Is Google building Forever Cars?

This is a departure from the usual administration-related posts. But I wanted to write about an old feeling of mine (around 10 years old now).

In his major novel Ring around the Sun, Clifford D. Simak introduces Forever Cars. Forever Cars are higly advanced cars sold at a ridiculous price. They last very long, cost very few and plans are possible for those who can't purchase them. They are perfect and cheap.

What's the catch? Why would someone produce a highly advanced piece of tech and give it for (almost) free?

Remind you of someone? Hint: it starts with a G. With two "o" just after.

In Ring Around the Sun, Forever Cars are an example of "too good to be true" - their manufacturer's hidden agenda is to destroy the world economy. Several years ago, I wondered the same about Google. How could they give all of this for free (even by internet standards, they're cheap)? Yeah, I know. Ads. Still…

And, from time to time, even now that I am a Google Apps system administrator, I still wonder.

Is Google building Forever Cars?

Gmail Labs conflict: "Signature Tweaks" incompatible with "Quote Selected Text" lab

Quote selected text (which, by the way, only works with keyboard shortcuts, not with the mouse), is incompatible with signature tweaks.

It seems I am the first one to document this. Feedback welcome!

Changing e-mail address for Google Apps user

Now it is possible to change an existing Google Apps user email address (administrator included). I am not talking about nickname, but about real renaming (thus, it will also work for login). It works with standard edition too.

Kudos to Google Apps France for the finding.

New Font: Syncopate

It’s been a while now,but anyway: a new font is available at Google Docs: Syncopate. Notice that only a small part of Google Fonts are available with Google Docs.

Gmail’s Mail Fetcher and MobileMe

Source: chat with MobileMe support

MobileMe is in IMAP by default. It is possible to switch to POP (and thus to be able to retrieve MobileMe mail with Gmail’s Mail Fetcher, which is POP-only) but with two important limitations :

• It is an either/or proposal — contrary to most other mail services, one cannot have both IMAP and POP enabled at the same time. The very moment when POP is enabled, IMAP is disabled. So be sure to be ready (important if looking for syncing multiple devices or if you are acting on the behalf of a customer)
• The switch must be made by MobileMe staff, which further requires real-time switching (with the customer’s devices nearby)

Note: I goes without saying that these both limitations are Apple’s, not Google’s.

How to suggest a feature request to Google… and be heard!

Google has several and redundant ways to be contacted. I suspect even Google employees do not know well how to do it.

Below I list all the ways I know to contact Google. I sort of cross-post on all of them. I don't consider this spam because it is Google's fault first: If they were rigourous in their feedback policy, then I would be confident and post at the One and Only place™. Till then…

So here we go:

• (Everything) Help forum. Google does read it. But no guarantee your particular thread is read (even automatically).
• (Gmail, buzz, contacts) Gmail feature request. There is a I have another idea button at the bottom. Once again, not that updated, since there is still a request button for a request that had already been honoured (preventing auto-adding contacts)
• (Gmail labs) Google Group Gmail Labs — Suggest a-labs feature
• Google Product Ideas. No complete list, it seems Google is being overwhelmed with the feature request aspect of quality insurance…
  
  • Product Ideas for Google Buzz
  • Product Ideas for Google Apps (administrators)
  • Product Ideas for Google Groups.
  • Product Ideas for iGoogle
  • Product Ideas for Google Reader
  • Product Ideas for SketchUp
  • Product Ideas for Ad Planner
  • Product Ideas for Custom Search
  • Product Ideas for Google Places
  • Product Ideas for YouTube
  • Product Ideas for Google AdSense
  • Product Ideas for Google Images
  • Product Ideas for Google Sidewiki
  • Product Ideas for Google Docs
  • Product Ideas for Webmaster Central
  • Product Ideas for Blogger
  • Product Ideas for Data Liberation

A related address is Submit your own Gmail tips. Who knows, maybe you'll be published on Gmailblog. Unfortunately, you cannot read what other have proposed.

There are certainly (and unfortunately) others. I will update accordingly.

Google docs features

This is probably incomplete. Input welcome!

However harsh I may appear by time, let me be clear: this is the most powerful web editor I know. I am very demanding (I am a certified Word specialist as well as a typography connoisseur) and well aware of Google Docs’s shortcoming, but still I am very impressed. There is still room to grow, but most people won't even use half of present-day features.

I won't do the same for Spreadsheet, as I don't know it well enough.

