26 January 2017

Google Image Search Shows Colorful Suggestions


Google Image Search has a different way to display suggestions: it now shows a long list of colorful boxes with related searches. You can click one or more boxes to dynamically refine search results.


For example, when searching for [sportswear], Google shows suggestions like: [women basketball], [tennis], [badminton], [golf], [volleyball], [nike woman], [alexander wang], [adidas], [fashion], [performance], [vintage], [trendy], [urban], [school], [gym], [90's], [70's], [vogue], [luxe], [avant garde], [korean], [italian], [french] and more. It's interesting to notice that each category of suggestions has a different color.




Here's the old interface:


16 January 2017

Google Image Search Starts Playing YouTube Videos


Google Image Search's mobile interface tests a new feature that starts playing snippets from a YouTube video at the top of the search results page. It's not disclosed as an ad, there's no sound and you can't stop or hide the video, which continues to play on repeat.



Right now, the experiment seems to be limited to fashion-related queries like [men jackets], [lookbook], [winter outfit], which match videos from YouTube channels like New Look and River Island. "New Look is a South African-owned British global fashion retailer with a chain of high street shops. (...) The chain sells womenswear, menswear, and clothing for teens," according to Wikipedia.

Google only shows labels like: "New Look on YouTube", even though this looks like an experimental ad format. I hope it will never become a regular feature, as it's pretty annoying and it wastes Internet bandwidth.

13 January 2017

YouTube Desktop Notifications, Now For Everyone


It looks like YouTube's notification experiment is now a regular feature and you can no longer disable it by clearing cookies. When sign in to your Google account, YouTube's desktop site no longer shows Google+ notifications in the navigation bar: it replaces them with YouTube notifications.

"Your notifications live here. Subscribe to your favorite channels to get notified about their latest videos," informs the new notification box.



09 January 2017

How to Make Phone Numbers Callable in Google Sheets


If you click an email link on a webpage, it opens your default mail program. Similarly, you can make phone numbers on your website “callable” meaning when someone clicks the phone number, it will launch the dialer on their mobile phone and initiate dialing of the specified phone number. It is recommended that you make phone numbers clickable as more and more people would be accessing your site on their mobile devices.

How to Insert Clickable Phone Numbers in Web Pages

We use the simple tel protocol to convert a plain text phone number on a web page into a clickable telephone link.

html-telephone-links.png

For instance, if you click this link on a mobile phone, it will open the phone dialer prefilled with the specified number. There’s no need to copy-paste numbers.

How to Type Phone Numbers in a Google Sheet

It is a bit tricky to type phone numbers inside Google Spreadsheets. Here’s why:

Phone numbers are mostly made of digits preceded by the plus (+) symbol. The problem is as soon as add the plus sign in the spreadsheet cell, it assumes that you entering a math formula and tries to calculate the value.

phone-number-formatting.png

There are two simple workarounds to this problem. You can enclose the phone number inside double quotes (“) and precede it with an equal to (=) sign.

An even easier alternative is to use the single quote (‘) before the phone number. Google Sheets will then interpret the cell’s value as text and the phone number formatting will be preserved.

How to Make Phone Numbers Clickable in Google Sheets

Coming to the main problem, how do you make phone numbers inside a Google Sheet clickable. The obvious answer would be to use the =HYPERLINK() method with the tel protocol but, unfortunately, Google Sheets do not support it.

So a formula like =HYPERLINK(“tel:12345”, “Call Me”) would not work since sheets will only allow regular http and mailto hyperlinks. There’s a simple workaround though.

google-sheet-phone-links.png

You can create a regular hyperlink in the cell pointing to a website which in turn redirects to the actual telephone link. To see this in action, add https://ctrlq.org/call/ before any phone number in the Google Sheet and it will turn into a clickable telephone link.

Say you have the phone number in cell A1. Add this simple formula in any other cell and it will create a telephone link just like on a regular webpage.

=HYPERLINK(“http://ift.tt/2juJx9s; “Call our support team”)

To get a better idea, open this Phone Number Google Sheet inside the Sheets app of your Android or iPhone and try clicking any of the phone links.

Also see: Add Images in Google Spreadsheets


03 January 2017

Know What Facebook Can See Inside Your Photographs


When you upload any photograph to your Facebook account, they look at the actual content of the photograph and try to determine what objects and scenes are inside the image. You may not have added any description, yet Facebook can determine what that picture is all about.

Whether you are having a pizza, enjoying the sun on a beach, playing with your dog or spending an evening with friends, Facebook can accurately figure it out from the photo itself. They internally use these machine generated captions to make your pictures more accessible to blind users.

Facebook Computer Vision Tags

If you are curious to know what information Facebook visual recognition algorithms have found in your own pictures, here’s an easy way to view that data.

  1. Open any photograph on the Facebook website and click the thumbnail to view the enlarged version of the image.
  2. Right-click the image and choose Inspect to open the Chrome Dev Tools. This trick would work across all modern browsers since they have developer tools built-in.
  3. Look at the alt attribute of the image tag* and you’ll find the description of the image as seen by Facebook (video tutorial).

[*] If the <img> tag is not visible in developer tool, you may need to expand the parent <div> tag.

Video Tutorial – Facebook Image Tags

Facebook’s computer vision tags cover multiple concepts including food, objects (e.g., eyeglasses), people’s expression (are they smiling?), sports, nature (sky, mountains), and more. The best part – if you are in a group photograph, Facebook can accurately tell you the exact number of people in the frame.

A Github user has created a Google Chrome extension that takes away all the manual work and overlays the tags on the pictures without you having to hunt inside the developer tool.