Can’t Express Yourself? Google Adds Over 1,000 Emoticons To Gmail’s New Compose [Updates]

Are you using Gmail’s new compose? If so, you’ve probably noticed that the emoticon icon does nothing but show a “coming soon” message. Not anymore. Google has rolled out over 1,000 emoticons for Gmails’s new compose, which you can add to your emails by clicking the “Insert emoticon” icon or with the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Shift+2.

The complete emoticon collection includes some familiar faces such as Google Talk’s square faces and “secret” animated crab, but if you scroll diligently you’ll find many different types of animated and non-animated faces, food items, animals, weather icons, and pretty much anything you can think of. If you can’t choose just one, holding the Shift button while clicking on emoticons will insert multiple ones into your email.

So how many emoticons are there, exactly? In a lengthy counting project, I counted exactly 1,324 emoticons, which is much more than the mere 150 available on the old compose. To be fair, TheNextWeb counted 1,287 emoticons in total, so according to them there are 37 less icons to enjoy, but no matter how you look at it, this is a huge collection.

If you’re using Google Apps, or if Google’s decided so for some reason, you might not see the emoticons yet. If you still see the “Coming soon” message when hovering over the smiley icon, don’t despair, Gmail’s emoticons will find their way to your account soon enough. At the moment, there doesn’t seem to be a way to disable emoticons in emails, but do let us know if you find one.

Is this good news or bad news for you? Will be using all these new emoticons in your emails, or are you dreading the emails you’re about to receive from now on?

Source: Google+ via TheNextWeb

The post Can’t Express Yourself? Google Adds Over 1,000 Emoticons To Gmail’s New Compose [Updates] appeared first on MakeUseOf.

Can’t Express Yourself? Google Adds Over 1,000 Emoticons To Gmail’s New Compose [Updates]

Are you using Gmail’s new compose? If so, you’ve probably noticed that the emoticon icon does nothing but show a “coming soon” message. Not anymore. Google has rolled out over 1,000 emoticons for Gmails’s new compose, which you can add to your emails by clicking the “Insert emoticon” icon or with the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Shift+2.

The complete emoticon collection includes some familiar faces such as Google Talk’s square faces and “secret” animated crab, but if you scroll diligently you’ll find many different types of animated and non-animated faces, food items, animals, weather icons, and pretty much anything you can think of. If you can’t choose just one, holding the Shift button while clicking on emoticons will insert multiple ones into your email.

So how many emoticons are there, exactly? In a lengthy counting project, I counted exactly 1,324 emoticons, which is much more than the mere 150 available on the old compose. To be fair, TheNextWeb counted 1,287 emoticons in total, so according to them there are 37 less icons to enjoy, but no matter how you look at it, this is a huge collection.

If you’re using Google Apps, or if Google’s decided so for some reason, you might not see the emoticons yet. If you still see the “Coming soon” message when hovering over the smiley icon, don’t despair, Gmail’s emoticons will find their way to your account soon enough. At the moment, there doesn’t seem to be a way to disable emoticons in emails, but do let us know if you find one.

Is this good news or bad news for you? Will be using all these new emoticons in your emails, or are you dreading the emails you’re about to receive from now on?

Source: Google+ via TheNextWeb

The post Can’t Express Yourself? Google Adds Over 1,000 Emoticons To Gmail’s New Compose [Updates] appeared first on MakeUseOf.

Talk To ISS Astronauts On NASA’s First Google+ Hangout [Updates]

Always wanted to talk to an astronaut? NASA will be hosting its first live Google+ Hangout on February 22nd, and everyone is invited to watch. The Hangout will go live from the International Space Station (ISS), and will last one hour: from 11am to 12pm EST. Not only will you get to watch the astronauts live, you will also get the chance to ask them your very own questions in text or video.

One of the ways to submit a question to the astronauts is to record a 30 second video and upload it to YouTube. In the video, you should introduce yourself and say where you’re from, and then quickly ask your question before the 30 seconds are up. During the event, several videos with questions will go live and get answered, but in order to be considered you must upload the video by February 12th, and tag it with #askAstro.

If you can’t make it by Tuesday, or don’t want to expose yourself on video, there are several other ways to communicated with the ISS astronauts. During the live event, you’ll be able to ask questions on Google+, Twitter or YouTube by using the #askAstro tag next to your question. NASA will also start a special thread on their Facebook Page on the day of the event through which you can also submit your questions.

