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

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.

Full Announcement The Code

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

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.

more

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.

via

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.

via

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…

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.

1. Highlight ‘[Gmail] Sent Mail’ in the sidebar and select ‘Mailbox’ (menu bar) > ‘Use This Mailbox For’ > ‘Sent’.
2. Highlight ‘[Gmail] Drafts’ in the sidebar and select ‘Mailbox’ (menu bar) > ‘Use This Mailbox For’ > ‘Drafts’
3. Highlight ‘[Gmail] Trash’ in the sidebar and select ‘Mailbox’ (menu bar) > ‘Use This Mailbox For’ > ‘Trash’
4. 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.

Google Maps for Mobiles