Use Quick Look on Mac to Preview Live Websites

Mac OS X has a handy preview feature known as Quick Look that helps you view the content of any file without having to launch the associated application. Select a file inside Finder (or on the desktop), press Space Bar and Quick Look would be activated. You can preview files of most common formats including images, videos, zip archives, Office documents, PDFs and more.

Place a web shortcut on your desktop

Quick Look however isn’t just an option for previewing local files, it can also display live websites without you having to open the web browser. All you have to do is create a shortcut for any website on your desktop from the browser and then preview that shortcut in Quick Preview.

This can be useful in several ways. For instance, if you routinely check your favorite news website for the top headlines, you can place a shortcut to that website on the desktop and use Quick Look to instantly check the site for any new content. Or you can create a shortcut to a YouTube playlist and watch the videos inside Quick Look outside the browser.

While you are inside Safari or Chrome or any other browser on the Mac, drag the website link to the desktop (see how-to). It will create a .webloc file. You can select the file and press the space bar to preview the source website inside Quick Look.

Quick Looks previews the webpage inside a fresh browser session and uses none of the existing cookies or cache so the website will treat you as a new visitor. Also, it disables scripts on the page but loads all the CSS and images.

What’s inside a .WEBLOC file

When you place a shortcut to a web pages on the desktop, it create a .webloc file which is actually a simple text (XML) file. You can replace the string value to make that shortcut to point to any other webpage. For instance, here’s the a sample .webloc file pointing to this website.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
   <key>URL</key>
   <string>http://ift.tt/1N3w0MU;
</dict>
</plist>

Also see: Essential Mac Apps & Utilities

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The story, Use Quick Look on Mac to Preview Live Websites, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 10/08/2015 under Apple Mac, Software.

Google Indexes Images From PDF Files

I'm not sure if this is a new feature, but I noticed that Google indexes images from PDF files. Google adds "[PDF]" next to the title of the page and offers a single option: "view PDF", since it can't link to an image from a PDF file.

Back in 2008, Google started to use OCR to index the full text of scanned PDF files. Now Google extracts images from PDF files and makes them searchable.

Here's an example of query that returns many images from PDFs: [google pdf site:static.googleusercontent.com].

Convert Notes to Documents in Google Keep for Android

The latest version of the Google Keep app for Android lets you export your notes to Google Docs, just like the desktop site. Open a note, tap the menu button and pick "copy to Google Doc".

You can also select multiple notes and use the same feature to export your notes to a Google Docs document.

If you don't have the latest version of the Google Keep app yet (3.1.313), you can download the APK file from APK Mirror. According to Android Police, "the APK is signed by Google and upgrades your existing app".

Export All Your Google Keep Notes

How to export all your notes from Google Keep? One option is to use a feature that converts one or more notes to a Google Docs document.

1. Select all your notes: go to Google Keep and press Ctrl+A (or Cmd-A for Mac).

Important: This only selects the notes from the current view, so archived notes aren't included. You can repeat these steps for archived notes or select all your archived notes and unarchive them.

2. Click the 3-dot icon from the top of the page and pick "Copy to Google Doc".

3. Wait a few seconds and you should see a link at the bottom of the page that says: "Open doc". Click that link to open the document that includes all your notes.

A Lynx-like Text Browser that Runs on Google Servers

Text Browser is a Lynx-inspired browser that lets you read the web in text and strips all JavaScript, images, videos and other rich content that maybe embedded inside a web page. Unlike Lynx that require installation and run locally, Text Browser is a web app and runs in the Google cloud.

To get started, click here and authorize the web app with your Google Account. It requires authorization to sign-in and also for fetching web pages on your behalf. It will neither track your browsing activity nor will have access to any of your Google Account data.

Once a page loads inside the Text Browser, any of the internal links will also open inside the same browser automatically.

Text Browser as a Proxy Server

Why would anyone want a basic text browser? Well, you can also use the Text Browser as a proxy server to access news articles and other text-only content on the Internet that may otherwise be inaccessible at your workplace.

When you request a web page through the app, the underlying Google Apps Script will fetch the page on Google’s servers and then renders the content on your screen using Google Apps Script. Thus, even if a site is restricted, you should be able to view the page indirectly through the Google cloud.

And if a website is down for you, use the Google text browser to confirm if the page is really down for everyone or it is just your Internet connection.