Once live, you can watch the event on NASA’s Google+ page or YouTube channel. According to NASA, “astronauts Kevin Ford and Tom Marshburn of NASA and Chris Hadfield of the Canadian Space Agency will answer questions and provide insights about life aboard the station.” So this is your chance to finally find out what exactly goes on on the ISS, and how it’s possible to sleep and exercise in near-weightlessness. Should be interesting.

Will you attend the Hangout on February 22nd? What will you ask the astronauts?

Source: NASA via Engadget

Image credit: NASA

The post Talk To ISS Astronauts On NASA’s First Google+ Hangout [Updates] appeared first on MakeUseOf.

Permalinks for Google Drive Images

While Google Drive lets you upload any file, the support for files that can't be edited using Google Docs/Sheets/Slides is limited. For example, you can embed PDF files and videos, but Google doesn't offer permalinks for images.



So you've uploaded a photo to Google Drive and the only options are to download the file and link to the image page. But what if you want to embed that image in a web page or simply post a direct link to the image? You may think that right-clicking the image lets you copy the image URL, but that's not true. Even if you check the source code of a page or use features like Firefox's "view page info", you'll get a link that doesn't work.



Fortunately, there's an easy solution - replace this URL from the address bar:



https://docs.google.com/file/d/FILEID/edit



with:



https://drive.google.com/uc?export=view&id=FILEID



(where FILEID is a long sequence of digits and letters).



This only works if you've changed the visibility options to "public on the Web" or "anyone with the link" in the Share dialog.



Here's an example:

You can also use:



https://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&id=FILEID



to trigger a download and this works for any non-private Google Drive file, not just for images.



{ via Stack Overflow. Photo licensed as Creative Commons Attribution. }

Convert Images Hosted by Google to WebP

WebP is one of the best thing that happened after Google acquired On2 in 2010. While WebM doesn't have a strong adoption outside YouTube and Firefox started to support H.264 after a few years of fight, WebP is an image format that's already used by many sites and applications. It can replace both JPEG and PNG and you can use it to create images that are compressed more efficiently (by about 35%) and look better. "By converting PNGs and JPEGs to WebP, the Chrome Web Store was able to reduce image sizes by about 30% on average," informs Google.



The format is supported by Chrome, Opera, Android 4.0+ and there are many tools that help you convert images to WebP and view them. It's also interesting to find that all the images hosted by Google services like Picasa Web, Blogger and Google+ can be converted to WebP using a simple URL adjustment.



Here's an example of JPEG photo hosted by Google+:



https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-b1qAbtG7VuI/TqON2f_eReI/AAAAAAAA4P4/r_5AKUt42rg/s633/DSC03146.JPG [57 KB]



To convert the photo to WebP, just replace "/s633/" with "/s633-rw/" ("/sNUMBER/" with "/sNUMBER-rw/") :



https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-b1qAbtG7VuI/TqON2f_eReI/AAAAAAAA4P4/r_5AKUt42rg/s633-rw/DSC03146.JPG [33 KB]



I'll also include the URL of a PNG screenshot from the previous post:



https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfqv9uEkuTAhJDAJoEOJFYl_qY-Zup-utch-yFRW71YxnA2LcJvcFzOSuTiMgbT4HJKWqwjR1S2r44WtyD9G1WW_BPxh429EC4zUMBiG4fNHbmJq3uTu15trhZX4jvN5Ba42li2TxK_Sd_/s640/new-gdrive-create-menu.png [21 KB]



Here's the WebP photo:



https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfqv9uEkuTAhJDAJoEOJFYl_qY-Zup-utch-yFRW71YxnA2LcJvcFzOSuTiMgbT4HJKWqwjR1S2r44WtyD9G1WW_BPxh429EC4zUMBiG4fNHbmJq3uTu15trhZX4jvN5Ba42li2TxK_Sd_/s640-rw/new-gdrive-create-menu.png [14.5 KB]

Third-Party Apps, More Visible in Google Drive

Google Drive updated the "create" menu. Now third-party apps are placed next to Google's apps and are easier to find. There's also a new option to "connect new apps" that displays the list of Google Drive apps (there are more than 100 applications). It's still an iframe for the Chrome Web Store collection, but you no longer have to open a new page to find an app. Another advantage is that you can filter the apps by category and restrict the search results to Google Drive apps. I've always found it weird that the Google Drive apps are listed in the Chrome Web Store, even though they don't require Chrome.

"The Google Drive Create menu now elevates Drive-connected apps to the same level as Google apps such as Docs and Sheets. This makes Drive-connected apps easier to reach and more visible to Google Drive users," informs Google.