Android 2.2 has a cool service for sending messages to phones: Android Cloud to Device Messaging. "The service provides a simple, lightweight mechanism that servers can use to tell mobile applications to contact the server directly, to fetch updated application or user data."

A simple way to use this service is to send a link from your browser to an Android device. Chrome to Phone is a Chrome extension that makes this possible, assuming that you also install an Android application on your phone. The extension has been recently updated and you can use it to send links, phone numbers and text from web pages.

There's also an unofficial Firefox extension called "Send to phone", which offers similar features. The Firefox extensions adds an option to the contextual menu, so you don't have to click on the toolbar button to send some text.



Some things you can try:
* send a Google Maps link and the Google Maps app from your phone should handle it
* send a link to a YouTube video and the video should start playing on your phone
* copy a phone number from a web page and send it to your phone
* copy a short text from a web page (<1KB) and send it to your phone's clipboard.

Note that you need a device that uses Android 2.2 (Froyo), which is officially available for Nexus One, HTC Evo and HTC Desire. Motorola Droid will be updated to Froyo starting from next week, while other phones will be updated in the coming months.

Integrated Gmail is a Firefox extension that adds Google Calendar and Google Reader to Gmail's interface. It's a simple way to switch between the three Google services without opening multiple tabs.

The extension is customizable, so you can add other Google services, reorder them and delete the ones you don't use. The interface for each service loads in a collapsible box and it's preloaded when you open Gmail.


You can add events or check your agenda while composing messages, read your feeds and chat with your friends from the same interface or copy some text from an email to a notebook.

The extension is not perfect, it might slow down browsing, but it's an interesting experiment and a good starting point for an official unified interface for Google's services. iGoogle, Google's iPhone interface and the support for gadgets in Gmail show that this idea has a great potential.

The word processor from Google Docs lacks a sorting feature for tables, but Firefox users can try an extension that adds the missing feature. Install TableTools, the best extension for managing tables, restart the browser and open the document that includes tables.

To use the extension, you need to right-click on the table and select one of the available options: sorting, filtering, copying data as tab-delimited text or as HTML. Google Docs replaces Firefox's contextual menu, so it's necessary to press Shift + Right-click in order to bring back the original menu. Select from the menu "Sort table column as" and choose the appropriate data type.


If you want to copy a table from Google Docs to Google Spreadsheets, select the cells, choose from the contextual menu: "Other table operations < Copy as tab-delimited text", and paste the text in a spreadsheet using Ctrl+V. Unfortunately, the filtering feature from TableTools doesn't work in a rich-text editor, but it's very useful if you visit a web page that includes long tables.

Depending on the number of subscriptions, if you don't visit Google Reader for 2-3 days, your reading list will have hundreds of new items. Google Reader doesn't provide a way to filter the items that are most relevant to you, so the best idea is to read the new posts from your favorite blogs and then go to "all items" in list view.

Another idea is to use the AideRSS extension for Firefox to restrict the reading list to the most popular items. AideRSS uses some arbitrary data that could measure the popularity of a post: the number of comments, Google Blog Search backlinks, del.icio.us bookmarks or the number of votes at Digg and reddit. All these values are used to calculate PostRank, a number from 1 to 10 that tells the popularity of a post among all the posts from the same feed.

Once you install the extension (or just the Greasemonkey script), AideRSS adds the PostRank value next to the title of each post and lets you filter the most popular posts. If you select a folder or switch to the "all items" view, AideRSS adjusts the ranking values based on the context.


While AideRSS has an interesting approach to deal with information overload, PostRank is not a great measure to determine if a post is popular, since it relies on a small number of arbitrary signals. It's also useless for recent posts and it's biased against popular sites. The extension may slow down your browser if you have many subscriptions.

AideRSS also integrates with NewsGator and it lets you subscribe to the most popular posts from a feed: best posts from Google Operating System or from an OPML file.

{ via AideRSS Blog }

Ryan Wagner from CyberNet News developed CyberSearch, a Firefox extension that lets you see Google results in the address bar. The extension adds new functionality to Firefox 3's address bar, which already shows bookmarks and other pages from your web history.

