Help For Using Gmail in iOS

Apple doesn’t always play well with others, and when it comes to the mobile operating system iOS, it can be even worse. Their relationship, or lack thereof, with Adobe and their flash video is well documented. Another entity that doesn’t get along with the system is GMail. It works, but it’s hindered in some ways by using the Mail app.

The most noticeable way in which GMail doesn’t work well in the iOS system is with the Trash. There is no “Trash” visible in the mail app like there is with other email domains. Something as simple as deleting an email suddenly gets more complicated. The good news is there is help for this issue. There are a few different ways to go about deleting your email, and and there’s a way to set up your Gmail in iOS through Google Sync, if your Gmail is set up through Google Apps.

While the screencap I used here is for my email with the maketecheasier.com domain, it’s still based off of the Gmail system and works in all the same ways Gmail does. It’s set up through Google Apps. There isn’t the familiar “Trashcan” in the options on the top right, when viewing an individual email, and when you select one or more emails to edit, it only gives you options to Archive, Move, or Mark. Delete isn’t one of the options. It just seems frustrating to not have such a basic function available.

I actually had a similar problem with my email hosted on a separate domain. While I had a Delete option and a Trashcan, it would give me an error message afterward and would stay on the server. It had an easy fix. I went into the Settings app and selected “Mail, Contacts, Calendars,” then clicked on the email domain I wanted to change. After clicking on the Account name, then “Advanced” at the bottom of the resulting screen, I then clicked on “Deleted Mailbox” which allowed me to change the folder I wanted the deleted emails to go into. By default it was set on “Trash” on my iPad, but once I changed it to “Trash” on the server, it resulted in the emails being deleted correctly. However, making this change to the Gmail settings didn’t solve the issue there.

The easiest way to solve the Trash problem for Gmail is to to just move the desired files into the Trash folder. If you click on edit in the email list pane, check off the emails you want deleted, then hit “Move.” This brings up a list of the folders on the server, including the Trash folder. There is also a Google app for iOS. It includes all the Google apps within it, such as Calendar, Docs, Google+, and Gmail. Using the mail here emulates the way it works online, including being able to delete unwanted email. You can also keep multiple Gmail accounts “open” at once. There’s also always the option, of course, to just keep up with the Gmail via whatever browser you are using by signing into your account there.

If you’re using Gmail that is set up for you through an organization or business that uses Google Apps, the administrator can choose to have Google Sync enabled for the email. If this is done, when you set your Gmail account in settings, instead of setting it up as a Gmail account, set it up as Microsoft Exchange. This will not only Sync folders, such as Trash, but will also sync your Google Calendars.

I still use the iOS Mail app, but that’s only because I like to have all my mail in one spot, and my Gmail accounts are more my secondary accounts. It’s only a minor irritation to have to move my deleted emails to the Trash. Hence the reason I don’t bother to delete them often. What iOS needs is more options for using Mail on the system. While there are multiple different browsers other than Safari, there’s only one Mail app, with no third party apps available, and this is what causes users to have to come up with alternate solutions such as these.

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The Angry Birds rage still seems to be soaring high,Angry Bird land opens up in Finland

The Angry Birds rage still seems to be soaring high, with the game developed by Rovio slowly extending its little wings around merchandising deals, a planned movie and now an entire area at a theme park in Finland dedicated to the game. Located in at the Särkänniemi Amusement Park in Tamper in Southern Finland, this area was designed with help from a team from Rovio. Complete with rides on the backs of larger than life Angry Birds, merchandise shops, a fortified pig castle, a play area with soft toys and a bunch of touchscreens scattered around enabling visitors to play their favorite Angry Birds game, the park could very well inspire yet another one of its kind planned for England up ahead.
[More images after the jump]

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What You Need to Know About Google Drive

Have you been using a 3rd party application to sync the documents on your computer? If so, you can now sync your computer(s) with your Google Docs. That’s because Google Drive has finally arrived! That’s right, you can now use what was previously Google Docs as a Dropbox-like storage. Here’s a walk-through.

Starting out

Like most of the mass changes Google makes with their apps, they roll them out in batches. It took me a few days for my Google Docs to change over after I started to read about Google Drive. So if yours hasn’t made the switch yet, don’t worry, it’s on the way soon.
When you get the option to change your Google Docs to Google Drive, you should see a welcome screen, something like this asking you if you want to try Google Drive.There isn’t much you need to do online or on your Android to make the change, just click yes.

What changed

Once you have agreed to make the change, you will see some slight changes. The word Docs is now Drive and your Collections are now called, get ready for this…. folders. I was happy about that one.
Another change is Google added SlideRocket presentations. When you make a lot of presentations, the presentations Google Docs could make did leave a something to be desired. SlideRocket will pick up the slack in this department.

More than a name change

So far none of the changes I’ve talked about have been life altering. The part everyone has been waiting for is increased space and the desktop app. Let’s talk a little bit about that why these are so great.

The space increase

You now have 5GB of free storage space to store whatever you’d like. This is quite a bit more than what you had with Google Docs.

