to sync Apple iCal with Google Calendar. In fact, more than 70,000 people have used Spanning Sync to do just that. But calendars are only one part of the equation.
Our users tell us that they also need to be able to sync their Mac Address Book with their contacts in Gmail and Google Apps. So Spanning Sync 2.0 does both—calendars and contacts.
The chaps over at Google have come up with a neat webservice - an easy way to get charts onto your webpages, the Google Chart API.
Google has finally released Google Charts API, which returns a PNG-format image in response to a URL. Several types of image can be generated: line, bar, and pie charts for example. For each image type you can specify attributes such as size, colors, and labels.
You can include a Chart API image in a webpage by embedding a URL within an
<img>tag. When the webpage is displayed in a browser the Chart API renders the image within the page.
Sounds like a good new feature…
Google is set on Wednesday to launch a new feature in its Google Maps for Mobile program that automatically sets your location even in phones that lack a global positioning system (GPS) device.
Until now, if you were in a cafe and you wanted to search for a nearby photocopy shop, you had to type in an address to set your location before Google Maps for Mobile could provide local listings.
The beta feature triangulates your approximate location based on nearby cell towers so you don’t have to type in your address. Given that less than 15 percent of mobile phones are GPS-enabled, this feature will be helpful to many people.
At the moment I’m a very happy user of Google calendar and Spanning Sync for all my scheduling needs. But the geek in me fancies playing about with things so I’m thinking about setting up a CalDav server (when time permits) so Cat and I can organise our lives accordingly.
Here’s some pages I’ve been reading whilst doing my research.
Will possibly post more as and when I get a chance to play about with things…
I’ve just managed to get my Gmail service upgraded to the new version with IMAP support,1 and as such i’ve been trawling the net for information on how to get this all set-up nicely. By this I mean moving my mail filtering rules onto Gmail itself and getting IMAP to play a bit more nicely with Apple Mail…
Here’s how to get Apple Mail to work as expected, thanks to 5ThirtyOne:
Similar steps must be taken to ensure that any emails sent, saved as drafts, or deleted are properly identified by Gmail’s servers. After completing the IMAP setup steps for Apple Mail, instructing Mail is a few simple clicks away. Once your Gmail IMAP account is added to Mail, you’ll notice your [Gmail account] in the left sidebar.
- Highlight ‘[Gmail] Sent Mail’ in the sidebar and select ‘Mailbox’ (menu bar) > ‘Use This Mailbox For’ > ‘Sent’.
- Highlight ‘[Gmail] Drafts’ in the sidebar and select ‘Mailbox’ (menu bar) > ‘Use This Mailbox For’ > ‘Drafts’
- Highlight ‘[Gmail] Trash’ in the sidebar and select ‘Mailbox’ (menu bar) > ‘Use This Mailbox For’ > ‘Trash’
- Highlight ‘[Gmail] Spam’ in the sidebar and select ‘Mailbox’ (menu bar) > ‘Use This Mailbox For’ > ‘Junk’
Once properly configured, managing email from Apple Mail or the iPhone will be no different from managing emails within the Gmail web client - sent, drafts, trash, and junk properly sorted between your various email clients and web interface.
Read the full article for even more information (including iPhone set-up).
And the best hints for setting up slightly more complex filters in Gmail came from Lifehacker:
I needed to set up a filter that would apply label ‘work’ to any email that came from ‘xyz@workplace.com’ OR had the word ‘workoholic’ in it. Unfortunately, Gmail’s inbuilt ‘Create a filter’ feature’s dialog boxes are connected with an AND operator. Example: if I wrote ’ xyz@workplace.com’ in the ‘from:’ field of the ‘Create a filter’ page, and ‘workoholic’ in the ‘Has the words:’ field, then only emails that came from ‘xyz@workplace’ AND had the word ‘workoholic’ would be picked up by this filter. So, to get the desired result, I needed TWO filters. Unless…
[…]
Incorporate both the conditions in the ‘Has the words:’ field itself! So my ‘Has the words’ field reads as: (from:(xyz@workplace.com) OR (workoholic)). Voila! c’est fini! But the possibilities are endless!
Read the full article for more information.
If you’re a user in the UK like me and are still waiting for your Gmail service to upgrade, simply navigate into your Gmail settings and change your language settings from ‘English (UK)’ to ‘English (US)’. This should make your Gmail switch to version 2 instantly! :) ↩
I really thought that Android was going to be a complete turkey, but after watching some of the videos up on YouTube it does look like it could be quite promising. If someone releases some decent hardware at a reasonable price the iPhone could have some competition…