By default, CyberSearch is a little inefficient: it performs web searches as you type in the address bar and it shows Google's search results after the local results obtained by Firefox. If you type one or two letters, it's likely that the address bar will only show suggestions from your local history. For more precise queries, you should mostly see Google results. In the example below, I only had to type [new sci] to directly access New Scientist.


If you usually type your queries in Firefox's address bar, you know that sometimes Firefox sends you to the top result for your keywords (e.g.: enter [new scientist]), while in most cases you're sent to the list of search results (e.g.: the ambiguous [scientist]). CyberSearch is redundant for many navigational searches since the top results is the only one that matters and Google sends you to the top result anyway.

But there's a way to trigger the list of search results only when you need it: start your query with the special keyword "goog". Enable keywords in the options (Tools > CyberSearch Options), where you can add your own keywords that trigger results from specialized search engines like Google News or restrict the results to a single domain. For example, I added the keyword "gos" that shows Google results from this blog:


To only show search results when you start your query with a special keyword, go to Tools > CyberSearch Options, and check:

[x] Enable keywords
[x] Show only search results when a keyword is recognized
[x] Don't perform a search unless a keyword has been typed

It's difficult to determine if a result is useful without reading some snippets from the web page, so CyberSearch is great when you want to re-find specific pages from familiar sites.

This extension is based on Searchery and the same idea is used in Inquisitor, a Mac application recently acquired by Yahoo.

Other ways to search more effectively from your browser:
* Outsource Firefox's keywords to YubNub
* Tips for Google Toolbar
* Link to a page using Google AJAX Search

If you use Google Toolbar for Firefox only because you like the bookmarking feature, there's a much better option: GMarks. While there are other extensions that provide an interface for Google Bookmarks, John Marshall's GMarks adds a lot of value to Google's basic bookmarking service.

GMarks can display the bookmarks almost the same as Firefox's native bookmarks: in a separate menu and in the sidebar. There's also a dropdown that can be added to Firefox's toolbars. The sidebar is useful when you want to perform full-text searches in your bookmarks without having to visit Google's site, while the GMark menu has an excellent option for managing bookmarks. If you click on "Organize bookmarks", you'll be able to import bookmarks, edit or delete bookmarks and create Gmail-like filters. For example, you can automatically add the label Google for any bookmark from this blog.


The extension can show the number of bookmarks for each label, a list of recent bookmarks and the most frequently visited bookmarks. To bookmark a page, use the familiar shortcut Ctrl+D or the GMarks menu.

One of the most frequent user requests for Google Bookmarks is nested labels and GMarks uses a little trick to simulate hierarchical labels: separate the labels with >. For example, if you want to label a bookmark as Shopping and Comparison, where Comparison is a sublabel of Shopping, just enter Shopping>Comparison when you create the bookmark. Since Google Bookmarks doesn't support this feature, the labels will appear to be nested only in GMarks.

And the cool features don't stop here: the extension suggests labels based on the web page's title, you can hide the bookmarks that have certain labels and there's an option for integrating the starred items from Google Reader.

Since the last time when I wrote about GMarks, the extension added the most interesting ideas implemented by the "competition" and managed to become THE Google Bookmarks extension. If there's anything that could be added, maybe it would be useful to completely replace Firefox's bookmarking system by hiding all the interface elements related to the native bookmarks and replicating all the changes to Google Bookmarks locally.

{ Thanks, Dr. Azrael Tod. }

After Google announced that Browser Sync will no longer be updated and will stop working at the end of the year, many people looked for an alternative. The closest project to Browser Sync is Mozilla Weave, a Firefox extension that synchronizes local data from your browser with a server so you can access your data from multiple computers. Unfortunately, Weave is still an experimental prototype, so it can be buggy and unreliable.

Weave 0.2 has been released today and it supports new data types: cookies, passwords, saved form data and sessions, in addition to bookmarks and browsing history. After installing the extension and restarting Firefox, you need to create an account and enter a key used for encryption.


Unlike Browser Sync, Weave doesn't synchronizes data in real-time. "After the initial data transfer is completed during setup, Weave connects to the server periodically when it accumulates enough changes that need syncing or when enough time has passed since the last sync (at least once every 20 minutes if any data has changed). Weave also syncs when you start Firefox, when you quit it, and when you click on the "Sync Now" button in the Weave menu or the preferences."