Basic features

• Auto-saving
• Cancel/redo
• Limited formatting: non-customisable style, frustratingly basic templating, bold/italic/underline, strike-through, superscript and subscript, left/right/center/justify, nested listing (now with hybrid ordered/unordered), line-height (limited), paragraph spacing (limited)
• Webfonts (limited choice, no advanced typography settings like swashes, alternate letters or ligatures; Word or Textedit lovers, be on your way.
• Insert link, anchor, drawing, image, footnote, special characters (impressive), horizontal line (buggy with table of contents, though), visible page break, table of contents (awkwardly customisable), header, footnotes
• Search/replace (limited: the only option is case-sensitiveness—way below Word)
• Table (up to 20×20 cells quick creation, unlimited after)

Printing

• Native printing. Nor more PDF in-between. Ctr+PCmd+P supported (which means you cannot print the HTML page of the Google Docs—you can only print the doc itself, but I don't see any use for this anyway)
• Visible pagination (can print pages numbers too)
• A4, Executive,…
• Laandscape or portrait
• Background color (won’t be printed, though)

Import/export

• Import: Word (ODF too?), picture (OCR), unconverted Word (with a previewer; not that faithful)
• Export: ODT, PDF, RTF, text, Word, HTML

Localisation

• Language selection (for spellchecking and translation)
• Translate document
• Personal dictionary
• Customisable character replacement ((c) => ©)

Collaboration

Going Wave!

• Live commenting (impressive) with mail alerts and @mentions
• Real-time collaboration
• Advanced access control
• Revisions

Layout

• Ruler
• Indent/outdent
• Freefloating pictures

Others

• Equation (not calculation; just writing; LaTeX alternative, MathML?)
• Completely full screen possible (browser full screen + hide ruler + two time hide command + hide warning bar). WriteRoom beware!
• Statistics (word counting, signs counting)

Regrets

• Still no offline browsing :(

Multipage selection buggy on Google Contacts

Copy-and-paste from my writing at Google Help forum.

Summary: if you want to do an operation on contacts scattered on multiple pages, you may run into problems — so move to 250 contacts per page (the maximum).

Say you have 75 contacts. You configured Gmail to have only 50 contacts per page. Consequently, your contacts will be splitted in two pages (1-50 on page 1 and 51-75 on page 2).

Now, you want to export 4 contacts. 3 of them are on page 1, the fourth one is on page 2. You can check the fourth boxes; Google Contacts (or is Chrome? Or is it OS X?) remembers which boxes you checked for every page, which is good… and bad, because it will spread confusion, read further.

The problem arises when you want to export these contacts. Click on export and select “Selected Contacts”. If you were on page 1 when you asked for exportation, the counter will tell you there is 3 contacts to export. If you were on page 2, it will tell you there is 1 contact to export. This is because, even if Google Contacts/Chrome/OS X is able to remember the checked boxes, the script for actually counting the selected contacts is not able to remember.

Unfortunately, this is not just a display bug. It will export the contacts on the page, not the whole selection!

Worse, the same bug happens with group creation. If the contacts you want to select are on different pages, Google Contacts will only add the contacts on the active page into the group. So, if you want to add contacts from different pages to one group, you have to select all contacts on one page, add them to the group, move to the next page and start the process again.

Now, there are two questions here:
- What is responsible for the “remember checked boxes across pages”, interface-level, behaviour? Chrome or OS X (so, unrelated to Google Contacts) or Google Contacts itself? In other words, is this behaviour an artifact or a part of the problem?
- The script-level lack of memory at the across pages has to be fixed.

Two interfaces for contacts

There are two contacts interfaces, with different features:

• the “embedded one”, which is default for Google personal, is the most powerful and is the one I recommend.
  Address is: https://mail.google.com/mail/#contacts
• the “dedicated one”, which is default for Google Apps and has less features (no exporting of individual address). Until recently (12th of April 2011?), it was the only one available for Google Apps (one reason why I wrote that Google Apps standard may be less interesting than Google Apps personal). Fortunately, you can now switch to the one above, the “embedded one” (you can access the dedicated interface with Gmail regular too, but why bother?).
  Address is: https://www.google.com/contacts/?tab=mC

Be sure to use the first one. It is more powerful and is keyboard shortcut-compatible (provided you activated the shortcut in settings, you can compose a new mail by hitting c with the embedded interface, something you cannot do with the dedicated interface. Plus, it is simpler for Gmail user, because this is what they know the best. Really, there is only two good thing to consider:

• Its three-panel layout
• Newly-created contacts default to the selected group. In Gmail regular, newly created contact default to My Contacts, which make it hard to properly organize contacts.