If you need more space, the rates are really reasonable. The 25GB upgrade is $2.49 a month. The cool part is, your Gmail inbox gets bumped from 10gb to 25gb also. If you need even more storage, there is a 100GB upgrade for $4.99 a month with the same bump to your Gmail account to 25GB.

Desktop sync

The desktop sync is the part you have been waiting for. You will need to initiate the download of the desktop app and log in with your Google credentials.

Once you are all logged in, you can choose the location of the folder or folders you want to keep in sync. If you use Box or Dropbox, the setup is really similar to those. Now when you place something in this folder, it is automatically synced with your Google Drive.

Google Drive for Android

Drive on your Android got a lot nicer. The layout of the document editing screen seems easier to use. Before the upgrade, editing a document was inconvenient because the interface made you select a line to edit almost like you would for a spreadsheet. Now editing is very similar to the web editing, just with less features.
You can now upload any kind of file right from your Android device. This means backing up music and pictures is an easy possibility. While there isn’t an automatic upload for your pictures like there is with Dropbox, most Android devices have the option to select several pictures at a time to upload or share.

Conclusion

I think with the large amount of Google Docs users that the change to Google Drive will bring on more users who are new to cloud storage. While the amount of free space could be more in comparison to some other services out there, the fee to increase the space is less than most. I for one am excited for Google Drive because now I don’t need to have an Internet connection all the time when I am typing something like this up. I can use something like Open Office and save it to the Google Drive sync folder. Trevor is a happy camper now.

Will you switch to Google Drive as your cloud storage?

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Google Launches Google Drive; Pricing, SDK, Ownership Of Content

Google has finally rolled out its long rumored cloud storage service, Google Drive, which allows users to store, create and sync different types of files across platforms. From the looks of it, this service is essentially an improved and rebranded version of its web-based office suite and data storage service Google Docs (which now redirects to Google Drive for users who have upgraded to Google Drive service).

The service is currently available at drive.google.com and offers native apps for Windows, Mac and Android with an iOS version expected in the near future. Further, the next version of Chrome OS will reportedly use Drive as its file system.  Google also noted that visually impaired users can also access Drive with the help of a screen reader.

Pricing: Google is offering new users, 5GB of storage for free with upgrades starting at 25GB for $2.49/month, 100GB for $4.99/month or even 1TB for $49.99/month. Interestingly, if a user upgrades to a paid account, his Gmail account also gets automatically upgraded to 25GB. On this occasion, Google also increased the free storage in Gmail from the existing 7.5 GB to 10 GB to all users.

Features: Quite similar to Dropbox, Google Drive allows users to create, sync and store files across different platforms. The service currently allows users to open more than 30 file types natively on a web browser including Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, and HD Video. Since Google Docs is built right into the service, Google Drive allows users to collaborate on documents, spreadsheets and presentations with others in real time and share files publicly. Expectedly, there is also integration to other Google services, for instance, users can attach photos from Google drive to posts in Google+ and in the future, they will be able to attach files from Google drive directly to emails in their Gmail account and possibly upload videos directly from Drive to YouTube.

Google Drive also offers Optical Character Recognition and Image recognition. That is, users can scan any document or a picture with text and Google Drive will convert them into text files to allow users to search through a specific text in that document or picture. In addition, Google Drive is also offering keyword search and allows users to filter files by various parameters like file type, owner and others.

Apart from this, Google Drive has desktop apps for Windows and Mac, which work very similar to how Dropbox works, integrated with the native file system. It creates a separate folder on the users’ desktop and syncs all the files from their Google drive to desktop and vice versa.Users can also drag and drop files from their desktop to this folder and later access it through drive.google.com or from other computers and mobile devices.

However, what’s worth noting is that the data in these files is not stored or replicated to one’s computer. Rather, what one sees is just shortcuts to the files on their Google drive, which opens in the respective Google app in the browser.

Google Drive SDK: Along with the Google Drive announcement, Google also released the Google Drive SDK enabling third party app developers to develop web apps for the Google Drive service. At launch, the service has 18 third party apps that has integrated with Drive and these apps will be distributed from the Chrome Web Store. Among the apps, currently available ones include photo editors Aviary and Pixlr, visual diagramming tool Lucidchart, mind maps tool Mindmeister, Online faxing service HelloFax, video editor WeVideo, online publishing service Lulu and AutoCAD WS among others.

Who Owns the Content in Google Drive? In January 2012, Google merged privacy policies of its various products and rolled out a new main privacy policy which covered the majority of their products. Google had stated that it may combine information the users have provided from one service with information from other services. With the launch of Google Drive yesterday, media outlets pointed out that Google owns the content uploaded Google Drive. The crux of the problem was a paragraph in Google’s terms and conditions which states:

When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide licence to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes that we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content.
The rights that you grant in this licence are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting and improving our Services, and to develop new ones. This licence continues even if you stop using our Services (for example, for a business listing that you have added to Google Maps.