It's worth mentioning that browser data sync is just one of the components that will be included in Weave. "As the Web continues to evolve and more of our lives move online, we believe that Web browsers like Firefox can and should do more to broker rich experiences while increasing user control over their data and personal information. Weave is the Mozilla Labs' project to develop a coherent framework and platform for deeply integrating online services with the browser."

Opera users can already synchronize bookmarks and notes using a feature included in the latest version of the browser. If you only need to synchronize your bookmarks, migrate to an online bookmarking service like del.icio.us, Google Bookmarks, or install plug-ins like Foxmarks (Firefox), Zinmko (Firefox / IE), that synchronize bookmarks and provide a web interface where you can access and share your bookmarks.

TableTools is a Firefox extension that lets you sort, filter and export tables from any web page. After installing the extension and restarting Firefox, find a web page that includes tables (this search might help) and right-click on a table to find a lot of interesting features:

* sort a column, depending on the type of elements (text, numbers, dates)
* filter the rows of a table by selecting elements from a drop-down or by entering your search terms, like in the screenshot below. You can even enter regular expression to filter more complex patterns. After typing the query, press Enter or click outside the active input box.
* export the entire table as tab-delimited text, HTML code or just the filtered rows


This might be helpful if you want to insert some partial data from a table in a document, a site or in Google Spreadsheets, which only supports filtering using a limited gadget. For Google Spreadsheets, choose the option to copy the rows as tab-delimited text.

If you ever start to type a comment on a blog and you realize that the textarea is very small and it doesn't have any of the powerful features from your favorite text editor, you should try It's All Text, a Firefox extension that makes the transition between any textarea and your text editor. The extension adds a small Edit button below the textarea that copies the existing text in a temporary file and it launches Notepad or any other text editor installed on your computer. When you save the file, its content is automatically added to the textarea, so you don't have to use copy-paste.


In case you don't need a text editor, but some comment boxes are way too small, this Greasemonkey script lets you resize them, by dragging a small icon. Another good option is to use the Resizeable Textarea Firefox extension. This bookmarklet should work in most browsers, but you need to click on the bookmark before resizing a textarea.


Somebody suggested that every comment box should be a Google Docs-like rich text editor, but until popular blogging engines support tables and image uploading, Flickr Rich Edit adds some simple editing options for those who don't want to type HTML tags. The Greasemonkey script works only for Flickr's comment boxes by default, but you can add the options to any textarea by replacing http://*flickr.com/* with * in the list of included pages.

Zemanta is not as powerful as the imaginary Google Writer envisioned last year for April Fools Day. It's a tool that helps bloggers writer better articles by suggesting related content from the web. You need to install a Firefox extension and it automatically shows related images, blog posts and Wikipedia articles next to the post editor. The nice thing is that Zemanta dynamically adjusts the suggestions as you add more content, but the suggested links aren't always helpful, as you can see in the screenshot below:


Zemanta suggests that the algorithm for finding recommended content is complicated, but it seems to rely mostly on identifying concepts and proper nouns. "We analyze your post through our proprietary natural language processing and semantic algorithms, and statistically compare its context framework to our preindexed database of other content."

The tool should do a better job at detecting the important keywords from the text and should allow users to provide feedback for the suggested links. For now, it's a pretty cool way to find blog posts related to your articles, but I wouldn't be surprised if this will evolve into a clever blog editor.

Related articles

• A content suggestion engine for blogging? That could work... [via Zemanta]
• Zementa Brings a Semantic Layer to Your Blog [via Zemanta]

PicLens is a browser add-on that detaches the images from a web page and lets you explore them in interesting ways. The add-on, which is available for Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari, works for a small number of sites: image search engines and photo sharing sites, as it requires to understand the structure of a web page.

PicLens is a great way to visualize the results from Google Image Search as a never-ending list of thumbnails. Once you find an interesting photo, you can double-click on it and view it in full-screen. PicLens can also create slideshows from Google Image Search's results so you can enjoy Dali's paintings or Google's doodles.