Again: don’t use the dedicated interface.

I asked for a merge at Google Help forum, where Google employees wander and sometimes honour requests.

Maximum attachment size in Gmail

Maximum attachment size in Gmail is 25 Mb. I don’t know if included image (with the right lab feature) images count towards this limit (I guess it does). This size limit may actually be lower for two reasons (out of inserted images):

• Technical reasons
• The recipient doesn’t accept attachments that big

(source)

List of Google employees posting on the Help forum

By checking where they posted, you have better chances to get authoritative answers. This list is destined to grow.

• Teresa C., Google Docs Community Manager
• Michelle
• Cody W., Chat Guide
• Bin, Google mobile tech support
• Jules H.
• Brandon L., Staff Software Engineer

Employee leaving: remove access to all documents in Google Docs

If you use Google Apps, you should share document at domain level (or better yet at OU level if you use Google Apps Premier or Education). Then deactivating the user would prevent access in a breeze.

I yo do not use Google Apps but only a collection of Google personal accounts (that’s my case and I don’t like Google Apps that much, but again, I do not manage thousands of users), then you can use this trick to find all the documents the employee used to have access to.

to:ex-employee@gmail.com

The beauty of this second solution is that it also proves useful for Google Apps: an external contractor may need occasional access to internal documents. With this search operator, the contractor can be unauthorized too (deactivating account would not have work since the contractor was not an employee firsthand).

works Kudos to Google employee Teresa C. who alse pointed to search operators for Google Docs.

Fixed-with font for text/plain email in Gmail

There used to be a lab for fixed-with font for text/plain in Gmail, but it had been removed. This is really a shame.

You can complain here: Default font for plain text message

Meanwhile, you can also install a Chrome extension: Fixed width text in Gmail™. You can then change the particular fixed-with font in Chrome preference (direct link for Chrome users), but beware: it will apply to every website, not Gmail only.
Coupled with extension synchronization, this is a passable solution. It will still not work for mobile access. It is not worth a native lab, but that’s all we have…

In order to optimize the chance of being reading, I also opened an issue at Gmail’s help forum. Maybe Sara Goetz will read me.

Coding Horror: HTML in Gmail

I am OK with badly written HTML on a daily basis if I have to. But a signature is something one has time crafting properly. And so, I would like to be able to create a clean HTML signature. Plus, experience told me that even the signature is not that clean when copied and pasted from a mail. Pure HTML is so much better.

I WANT to be able to instert my HTML signature in code way, not WYSIWYG way!

Not convinced? See for yourself:

First the result:

David Latapie

Informatique
Email : david.latapie@adnfrance.org
Agence du don en nature — 35, avenue d’Eylau 75116 Paris

Standard : 01 76 21 10 50 | web: http://adnfrance.org

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Pensez à l'environnement : n'imprimez ce courriel que si nécessaire.

Then the clean code:

<div><img src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/20188079/LOGO-ADN-sig.jpg" height="55" width="96"></div></div>
<address> style="font-style:normal";<strong>David Latapie<br />
Informatique
Email : <a href="mailto:david.latapie@adnfrance.org" style="color:#36F">david.latapie@adnfrance.org</a>
Agence du don en nature — 35, avenue d’Eylau 75116 Paris<br />
Standard : 01 76 21 10 50 | web: <a href="http://adnfrance.org/" style="color:#36F" target="_blank">http://adnfrance.org</a><br />
<a href="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/20188079/ADNImpact/ADNImpact-2011-03.pdf" target="_blank" style="color:#C3C">Vous n'avez pas lu notre dernière newsletter ? Cliquez ICI !</a><br />
<br />
Pensez à l'environnement : n'imprimez ce courriel que si nécessaire.</strong>

Then (beware), Gmail’s horrible code:

