No Gmail in Germany

I already knew that Google couldn’t use the Gmail brand in Germany:

The only problem is that I’m at our Paris school right now, nowhere near Germany.

From a user experience point of view, though, the message is even more disturbing in another way. It says that I have to visit http://mail.google.com, but that’s what my address bar is showing!

I know what’s going on, but most people won’t. I guess that’s why regular users have a little trouble adopting Gmail (in my experience anyway), the service is still very tech-savvy oriented.

Tasks and Text Messaging Come to Gmail

Anina from 360°Fashion seemed to go a bit off-topic this week at Le Web when she asked one of the Google executives when we could expect to see task or “to do” lists in Gmail. Well, by what I can only hope is coincidence, it would seem that she wasn’t that off-topic after all. Today Gmail Labs is launching task lists and text messaging within Gmail.

With a keyboard shortcut to create tasks from mail (Ctrl+T) this is exactly what I needed. Text messaging is a little less useful in my case because they’re unlimited in my plan and you can only send SMS to US numbers, but I guess there’s plenty of people excited about this too ;)

Go to the Labs tab to activate these if you want to take full advantage of your Gmail account.

Time and Attention with Merlin Mann

In case you’ve never heard of Merlin Mann before, he is a well-known author who frequently writes about productivity issues. He’s website, 43folders.com, is all about finding the time and attention to do your best creative work.

Merlin was at Google in March to talk about time and attention, here’s the video:

I like that he mentions that the rules, routines and techniques of some may not be good for others, but they are still necessary. We really need to work on that where I work…

How to think about the tools that we use is something very important too. I know that we really suck at adopting tools over here. We should start thinking about how to integrate new tools into our work habits, such as Twitter or Facebook-like applications. There’s so much potential, but we still need to learn to tap it.

I will not summarize the video, because it’s only 35 minutes long and it can be easily listed to while doing other stuff, so there’s no excuse ;)

Opening twhirl Links in Google Chrome

In spite of its bugs, I’ve been using Google Chrome as my main browser for a while now; mainly because it is generally fast and because it allows me to kill Flash whenever it bugs (often) without having to kill the whole browser.

I also use Windows Vista because I like it and it doesn’t feel slower than XP even on my computer.

Finally, I use twhirl to follow my Twitter friends. It’s far from perfect, because I’d like to have a single client that allows me to follow not only Twitter but all the social networks in which I might have an account, but twhirl does a good job in the meanwhile.

One thing that’s bothered me from the beginning though—and I don’t know if this is a Windows (Vista?), twhirl or Chrome bug—is that whenever I click on a link on twhirl, it will open in Internet Explorer instead of Chrome, which is set up as my default browser. I tried different settings, but I didn’t find a solution until today, so I’m sharing it here because I’m sure others might be having the same problem.

(Warning: this solution involves modifying the Windows registry, which if done incorrectly might prevent your machine from working properly. Following my instructions carefully should be safe, but use at your own risk.)

1. Open the Registry Editor by typing regedit in the Windows Start Menu.
   
   You may see a confirmation window if UAC is enabled on your computer.
2. Verify that the key HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\ChromeHTML exists.
    
   If this key doesn’t exist, you can stop reading here.
3. Look for the key HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.htm and change the (default) value to ChromeHTML. Repeat for HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.html.
   

That should do it!

Alternatively, you can also import this file into your registry: correct_chrome.reg

Gmail integrates with Calendar, finally

I’ve been using Gmail more and more lately for everything personal, but I was still missing the “Oulook experience” from work when it came to having, at a  glace, my mail and my future appointments.

Thanks to Google Labs’s new Google Calendar gadget this is now possible, as you can see on the screenshot on the left. You can also see that you get whatever calendars are active on your Google Calendar account, and they are color-coded, too.

Sure, my Gmail is getting a little crowded now, but keyboard navigation still works great and the “Right-side *” Labs features makes things readable (except for a couple of poorly formatted HTML newsletters), so I’m still happy.