For Picasa Web Albums, the slideshow doesn't include captions or file names, but it lets you navigate inside an album. The slideshow also works for Picasa Web's search results and it shows the images in full-screen.

gTranslate is a Firefox extension that lets you select some text from a web page and translate in another language. For short texts, you can read the translation in Firefox's contextual menu, but in most cases you'll have to click on the short preview to read the full translation. One of the most useful features is replacing the original text with the translation in text boxes. For example, you can write a reply to a post from Google Groups or compose a Blogger post in a language and instantly translate it to another language.

gTranslate uses Google Translate to perform the translations, so it supports the same language pairs.



Related:
System-wide translations using Enso
Google's translation bots

{ via μblog }

iGoogleBar is a Firefox extension that enhances Google's navigation bar by showing the number of unread Gmail messages (only from the inbox) and the number of unread posts in Google Reader. The extension also adds icons that open Google gadgets for each service so you can preview your Gmail inbox from Google Calendar or open a recent document from Google Notebook.

For example, in the screenshot below, I visit Google Docs, but I can see that there is a single new post in Google Reader, only two unread messages in my inbox and I can easily open a bookmark from Google Notebook.

Unfortunately, the new navigation bar is displayed after the page loads, it works only in Google's communication apps and it doesn't include the More dropdown. Another big drawback is that the extension is actually a Chickenfoot script that comes with its rendering engine, which is terribly slow. In fact, the extension's XPI file has 1 MB, almost the same as Google Toolbar for Firefox.


{ via Googlified }

Google Docs Bar (gDocsBar) is a Firefox extension that shows the list of documents from Google Docs in the sidebar. The extension has many features from Google's file explorer: you can search for a file, restrict the list to documents, spreadsheets or presentations and view a certain folder (the subfolders aren't yet supported).

A great feature that makes this extension more valuable is uploading files using drag and drop. Drag one or more files from Windows Explorer to the sidebar and they'll be uploaded in the background.

For those who are worried about security, the extension sends your credentials directly to Google and stores them in Firefox's password manager. After installing the extension, you can make the sidebar visible by going to View > Sidebar > Google Docs Bar. The sidebar will always show the list of documents and it's useful if you frequently use Google Docs.


Related:
Google sidebars for Firefox and Opera
Google Maps in your sidebar (Firefox extension)

{ via Firefox Facts }

A useful feature of Gmail Manager, a great Firefox extension that notifies you when you receive new Gmail messages, is that you can easily log in to a different Gmail account without entering the username and password: after adding your Gmail accounts and Google Apps accounts, select the account by right-clicking on the Gmail Manager icon in the status bar and then click on the icon.


Another way to easily switch between your Gmail accounts is the Google Account Multi-Login Greasemonkey script, but it stores the passwords in a non-secure way.

Hopefully, Google will add a feature that lets you link a main Google account with your other accounts and log in once to access all your Google accounts, like you can do in Windows Live Hotmail:


If you want to minimize the number of times you access your secondary Gmail accounts, forward all the messages to your main account and enable it to send messages using custom From: addresses.

There's so much Google in Remember The Milk, a popular task management service, that you may wonder why Google didn't acquire it. Remember The Milk has a simple interface, can show your tasks inside Google Calendar, Gmail, iGoogle, and makes your tasks available offline thanks to Google Gears.

The integration with Gmail is available only in Firefox (through an extension) and only in the new version of Gmail. "Remember The Milk for Gmail is a Firefox extension that allows you to manage your tasks in Gmail (complete, postpone, and edit tasks), add new tasks (and connect them with your emails, contacts, and Google Calendar events), automatically add tasks for starred messages or specific labels, and much more!" So you can add events to Calendar directly from Gmail, you can flag messages for follow-up and see which tasks are connected with a certain contact. You can also create tasks every time you star or label a message and let RTM to auto-complete tasks using names from your contact list or Google Calendar events.


"It happens to be the product that inspired us when we started building RTM back in 2004 -- that's right, the one and only Gmail. We've always thought it would be incredibly cool if you could manage your tasks alongside your mail -- and have your tasks know what's on your calendar and who your contacts are too," explained RTM's blog.

And Remember The Milk fits great in the landscape by using visual elements from Gmail Chat, Google Reader, by using even small features from Gmail (like undo) and creating a section for tasks in the settings. This is definitely the service that has the best integration with Google services and it looks so good in Gmail that it should be a part of Google's mail application.

Mini Map Sidebar is probably the greatest Firefox extension for maps and geographical information. Its simple interface hides a lot of powerful tools that help you find places directly from your browser's sidebar.

