Google Hangouts Photo Sharing, Powered by Picasa Web

Now that Google+ Photos is discontinued, Google Apps admins received a message which informs them that Google Hangouts will only use Picasa Web Albums for photo sharing.

"The photo-sharing functionality in Hangouts is changing. Going forward, the ability to share photos and other multimedia in Hangouts Chat will be set by the Picasa Web Albums service rather than by the Google+ service. If Google+ is enabled in your domain, no further action is necessary. Google+ requires Picasa Web Albums so you can continue to share photos using Hangouts Chat just like you always have. If Google+ is not enabled for your domain and you want to use the photo-sharing functionality in Hangouts Chat, you must turn on the Picasa Web Albums service in your Admin console."

This change also affects regular Google users, since photos shared using Hangouts aren't added to Google Photos and you'll only find them in Picasa Web Albums when Google+ Photos will shut down. The same thing will happen with Blogger photos.

Picasa Web Albums and Google+ Photos served as a central hub for almost all the photos uploaded using Google services. This was great, since you could find all your photos in one place, but it also cluttered Picasa Web and Google+ Photos with albums automatically generated by Blogger, Google Hangouts and other services.

It looks like Picasa Web Albums is here to stay, at least for now.

{ Thanks, Petr Man. }

Google+ Photos Discontinued

Google announced that Google+ Photos will no longer be available in a few weeks, so everyone will have to switch to Google Photos. "In an effort to ensure everyone has the best photos experience we can deliver, on August 1st we'll start to shut down Google+ Photos - initially on Android, and soon thereafter on the Web and iOS."

Google Photos was launched 2 months ago and there are many missing features. For examples, some powerful editing features from Google+ Photos for desktop are not yet available in Google Photos and you can't organize albums or tag people in Google Photos.

Since both services are 2 interfaces that show almost the same photos and videos, you can find most of your files in Google Photos. Apparently, photos shared in Blogger and Hangouts are only available in Picasa Web Albums, for now. If you don't like Google's new service, there's always Google Takeout, which lets you export all your photos and videos.

The New Google Patents

There's a new version of Google Patents that's available at patents.google.com. The interface now uses Material Design, there's a checkbox that lets you search Google Scholar, advanced search options are available in the sidebar and you can quickly navigate between search results, which are now grouped by category.

"The new Google Patents helps users find non-patent prior art by cataloguing it, using the same scheme that applies to patents. We've trained a machine classification model to classify everything found in Google Scholar using Cooperative Patent Classification codes. Now users can search for [autonomous vehicles] or [email encryption] and find prior art across patents, technical journals, scientific books, and more," informs Google.

Another change is that you can search for foreign patent documents using English keywords. It's interesting to notice that the old Google Patents is still available if you use this URL: http://ift.tt/Nnnbks.

{ Thanks, Florian Kiersch. }

How to Customize the Facebook Page Plugin for Websites

The old Like box for Facebook Pages has been deprecated and replaced with a new Page Plugin. If you have not manually upgraded the embed code for Like box on your website yet, no worries as Facebook has automatically migrated all the Like boxes using the old embed code to the new Page Plugin.

Unlike the previous Like box that carried too much Facebook branding, the new Facebook Page plugin is cleaner without any branding. You can now display the cover photo of your Facebook Page inside the Like box. You can also add a “Call to Action” button that will redirect people to your email newsletter or prompt them to install your mobile app and so on.

The other difference that you can now only display a single row of fan pictures inside the Page Plugin. Why does this matter? The pile shows profile pictures of mutual friends who have liked your Facebook Page and thus, when a casual visitor sees a familiar face inside that pile, it is likely to increase their interest in your website.

What you see here are a list of customization options now available inside the Facebook Page plugin. You can choose to have a simple Like box with just your logo and like button or you can have a complete box with cover photos as well.

Customizing this Facebook Page plugin is simple as detailed in the official documentation. For instance, if you would not like to show a cover photo, set the HTML5 data attribute data-hide-cover to false in the DIV tag. Setting data-show-facepile to false will hide the row of pictures.

Similarly, you can attach styles to the .fb-page class to customize the outer of the Facebook Plugin. For instance, if you like the steps style I use here with the Facebook box at labnol.org, this is the underlying CSS code.