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The story, A Lynx-like Text Browser that Runs on Google Servers, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 04/08/2015 under Proxy Server, Internet.

YouTube Only Updated The HTML5 Player

There's something interesting about the latest YouTube player update: it's the first time when YouTube only updates the HTML5 player.

Since it's no longer that easy to force YouTube to switch to the Flash player, I've used an old version of Firefox (22.0). YouTube defaulted to the Flash player, the same old player before the recent update.

I've switched to the HTML5 player using youtube.com/html5 and YouTube displayed the new player, just like it does in the latest versions of most desktop browsers.

It's obvious that the Flash player has been deprecated and it's still used for older browsers. If you're using the latest version of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, the HTML5 player is used by default and you can't even switch to the Flash player.

YouTube's New Desktop Player, Available for Everyone

After a few months of testing, the new desktop player for YouTube replaces the old one. The new HTML5 video player uses a transparent control bar that hides when you're not using it and has new buttons and dropdown menus.

"Our new player design has a bit more polish, gets out of the way of your video playback, and scales to any screen or embed size," informs YouTube. The TestTube page no longer lets you switch back to the old player and it only shows this message: "This browser is using the new YouTube player".

Delete Recommendation History in Google Play Music

Google Play Music's desktop site has a new feature that lets you delete history. At the bottom of the settings page, there's a new section called "delete recommendation history". According to Google, this "removes the history used to give you recommendations and customize radio. This will not remove ratings and play counts on individual tracks."

Google shows a long list of recommended radios and albums and you can manually remove them by clicking "not interested" for each radio and album. After using the new "delete recommendation history" feature, I expected to see that all recommendations are removed and Google will start to show new suggested albums and radios based on the songs you play from now on. Unfortunately, that's not the case: Google still shows similar recommendations.

Speaking of historical data, it's surprising that Google Play Music still doesn't have a feature that shows all your recently played songs. It should be an auto playlist, just like "last added" and "thumbs up" and users should be able to export it.

{ Thanks, Camilo Moreira. }

Google Updates Ad Settings

Google has recently updated ad settings pages, which have a new design and more information about your options. You can still disable ads based on your interests from both Google sites and third-party sites. When you do that, you'll still see ads, but they "will not be based on data Google has associated with your Google Account, and so may be less relevant".

It's interesting that Google replaced the section titled "Google ads across the Web" with a new section for signed-out ads, which has 2 separate settings for "ads based on your interests on websites beyond google.com" and "Google Search Ads based on your interests". Google uses your previous searches and browsing history to improve search ads, but you can disable this feature. AdSense ads also use your browsing history and anonymous demographic details to improve ads.

{ Thanks, Herin Maru. }

Get Fare Estimates for Uber Taxis on Twitter

How much will it cost if you are take an Uber taxi from point A to point B? Uber’s mobile app has a built-in fare estimator but you can now also Twitter to calculate the fare. Write your query in plain English (see example), send it to @WhatTheFare and the bot will let you know the approximate fare for your ride in less than a minute.

@WhatTheFare is a new Twitter bot that will help you estimate the cost of your Uber trip. You’ll get to know the fare as well the different types of Uber taxis that are available on that route. And you can use the bot to estimate fare for trips anywhere in the world where Uber service is available.

Tweet me a command like "taxi fare from <<pick-up location>> to <<drop-off location>>" and I'll respond with the Uber price in a minute.

— What the Fare (@WhatTheFare) August 2, 2015

The bot’s response will also include a deep-link (see example) to Uber’s mobile website and it will directly populate the pickup/drop-off co-ordinates should you decide to book a taxi with Uber.

You can use the bot from anywhere in the world but the Uber prices are always provided in the currency of the pickup/drop-off address. Here’re some sample tweets that used the @WhatTheFare bot to know Uber prices.

@WhatTheFare How much does a Uber taxi cost from JFK Terminal 4, NY to Jersey City, NJ August 2, 2015

@WhatTheFare taxi fare from civic center, san francisco to SFO August 2, 2015

@WhatTheFare taxifare from Kondapur to jubilee hills August 3, 2015

Internally, like DearAssistant, the Uber bot is also written with Google Scripts.

It uses the Google Maps API to geocode postal addresses found in your tweet request, fetches the list of Uber taxis available for that route via the official Uber API and then tweets the response using the Twitter API. The taxis icons in the tweet are standard Unicode emojis supported by Twitter.