However, there seems to be an another side which dismissed this problem as ‘Scaremongering’. As pointed out by The Next Web, Google Drive allows one to access files from any device as long as there is an Internet connection, so if the user doesn’t provide the permission to host, store, reproduce content to Google, it would be impossible for them to provide such a service. As far as publicly performing, displaying and distributing content is concerned, while it is quite unclear on the exact definition what ‘public’ is, it could quite possibly mean public places like Internet cafes (Correct us if we are wrong).

Would you use it? Google Drive is actually a late entrant to the cloud storage segment and it will compete against Dropbox which claims to have more than 50 million users, Box which claims to have 10 million users, Microsoft’s SkyDrive which recently launched native apps for Windows, Mac and rolled out paid storage plans and several other cloud storage providers. Therefore its quite difficult to say if the service will get a sizable traction to cause a dent to the existing cloud services. However, this service could prove to be greatly beneficial to users who use Google services heavily in their day-to-day life.

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How To Add Google Instant Pages To Your WordPress Site

How Do Instant Pages Work?

Instant Pages builds upon the functionality of Google Instant shaving between 2 to 5 seconds off a search query by using an algorithm of about 200 factors combined with the Google search history to determine which link a user is most likely to click on. It begins contacting the server to load that page in the background as soon as the search results appear. Check out this quick video to give you a better idea just how much faster Instant Pages are!
 

Google has made this technology works for developers as well as searchers. By following the Guide To Prerendering In Chrome, publishers are able to choose which pages on their site they want to prerender when users are already on the page. However, it is important that you limit the number of prerendered pages because it could result in increased bandwidth usage, slow loading of other links and stale content.

 Before You Start

Although the process of implementing Instant Pages is easy, it’s VERY important to make sure you know where to properly place the code. Take it from me, if you aren’t familiar with PHP code placement, you may want to read about the most common mistakes beginners make when trying to copy and paste snippets into their site. If you put it in the wrong place, you WILL break your site. Always do a backup of your site before making any changes and if you’ve made modifications to your theme, it’s best to make changes and test using a child theme.

Adding The Code

You will need to add a few lines of code to your theme’s PHP settings. Go to your File Manager and open the header.php file under your theme by clicking the Edit button.

The page of code that is set by default will open displaying the current PHP code settings. Here’s where you’ll add the Instant Pages code to make it compatible with your site and where you need to be most careful! Before the closing </head> tag, include the following code:

<?php if(is_archive()) { ?>
<!-- Instant Pages codes for Google Chrome --> 
<link rel="prerender" href="<?php echo get_next_posts_page_link(); ?>" />
<?php } ?>

It should look like this when placed in the code file:

Save your changes and test them out on your site. Here you can see the Bombax theme will start to suggest article topics as you start entering letters into the search box. This doesn’t just give a suggested article; it’s also queued to open very quickly if selected.

In conclusion, adding Google Instant Pages as a background tool to your site will keep visitors engaged on your site. With suggested articles and fast page loading, your site will become more user friendly and encourage many return visitors, producing a low bounce rate. Test it out and see for yourself if your bounce rate improves and come back to let us know!

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Delhi Court Drops Google India, 7 Others From Lawsuit; Google Inc Remains

Google India has been dropped from the web censorship case along with seven other companies including Exbii, IMC India, My Lot, Shyni Blog, Topix, Zombie Time and Boardreader, by the Delhi Court, reports The Economic Times. The report states that Google India’s name was dropped following the company’s plea that it is just a subsidiary of Google Inc and does not operate a social networking website in the country, which was agreed upon by the Delhi Court.
A similar IBNLive report also suggests that Delhi Court has dropped Youtube, Blogspot and Orkut, which were represented under Google India MD Rajan Anandan noting them as ‘non-entities’, while the same companies represented through Google Inc CEO Larry Page will continue to remain in the case.
In December 2011, Delhi-based journalist and editor of an Urdu weekly Akbari, Vinay Rai had filed a lawsuit against 21 companies including Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, “Exboii” (sic), Shyni Blog, Topix, and others, complaining that these companies hosted objectionable and inflammatory content. A week later, Judge Sudesh Kumar had issued a summons order noting that there is enough prima facie evidence to proceed with trial against the intermediaries named and their senior officials. He had noted that instead of regulating the undesirable and offensive content, these companies had promoted the same for increasing their profits and promoting their business.
Last month, Delhi court had dropped cases against Microsoft India after Microsoft’s counsel had stated to the court that the company dealt only with computer software and there was no defamatory material posted on its web sites since it was not a social networking platform. Later, Delhi High Court had also dropped the cases against Yahoo India.
And with today’s announcement, only six companies of the 21 initial accused remain including Facebook (US and India), Google Inc, Orkut, YouTube and Blogspot (through Google Inc CEO Larry Page) on whom the court case will continue.
Our Take (Nikhil adds)
Google India has argued in the past that it is merely a sales company and does not own and operate YouTube, Blogger and other Google Inc sites. While this may work from a legal perspective, and in this case, it appears to have worked since Google India has been dropped from the lawsuit, the logical conclusion is that Google Inc then should either be in court defending its business in India, and be compliant with Indian law, or it should not be allowed to operate in the country.

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