<div class="fb-page" 
     data-href="http://ift.tt/1V2OjFb;  
     data-small-header="false"  
     data-hide-cover="false"    
     data-show-facepile="true"  
     data-show-posts="false">
</div>

<div id="fb-root"></div>

<style>

  .fb-page, .fb-page:before, .fb-page:after {
    border: 1px solid #ccc;
  }

  .fb-page:before, .fb-page:after {
    content: "";
    position: absolute;
    bottom: -3px;
    left: 2px;
    right: 2px;
    height: 1px;
    border-top: none
  }
  
  .fb-page:after {
    left: 4px;
    right: 4px;
    bottom: -5px;
    box-shadow: 0 0 2px #ccc
  }
</style>

<script>
  (function(d, s, id) {
    var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];
    if (d.getElementById(id)) return;
    js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id;
    js.src = "//connect.facebook.net/en_US/sdk.js#xfbml=1&version=v2.4";
    fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs);
  }(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk'));
</script>

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The story, How to Customize the Facebook Page Plugin for Websites, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 15/07/2015 under Embed, Facebook, Internet.

Bring Gmail’s Archiving Feature to Microsoft Outlook for Mac (without scripting)

The Archive feature in Gmail comes handy when you would like to preserve an email conversation forever but at the same time move it out of your main inbox. While a thread is selected in Gmail, you can press the Archive button, or hit the “e” keyboard shortcut, and the selected thread is removed from your inbox but continues to exists in the “All Mails” folder.

Microsoft has just launched a new version of Outlook with Office 2016 for Mac but there’s no built-in option to help you easily archive messages similar to what you have in Gmail. You can obviously move email messages to the Archive folder through the Message > Move > Choose Folder.. menu but that is no match to the simplistic option available in Gmail. Press ‘e’ and you’re done.

Add Gmail-like Archiving to Outlook

Here’s a step-by-step guide that will help you emulate Gmail’s archiving functionality in your Microsoft Outlook. The tutorial is for Office 2016 but it should work with previous versions of Outlook on Mac OS X as well.

Step 1: Open Microsoft Outlook, select any message in the inbox and press the keyboard shortcut Cmd+Shift+M to move the selected email message into another Outlook folder.

Step 2: A search window will pop-up. If you are using Gmail with Outlook, type All Mail in this window to select your Gmail’s archive folder (see screenshot). Or you can type the name of any other Outlook folder that you plan to use for archiving messages. Click “Move” to move the selected message.

Step 3: From the Outlook menu, choose Message > Move and make an exact note of the highlighted menu item corresponding to the folder that you selected in the previous step. In this example, the menu is available as All Mail (email@domain.com).

Step 4: From the Apple menu, choose System Preferences, then click Keyboard. Click Shortcuts, select App Shortcuts, then click Add (+). Choose Microsoft Outlook from the Application dropdown, type the menu name exactly as noted in previous step and put Cmd+E as the app shortcut.

Click Add to create the app shortcut, switch to Microsoft Outlook, select one or more email messages and press Cmd+E. If you’ve followed the steps right, the selected email messages will instantly be moved to the Archive (All Mail) folder of Outlook, much like Gmail.

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The story, Bring Gmail’s Archiving Feature to Microsoft Outlook for Mac (without scripting), was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 14/07/2015 under Apple Mac, GMail, Microsoft Outlook, Software.

How to Get the Password of WiFi Network You Are Connected To

Your computer is connected to a Wi-Fi network but you do not remember the password that you had earlier used to connect to this particular WiFi network. Maybe you forgot the password or maybe the network administrator entered it directly without revealing the actual password to you.

You would now like to connect a second device, like your mobile phone, to the same WiFi network but how do you find out the password? You can either send a password request the WiFi admin or you can open the command prompt on your computer and retrieve the saved password in one easy step. The technique works on both Mac and Windows PCs.

Get the WiFi Password on Windows

Open the command prompt in administrator mode. Type “cmd” in the Run box, right-click the command prompt icon and choose Run as Administrator (see how). Now enter the following command and hit enter to see the WiFi password.

netsh wlan show profile name=labnol key=clear

Remember to replace labnol with the name of your Wireless SSID (this is the name of the Wi-Fi network that you connect your computer to). The password will show up under the Security Setting section (see screenshot).