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The story, Get Fare Estimates for Uber Taxis on Twitter, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 03/08/2015 under Twitter, Uber, Internet.

How to Create a Retweet and Favorite Bot for Twitter

This tutorial explains how you can easily make a Twitter bot that will automatically favorite and/or retweet tweets that contain particular keywords or #hashtags. You need absolutely no coding knowledge and your Twitter bot will be up and running in few minutes.

Before we get started, you may be wondering why would anyone write a twitter bot that mindlessly favorites or retweets tweets? Yes, bots are often used for spammy behavior but, if used right, they can also help grow your Twitter network. For instance, when people share a link from your website on Twitter, you can favorite that tweet and it will give an hint to the original poster that you are author of that page. A brand may like to retweet tweets that contain positive mentions of their product. The list goes on.

Also see: How to Write a Useful Twitter Bot

The first thing you need to do is define a search phrase and any matching tweets will be retweeted or favorited by the bot. Add as many search conditions as possible to keep spam tweets away from your list. Some examples:

1. Tweets containing links to your website, sans retweets
example.com min_retweets:5 OR min_faves:5 -RT

2. Mentions of particular hashtag, but no links
#WhatAnAwesomeHashtag -RT -filter:links

3. All tweets sent from a particular location
#hashtag near:”New York, NY” within:15mi

OK, next we need to build our Twitter bot app. I suggest creating a separate Twitter account to test your automated bots.

1. Go to apps.twitter.com and create a new application. Fill in the mandatory fields (name, description, URL) and click the Create button. Next go to Keys and Access Tokens and click the Create my Access Token button. Twitter will generate the Consumer Keys & Access tokens that we will need in the next step.
2. Click here to copy the Twitter bot script to your Google Drive. Replace the search phrase and Twitter keys that were generated in the previous step.
3. Go to the Run menu and choose StartBot to initialize your Twitter bot.

That’s it. The bot will run in the background, every 10 minutes, and favorite / retweet matching tweets. It will fave/RT a maximum of 1 tweet per minute. If you wish to stop the bot later, go to Run again and choose StopBot.

Also see: How to Save Conference Tweets to a Spreadsheet

Use with care and, as always, the full source of the Twitter retweet bot is available on ctrlq.org under the “do whatever you like” license.

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The story, How to Create a Retweet and Favorite Bot for Twitter, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 03/08/2015 under Twitter, Internet.

A Renewal Reminder

Google has recently sent notifications about some domains that are about to expire. "Your registration of domain.com is about to expire. This means that users will no longer be able to access your website at that time."

The domains were registered using Google Domains, but they were set to automatically renew, so Google's message was confusing. Google realized that it was a mistake and sent another message:

"An automated email was sent out to you earlier in error with the subject 'Your domain registration is expiring'. Please discard the erroneous message. Since your domain is set to auto-renew, your domain will be renewed on the expiration date as expected. We apologize for any confusion this may have caused."

Unfortunately for Google, the message was sent to 1664 people and all the email addresses were added to the "to" field, so everyone can see them. Whoops!

More Related Images in Google Image Search for Mobile

Google Image Search has a new mobile interface. When you tap a thumbnail, Google shows the image result, a link to the page and a long list of related images.

Below the search result, you can find a list of similar images. You can still swipe left or right to go to the previous or the next image result. Tap the image to hide everything else.

How to Save your Gmail to Google Drive Automatically

Introducing Save Emails, a new Google Docs add-on that will help you easily save email messages and file attachments from Gmail to your Google Drive automatically. The emails threads are converted and saved as PDF files in Drive while the attachments are saved in their native format.

You can use the Google add-on to save images, videos, Office documents, project backups and everything else from Gmail to your Google Drive. It also supports the Gmail size search operator so if your mailbox is running out of space, use the add-on to quickly move the large file attachmetns to Drive and delete the corresponding email from Gmail.

Download Gmail Attachments & Emails to Google Drive

The YouTube video will help you get started in 2 minutes.

All you have to do is visually create a rule, similar to how your create filters in Gmail, and then specify a folder in your Google drive. The add-on runs in the background and will automatically download the matching emails to the corresponding Drive folder. You can choose to save the email message only, the included attachments or both.