<img src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/20188079/LOGO-ADN-sig.jpg" height="55" width="96"></div>
</b></span></span></div></b></span></div></b></span></div></b></span></span></div></b></span></span></div></b></span></div></b></span></div></b></span></span></div></b></span></span></div></b></span></div></div></b></span></span></div>
</b></span></div></b></span></div></b></span></span></div></b></span></span></div></b></span></div></b></span></div></b></span></span></div></b></span></span></div></b></span></div><div style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-family: arial; border-collapse: separate; font-weight: normal;"><b><div style="display: inline ! important;">
<span style="border-collapse: collapse; font-family: arial,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13px; font-weight: normal;"><b><div style="display: inline ! important;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 13px;"><b><div style="display: inline ! important;">
<span style="font-weight: normal;"><b><div style="display: inline ! important;"><span style="font-family: arial; border-collapse: separate; font-weight: normal;"><b><div style="display: inline ! important;"><span style="border-collapse: collapse; font-family: arial,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13px; font-weight: normal;"><b><div style="display: inline ! important;">
<span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 13px;"><b><div style="display: inline ! important;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><b><div style="display: inline ! important;"><span style="font-family: arial; border-collapse: separate; font-weight: normal;"><b><div style="display: inline ! important;">
<span style="border-collapse: collapse; font-family: arial,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13px; font-weight: normal;"><b><div style="display: inline ! important;"><div style="display: inline ! important;"><span style="font-family: arial; border-collapse: separate; font-weight: normal;"><b><div style="display: inline ! important;">

<span style="border-collapse: collapse; font-family: arial,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13px; font-weight: normal;"><b><div style="display: inline ! important;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 13px;"><b><div style="display: inline ! important;">
<span style="font-weight: normal;"><b><div style="display: inline ! important;"><span style="font-family: arial; border-collapse: separate; font-weight: normal;"><b><div style="display: inline ! important;"><span style="border-collapse: collapse; font-family: arial,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13px; font-weight: normal;"><b><div style="display: inline ! important;">
<span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 13px;"><b><div style="display: inline ! important;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><b><div style="display: inline ! important;"><span style="font-family: arial; border-collapse: separate; font-weight: normal;"><b><div style="display: inline ! important;">
<span style="border-collapse: collapse; font-family: arial,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13px; font-weight: normal;"><b><div style="display: inline ! important;">David Latapie</div></b></span></span></div></b></span></div></b></span></div>
</b></span></span></div></b></span></span></div></b></span></div></b></span></div></b></span></span></div></b></span></span></div></b></span></div></div></b></span></span></div></b></span></div></b></span></div></b></span></span></div>
</b></span></span></div></b></span></div></b></span></div></b></span></span></div></b></span></span></div></b></span></div><div style="font-weight: bold;">Informatique</div><div style="font-weight: bold;">Email : <a href="mailto:david.latapie@adnfrance.org" style="color: rgb(17, 37, 8);" target="_blank"><font color="#3366FF">david.latapie@adnfrance.org</font></a></div>
<div style="font-weight: bold;">Agence du don en nature — 35, avenue d’Eylau 75116 Paris</div><div style="font-weight: bold;">Standard : 01 76 21 10 50 | web: <a href="http://adnfrance.org/" target="_blank"><font color="#3366FF">http://adnfrance.org</font></a></div>
<div style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-family: arial; border-collapse: separate; font-weight: normal;"><b><div><span style="border-collapse: collapse; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-weight: normal;"><div><div style="display: inline ! important;">
<b><a href="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/20188079/ADNImpact/ADNImpact-2011-03.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#CC33CC">Vous n'avez pas lu notre dernière newsletter ? Cliquez ICI !</font></a></b></div></div></span></div></b></span></div>

<div style="font-weight: bold;"><br></div></span></span></div></span></div></div><span style="font-size: 10pt; color: black; font-weight: bold;"><div style="display: inline ! important;">Pensez à l'environnement : n'imprimez ce courriel que si nécessaire.</div>

Still with me? Please Google, do something! It is not just a matter of aesthetics or bandwith: It also made it very hard or even impossible to manage HTML signature for all employees in my company!

Gmail’s Autoresponder doesn’t support HTML Signature

Autoresponder sends mail in plain text, regardless of the format set up in settings. As a consequence, HTML signature appears badly.

Consider this (rendered result):

*Stéphanie Goujon
Déléguée Générale
web: http://www.adnfrance.org

**
Vous n'avez pas lu notre dernière newsletter ? Cliquez ICI
!<http://dl.dropbox.com/u/20188079/ADNImpact/ADNImpact-2011-03.pdf">

Instead of this (expected result):

Stéphanie Goujon
web: http://www.adnfrance.org

Vous n'avez pas lu notre dernière newsletter ? Cliquez ICI !

Google Motion, the body as an input device, Google’s way

• Microsoft’s Kinect brought bodily interface to gaming.
• Google’s Motion will hopefully do the same for working à la Minority Report

(announcement)

It’s an April’s Fool, but I would not be surprised they are working on the real thing!