If you do not see the password, probably you’ve not opened the command prompt window as administrator

Show the WiFi Password on Mac OS X

Your Mac OS X uses Keychain to store the configuration details of the WiFi network and we can use the BSD command “security” to query anything stored inside Keychain, including the Wi-Fi password. Here’s how:

Open Spotlight (Cmd+Space) and type terminal to open the Terminal window. At the command line, enter the following command (replace labnol with your WiFi name), then enter your Mac username and password to access the OS X keychain and the Wi-FI network password would be displayed on the screen in plain text.

security find-generic-password -ga labnol | grep password

Resources for further reading:

• Windows – Manage Network Profiles (microsoft.com)
• Man pages for Security Command (apple.com)

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The story, How to Get the Password of WiFi Network You Are Connected To, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 14/07/2015 under Apple Mac, Networking, Password, Wi-Fi, Software.

Redirect Gmail to Google Inbox

If you like Google Inbox and you're wondering why it doesn't replace Gmail, there's a setting that redirects Gmail to Inbox. Just go to Inbox, open the settings box, switch to the "Other" tab, enable "Redirect Gmail to inbox.google.com" and click "Done". The next time you type mail.google.com, gmail.com or click on a Gmail shortcut or bookmark, you'll be sent to inbox.google.com.

You can still open Gmail: just click the new "Gmail" menu item, which is placed below "Contacts" in Inbox's sidebar. The URL that temporarily disables redirects is http://ift.tt/1gwKrwv.

"If you often go to Gmail in your web browser when you really mean to go to Inbox, you can turn on a setting so that you'll automatically be taken to Inbox when you visit gmail.com or mail.google.com on a computer. You can always get back to Gmail using a simple link in Inbox," informs Google. The setting was added a few weeks ago.

A Privacy Reminder From Google

After signing in to my Google account, Google showed a new page called "a privacy reminder from Google." Here's Google's explanation: "To be consistent with data protection laws, we're asking you to take a moment to review key points of Google's Privacy Policy. This is not about a change we've made - it's just a chance to review the key points below."

The page shows a list of information processed when you use Google and a list of reasons why it's processed. Google also explains how it uses data to improve user experience and lets you adjust some privacy controls (account history, ads settings, opt out of Google Analytics data collection). "These features work because of the information you choose to store with Google. But that's up to you. The controls in your Google Account let you decide what information you want Google to put to work on your behalf," informs Google.

My Account, Added to Google App Launcher

When Google launched My Account, a new interface for Google Account Settings, it added a shortcut to the app launcher, but only users who weren't logged in and for those who haven't customized the app launcher. Unfortunately, Google didn't provide a way to add the shortcut for all the other users.

Now the "My Account" shortcut has been automatically added to the app launcher at the bottom of the "More" section, so you need to click "More" to see it. You can always customize Google's navigation menu using drag and drop.

Gmail Promotes Google Inbox

Gmail changed the text that's displayed when you don't have any message in your inbox. Now Gmail promotes Google Inbox: "No new mail! Want to hit inbox zero more often? Try our new app, Inbox by Gmail."

So why can you hit inbox zero more often if you use Google Inbox? You can snooze emails until you're ready to deal with them, you can open attachments, watch videos, open news articles and read important information extracted from a message without having to open it. For example, Google Inbox shows flight status next to flight reservation emails and package tracking links next to order updates from Amazon or other shopping sites.

{ Thanks, Ryan Goldstein. }

Old Google Drive Goes Missing

Last year, Google launched a new desktop interface for Google Drive. If you missed the old interface, the "settings" menu allowed you switch to the old interface by clicking "Leave the new Drive". The classic Google Drive also added a link to the new interface, so you could click "Experience the new Drive" and switch back to the new UI.

Now the "Leave the new Drive" option is missing and you can no longer switch to the old Google Drive. Even the URL for the old Google Drive doesn't work: http://ift.tt/1f67nCd.

Google still has a help center article about "switching between versions of Google Drive", which is now outdated. "Have you noticed that your Google Drive looks different? Or are you trying to do something in Drive and the instructions don't work? This may be because there are now two versions of Google Drive on the web – a new version and a classic version. The new Google Drive is gradually rolling out to all users, but you can switch to the new version, or back to the classic version, at any time," mentions the article.

{ Thanks, Frodo Baggins. }

Customize Gmail Themes

Gmail's theme gallery added hundreds of new high-resolution photos and many of them were taken by Google employees like Romain Guy and Greg Bullock. Click "more photos" in the "pick your theme" dialog to find all the new photos. You can still use your own photos, upload photos or paste a URL.

After you select a background image, Gmail lets you customize it using 3 features: select light or dark text background, add vignette to make borders darker or you can blur the background image.