The add-on runs every hour but if you would like to speed up things a bit, you can manually start the downloads as well. While you are inside the Google Sheet, go to Addons, Save Emails and Attachments and then choose Manage Rules. Now pick any of available rules that you have previously created and tap the Run button to instantly download the matching emails to your Google Drive.

Once an email thread is added to Google Drive, a label “Saved” is applied to the message in Gmail to indicate that the thread has been processed by the add-on and it won’t be processed in the next iteration.

Download Save Emails

Internally, there’s a Google Script that is doing all the hard work. It connects to your Gmail, pulls the matching threads and saves them to Drive via the various Google Apps Script APIs.

The add-on is completely free but there’s a premium version as well that offers a few additional benefits. With premium, you can create unlimited number of mapping rules, the Gmails are saved to Drive at a much faster rate (within 10-15 minutes) and you get email support as well.

If you are wondering why use an add-on where you have services like Zapier or IFTTT that offer similar features, here’s a clue. The Save Emails add-on can process both new (incoming) email as well as old messages in your mailbox. It converts your email messages into high-quality, print-ready and searchable PDF files. And you can run the add-on manually to save emails on demand.

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The story, How to Save your Gmail to Google Drive Automatically, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 30/07/2015 under GMail, Google Drive, Internet.

Google's Visual Translation Supports 20 New Languages

Google bought Word Lens last year and brought a very useful feature to Google Translate: real-time visual translation. Use a phone or a tablet running Android or iOS, point the camera at a sign or text in a foreign language and Google will translate the text almost instantly, while preserving all the other details. It's like using a magic camera that translates text and lets you read street signs, restaurant menus, user manuals, newspaper articles even if they're written in foreign languages.

Visual translation now supports 20 additional languages. "You can now translate to and from English and Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Filipino, Finnish, Hungarian, Indonesian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Slovak, Swedish, Turkish and Ukrainian. You can also do one-way translations from English to Hindi and Thai." Back in January, the feature was launched with only 7 supported languages: English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.

This feature requires to pick the right languages before tapping the camera button and one of the languages must be English. You'll probably be prompted to download a small language pack, since you can use Word Lens offline.

Google Research Blog has more information about Word Lens. After finding the text regions in the picture, Google recognizes the letters using a convolutional neural network. "Letters out in the real world are marred by reflections, dirt, smudges, and all kinds of weirdness. So we built our letter generator to create all kinds of fake 'dirt' to convincingly mimic the noisiness of the real world—fake reflections, fake smudges, fake weirdness all around." After recognizing the letters, Google translates the text taking into account that text recognition might include mistakes, then it "renders the translation on top of the original words in the same style as the original". Google actually erases the original text using the colors surrounding the text and draws the translation using the initial foreground color. It's quite clever.

Popular Times Added to Google's Local Search Cards

Google has a new feature for local search cards. When you search for restaurants, stores, museums and other places, you can now see the busiest times of the day or week. The new "popular times" section shows when it's a good time to go to a certain place and when it's best to avoid it because it's too crowded.

"Now, you can avoid the wait and see the busiest times of the week at millions of places and businesses around the world directly from Google Search. For example, just search for "Blue Bottle Williamsburg", tap on the title and see how busy it gets throughout the day," informs Google.

For now, it seems that this feature is only available in the US and it's limited to the mobile interface. Google says that the data is based on historical visits, so I assume it uses Location History and other location services for mobile devices. Google Maps has a similar feature that shows typical traffic.

Google Photos Search Filters

Google+ Photos has a few search filters that are pretty useful. You can find them if you click the small arrow from the search box: Auto Backup, Hangouts, Google Drive, Posts, Auto Awesome, Videos and more. The nice thing is that most of them are also available in Google Photos.

Google Photos has a search page that shows a few filters: Creations (replaces Auto Awesome), Google Drive, Video, Recently Added. Here are some searches you can use to bring back the filters from Google+ Photos:

#AutoBackup - shows all the photos automatically backed up from your mobile devices and desktop computers

#Desktop - shows the photos automatically backed up from your desktop computers

#Posts - shows the photos added to your Google+ posts

#All - shows all your photos

#PhotosOfYou - photos you've been tagged in

#CAMERANAME - replace CAMERANAME with the your camera's model or brand to see all the photos taken with that camera. Some examples: #Nexus5, #Canon, #iPhone.