Google Chrome's killing who?

At Google people don't make mistakes, they're just overeager to launch a new product. At least that's kind of what they imply at the Official Google Blog when they announce A fresh take on the browser.

This fresh take on the browser is nothing more than an open source project, called Google Chrome, that the Mountain View company will be making available for download sometime today (probably in the morning Pacific time). It hasn't even launched and it was announced with a comic book, but still, it has already been touted "Windows Killer" by some.

Open source browsers are not precisely something new. Changes in the interface are something we're starting to get used to even though it might hurt a little at the beginning. Sure, there are a few technical changes from what we're used to that might make Chrome feel different from other browsers and Google does have an advantage over others in the field since they don't have to fear antitrust suits with every line of code. But how is this supposed to kill the OS?

It's supposed to run JavaScript like a charm, OK. But will it run Flash? Will it run Silverlight (or Moonlight for that matter)? (Believe me, this will be important in the near future.) Oh, and it needs Windows (and only Windows for the moment) to run on. And how's it supposed to run the large number of applications that are open my computer right now? On JavaScript? Please! So really fail to see who's getting killed here...

Anyway, here's a screen shot of some Google results this morning:

Curiously enough, none of the links points to a real page. Funny how when your site does it, the search engine doesn't really place it in first position.

All this said, I will be testing Chrome by the end of the day as objectively as humanly possible. I'll let you know how it goes.

Search different...

...with tafiti!

Tafiti, from Swahili "do research," is a new Silverlight application by Microsoft that approaches searching the Web in a rather original way.

Of course, egomania dictates that I must demo by tafiti-ing (?) my name, so here's the video (captured with CamStudio):

As you can see, you get to preview, filter and save results in categories such as Web, Blogs and Images.

There's also the tree view, which presents results in a, albeit, useless, but interesting way.

To test tafiti by yourselves all you need is a couple of things:

1. A browser. It can be any of Internet Explorer, Firefox or Safari on Windows or Mac.
2. Silverlight. Which you can get from silverlight.net, or better yet, just follow directions when you visit tafiti.com for the first time.

My only regret is that tafiti obviously uses search results from Microsoft Live Search, and I've already commented on what I think about those. As a matter of fact, look at search results from Google and tafiti, respectively, for the keyword "tafiti":

Sure, one of them looks nicer than the other, but who do you think I'll visit more often to get up-to-date results?

Why is Google better than Live Search?

One word: relevance.

I was looking for information on WPF/e (now Silverlight) today and, without thinking twice, I went to Google to find it. However, after seeing how good the results were for this Microsoft technology, I thought I go take a look at the Redmond-giant’s own search engine and see how it performed.

Disappointing, to say the least.

Take a look at the results (I’m shrinking them to put them side by side, but you can click to see them better):

Before going into relevance, let’s talk design.

When I use a search engine, you will probably agree with me, I couldn’t care less about the search engine itself, what I want is to find resources related to my keywords.

I’ll admit that my screen resolution of 1024×768 is not targeted by Live Search, even though about 70% of users still have resolution equal to that or less (you can google* look it up on Google if you don’t believe me) but still, Google displays 5 complete top-level results while Live Search only gives me three. I don’t want to have to scroll, I want my result to be in the top five and have the top five in front of me when I execute my search.

Now let’s talk about relevance.

These are Google’s top 3 results:

Notice how result number one is a link to Microsoft’s official website for WPF/e. Even better, notice how Google’s index is so up-to-date that the title is now MSDN Silverlight Dev Center, a name which was only release one or two days ago.

Now take a look at Live Search’s top 3 results:

Do I even need to comment? I guess if Microsoft wants to offer search services and sell their products, they should by search results from Google :)

* Google would like to avoid having its name become an everyday verb.

Interesting Google search results

Have fun:

Google me connaît !

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