My favorite feature is the vignette effect:

The "theme" tab from Gmail's settings page is no longer useful, now that there's a separate theme picker. All the themes used to be displayed there, but now the tab only includes a link to "set theme".

"Your inbox is home to some of your most meaningful and entertaining messages — from that acceptance letter, to those throwback photos — so we think it's important for Gmail to feel just as personal (and fun!)," says Google. To make Gmail more fun, Google also added emojis for almost every occasion.

An Improved Gmail Clipper from Evernote

Evernote, the quintessential note-taking software, has released a new web clipper add-on for Chrome, Opera and Safari browsers. While the web clipper is primarily used for saving snapshots of web pages to Evernote, the updated version is much more efficient at archiving Gmail messages.

When you clip an email thread with the new Evernote clipper, it creates a de-cluttered view and re-formats the whole thread so it is more readable. And if you are clipping a lengthy email conversation in Gmail, you now have an option to select individual messages in the thread that should be saved into Evernote.

Save Gmail Messages without the clutter

The Gmail Clipper for Evernote can also save the inline images and file attachments found in your email messages. For instance, if there’s a PDF document or an Excel sheet attached to a Gmail message, the files will be directly saved to Evernote in their native format along with the email message.

You can get the clipper at http://ift.tt/Mbon6x – you would need an Evernote account to activate the clipper in your browser.

In my testing, the clipper worked as advertised for Gmail. It could easily handle large threads with 20+ email messages, the file attachments were successfully saved and the rich-text formatting of HTML messages was well preserved in Evernote. If you are to share an email thread with someone, it may be a good idea to save it as a note in Evernote and then share the link.

Also see: The Best Evernote Tips & Tricks

One more thing. The web clipper helps you manually save your emails to Evernote. If you are looking for an automated way to archive multiple emails from Gmail into Evernote, you can use a Google Sheet.

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The story, An Improved Gmail Clipper from Evernote, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 01/07/2015 under Evernote, GMail, Internet.

See all your Google Contacts on a Google Map

Want to know where you friends and colleagues are? The all-new Map My Contacts app will help you quickly visualize the location of your Google contacts on a world map. It reads the postal addresses of people from your Google Contacts and puts them all in a Google Map using a simple Google script.

Create a Google Map with your Google Contacts

Publish a Map of Google Contacts

It takes one easy step to turn your address book into a Google Map. If you are Google Chrome user, you can install an add-on or you can click here to directly access the “Map My Contacts” web app in any other browser.

The app will require authorization because it needs to read the addresses of your Google Contacts and it needs access to Google Drive for saving the generated map. It is an open-source Google Script and you get find the entire source code on ctrlq.org published under the MIT License.

Once you have authorized and granted access, the app will run for a few minutes, depending on how big your address book is, and generates a Google Map embedded in an HTML file. A KML file is also created in your Google Drive with markers (or placemarks) for every contact and you can double-click to open this file inside Google Earth.

Also, if you are not using Google Contacts as your primary address book, you can still use the apps to map your contacts. Just export the contacts data from your existing address book (like Outlook or Yahoo Mail) as a CSV file, import the file into Google Contacts and run the app again.

Internally, the Google Apps Script reads the home and work postal addresses of your Google Contacts and then uses the geocoding service of Google Maps to transform these human-readable addresses into latitudes and longitude values. These points are then put in a KML file (see sample KML file) that can viewed inside Google Earth or Google Maps.

See some of our other useful Google Scripts.

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The story, See all your Google Contacts on a Google Map, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 30/06/2015 under Google Contacts, Google Maps, Internet.

Earth View Update

Google has a cool Chrome extension called Earth View, which replaces the new tab page with a random stunning satellite image from Google Earth. The latest release brings a lot of new features: there are 500 new images, you can see the images from the last 10 tabs you've opened, there's a download feature in the menu and a sharing button. You can share images on Google+, Facebook, Twitter or copy the URL and paste it somewhere else.

If you don't want to install the extension or you use a different browser, there's a web gallery that shows all the 1500 images. Click the arrow button or use the left/right keyboard shortcuts to navigate between images. There's also a slideshow feature called "leanback mode".

"Earth View is a collection of the most striking and enigmatic landscapes available in Google Earth. The colors, shapes, textures and patterns all contribute to the strange beauty of our planet, reminding us of nature’s uncanny geometry and bewildering simplicity. Each of the 1500 images featured in this collection was hand curated and available for download as wallpaper for your desktop or mobile," informs Google.