Evernote Drops Email-to-Note for Free Accounts, Alternative

Your Evernote account has a unique and secret email address. Any email messages forwarded to this address are automatically saved as notes in your Evernote notebook. The feature has been around for a while and is particularly handy for quickly archiving email messages and included file attachments into Evernote that can be retrieved later from any device.

Earlier this month, Evernote made a little change. The Email to Evernote feature still exists but only if you have a premium account. From the support page:

After July 15, 2015, you can continue saving up to five more emails into Evernote. After you send your fifth email, you won’t be able to save any additional emails into Evernote until you’ve upgraded to Evernote Plus or Premium.

In the meantime, Evernote has introduced a new Email Clipper for sending your Gmail messages to Evernote but it only works inside desktop browsers. How do you send email messages to Evernote from a mobile device?

A good alternative is IFTTT. Assuming that you have activated the Evernote and Gmail channels in your IFTTT account, here are the 2 recipes that will help you email notes into Evernote but without having to upgrade to premium.

• Recipe 1 – Forward any email message to trigger@recipe.ifttt.com with #Evernote in the subject line and it will create a note in your default Evernote notebook.
• Recipe 2 – Apply the label Evernote to any email message inside Gmail and it will magically appear in your Evernote notebook via IFTTT.

You will however miss the option to create reminder notes via email nor can your redirect notes to different Evernote notebook based on the subject line.

See more Evernote Tips & Tricks

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The story, Evernote Drops Email-to-Note for Free Accounts, Alternative, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 28/07/2015 under Evernote, Internet.

Embedded Tweets can be Easily Faked

You can easily embed tweets in your website by adding a little HTML snippet to your site’s template. The embedded tweets are interactive in the sense that they’ve a follow button, they show live retweet counts, and you also use CSS to change the formatting of tweets.

Now CSS does help you control the tweet’s appearance but you may be surprised to know that it is also possible to change the other elements of an embedded tweet. For instance, you may modify the actual text of the tweet. The favorite & retweet counts can be altered as well. Let me illustrate that with an example:

This is the original tweet:

Receive files in your Google Drive from anyone http://t.co/5NyaM0NRiK http://pic.twitter.com/w6RTdkWhSe

— Amit Agarwal (@labnol) April 23, 2014

This is the same tweet, but altered with JavaScript:

Notice any difference? Well, there are quite a few.

The altered tweet uses a different font family, there’s minimal Twitter branding, the favorite & retweet numbers are made up, some extra words were appended to the tweet itself and the date has been replaced with custom text. And it is not a fake screenshot.

Also see: Learn Coding Online

How to Alter an Embedded Tweet

Twitter allows you embed tweets with JavaScript and when you take this route, you not only gain control over how the tweets are rendered but also over what’s rendered inside the tweet.

Here’s the complete JavaScript snippet that allows use to modify most of the elements of an embedded tweet.

<div id="tweet"></div>

<script src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>

<script>
  twttr.ready(function() {

    twttr.widgets.createTweet(
      
      // Replace this with the Tweet ID
      'TWEET ID', document.getElementById("tweet"))
      .then(function(el) {

        var e = el.contentDocument;

        // Change the tweet text
        var html = e.querySelector(".Tweet-text");
        html.innerHTML = "[How-to Guide] " + html.innerHTML;

        // Hide the Follow Button
        e.querySelector(".FollowButton").style.display = "none";

        // Change the retweet count
        e.querySelector(".TweetAction--retweet .TweetAction-stat").innerHTML = "123";

        // Change the favorites count
        e.querySelector(".TweetAction--favorite .TweetAction-stat").innerHTML = "999";

        // Replace the date with text
        e.querySelector(".dt-updated").innerHTML = "Contact the author of this tweet at amit@labnol.org";
      });
  });
</script>

You pass the tweet ID (line #11) and also specify the DIV element where the tweet will be rendered.

After the tweet is rendered, you can use standard DOM methods to change the various inner elements based on class names. For instance, you can change the innerHTML property of the element with the Tweet-text class to modify the tweet text. Similarly, if you set the display property of class FollowButton to none, the follow button is hidden.

Fake tweets are known to have crashed markets so the next time you come across an embedded tweet with unbelievable retweets or favorites, it may be a good idea to verify the numbers.

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The story, Embedded Tweets can be Easily Faked, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 28/07/2015 under Embed, Twitter, Internet.