The sidebar lets you drag and drop addresses from the current web page, search the map, get the latitude/longitude, embed the map or send a link by email. It's also easy to switch from Google Maps to Yahoo Maps, Windows Live Local or Google Earth. You always have a list of recent addresses, so you can go back to another address with just a click or select them when you want to get directions.

The extension also adds two options in the contextual menu that let you open the selected address in the sidebar or in a new tab.

Other interesting features: geodiscovery (if a page has geotags, you can view the locations - for example: some Flickr photos), preview KML files before opening them in Google Earth, find places reviewed at Platial and Tagzania.

Overall, the extension is very useful if you need to map a lot of places and opening Google Maps in a new tab is too time-consuming.

Fire Uploader is a Firefox extension that lets you upload files to the most popular image/video/document sharing sites from a single interface. Most sites only let you upload a file at a time, but in Fire Uploader you can just drag and drop all the files from a folder.

The extension supports YouTube, Flickr, Picasa Web Albums, Webshots, Box.net, Omnidrive, Facebook, but the author plans to add more sites.

For Picasa Web Albums, you can see the existing albums, create new albums, upload and download photos and delete some of them. While the option to upload photos is also available in Picasa, this extension lets you manage the online photos in an interface similar to a file manager or an FTP client. Note that all the albums created from the extension are public, but you can change that from Picasa Web Albums.



You can also upload multiple videos to YouTube, backup your Flickr photos, download only some of the files from Picasa Web album and manage multiple accounts for a single site. The interface is pretty rough and there aren't too many options you can configure, but if there are so many powerful download managers, why not have an universal uploader for all the sites that store files in the "clouds"? The meaningless power of a single channel to the "cloud of half-promises and unseen miracles"*.

* From "Det sjunde inseglet" (available for free at Google Video)

BlogRovR is a Firefox extension that lets you browse the web guided by your favorite blogs. After you install the extension, you'll have the opportunity to enter a list of blogs (there are also predefined bundles of blogs) or import an OPML file from your feed reader. Everytime you visit a new web page, you'll a small box with snippets from the blog posts included in your list that link to the current page. For example, if you visit Google Video, you might see two surprisingly similar posts from TechCrunch and Mashable that discuss the problem of copyright infringement in online video sites and link to full-length movies available at Google Video:


You can configure from the toolbar how often BlogRovR's list shows up and even disable it when you don't want to see it.

This is a great way to cluster blog posts: visit the source of a news and you'll see a list of blogs that link to that page. It's also a method to see if one your favorite bloggers linked to your site.

Note: If this extension gives you a déjà vu feeling, then you know about Blogger Web Comments, a Firefox extension created by Google that "makes it easy to see what bloggers are saying about a page you're viewing". The difference is that Google's extension doesn't let you restrict the blogosphere to your favorite blogs.

Interclue is a Firefox extension that adds more information about a link when you hover over it. It's not that annoying as the famous Snap tooltip and it certainly provides much more information about the page. As you can see in the screenshot above, you need to hover over a link, and then over the site's favicon that appears next to the link. Interclue shows a preview of the page that includes most of the actual content, a thumbnail, information about the last update, the number of words, links, images, a tag cloud with the most popular del.icio.us tags. But the most impressive thing is that all this data loads almost instantly and it's actually useful, especially when you want to judge the quality of a search result (including if it returns a server error). The preview window can be resized and dragged around, but it disappears when you move your mouse unless you lock it.



When the link points to a file (for example, a PDF), Interclue shows its file size and the last modified date, as reported by the web server. This is useful if you don't have a fast Internet connection and you don't want to wait for an hour to download Adam Bosworth's speech about health. Fortunately, the file is quite small.



The previews are pretty clever: for example, the preview for a link to a YouTube video shows the actual video. The extension "tries to avoid doing any look-ahead operations on [links that produce side-effects] by avoiding links with certain keywords in their text and link (such as 'logout', 'delete', 'remove' and so on), and also by turning off Linkclues for internal links on secure sites, which are typically used for banking, ordering goods and services".

You'll find a lot of things you can change in the settings and also the options to disable the previews for certain domains. Overall, the extension takes a great concept from Cooliris and transforms into a brilliant tool.