ath3na's talking points

So it's been a while - I know. That's what I get for being a bit of a workaholic. On with the tech...

So I've been in search for way to have multiple signatures in Gmail. Those of you that have kept up with my blogging, or know me at all, know that I absolutely love Gmail - and pretty much all things Google. Google is in the process of creating what you may call Gmail "addons" through Gmail Labs; but even labs does not provide the ability to have mutliple signatures. Now you may ask - why is this so important? Well, I currently have 5 email accounts automatically forwarded to my primary Gmail account, and I've set up the ability to email "from" those accounts within that primary Gmail account. With that being said, I have a lot of comings in and out from that account, and I don't want a professional email signature on my personal emails and so forth. Hopefully this all makes sense.

In my search I found one such Firefox addon that does a pretty nice job of allowing me to have multiple signatures depending on the address I choose to mail from. The Blank Canvas Gmail Signatures Firefox extension is still considered "experimental" by Mozilla, but its usability makes it far from experimental in my book. Create your signatures for each email address you mail from, and voila... now every time you select that email address to mail from, the signature will automagically be inserted into your email for you. And as a bonus - the Blank Canvas Gmail Signatures has full HTML support for your signatures.

It's one of the few extensions that I couldn't do without. More on that later... for now, go download the Blank Canvas Gmail Signatures Firefox extension... if you have as many email accounts forwarded to one as I do... and a need for signatures for all of them... you'll love this extension!

Also - I should say that this extension is far better than the bookmarklets that I posted about last time. Bookmarklets are still pretty awesome... but as for signatures, this extension is the best solution around. See how long I've been in search for such greatness though?!

Wikipedia:

In case you don't know, <3 leet speak symbol for heart. The "i<3" (I heart) phenomenon was spread mostly with the mass sale of the I<3NY t-shirts and has since become much more commonly used.

I'm a huge fan of Google, which you may already know from some of my other posts (My Life With Google, Part I; My Life With Google, Part II). I'm also a big fan of the blog Makeuseof, who made me aware of these nifty features of Google that I didn't know about previously.

So, if you didn't already love Google, for their wonderful advancements in internet search, web mail, calendars, or rss readers, then here's something that's sure to make you love them:

• GOOG-411
  You dial up 1-800-GOOG-411 (1-800-466-4411) from any (US) phone. After you get a friendly Google hello you follow the voice prompts which are extremely intuitive.
  Start by saying your city and state. You hear the Google engines spinning in the background and then you will be prompted to say what business listing you want (pizzeria, repair shop, Burger King, etc.). They understood me every time even when I put on various accents. I had previously tried out 800-free-411 and they never understood me - it was infuriating!
  Now Goog411 will also complete your call for you FOR FREE or send you a text message FOR FREE with your listing, a link to their website, a link to a map and directions or any other information they have. For a list of all the commands check out this page here. This is all easily save-able on your mobile. The service is still in its beta stages and currently has NO ads! Suck it up while you can this is the way most services will be going in the near future. If you are interested in seeing a video demo go to GOOG411 on MUO Directory.
  Goog411 currently only works from the US
• Google SMS
  Just save 466453 “Google” into your phone and text it with your query and Google will hit you back with all sorts of free information. How about dictionary definitions, calculations, curency exchange rates or movie listings (Google SMS -All Features). Give it a shot - its free minus the cost of the text messages of course.
  To try it out via the web go here. It's super easy and could be fantastically wonderful when you're out of town or out on the town and need some quick information.

So, whatya think now? Love Google more, less? Let me know in the comments.

If you haven't read my previous post on the Google Services, I posted it several days ago, you can read it here. I'd like to continue my discussion of Google Apps by discussing Google Calendar (GCal).

Now, I haven't had GCal nearly as long as Gmail, mostly because it didn't exist until about a year ago (I think). I've only been using it myself since around September. Since then, though, I've discovered it to be one of the greatest of the Google tools.

Not only is this your typical calendar, where you can add events and keep track of your life, you can also share these events with your friends. Now this may seem like a simple detail, but it essentially takes the place of websites such as Evite, or any of the other popular e-party invitation sites. It can also be as simple as confirming a get-together between friends, or a dinner with family. If they respond with yes, no, or maybe, you can more easily plan for what and who to expect.

Now there's also the ability to add, share, and search for additional calendars to add to your own. The way Google handles these additional calendars is by allowing them to be completely separate from your personal calendar, and checkable so that you can check whether you want it to be displayed or not. This could be quite useful for friends calendars and such where they may have a lot of events added to theirs as well, and you may only want to see what they've got going on occasionally. You can tell these apart from your other calendars by the color of the text. You select a color for the calendar, and their text displays in the color of your choosing.

I mentioned that you can share and search for calendars, and by this I mean quite literally that you can share and search for calendars. You can allow your friends and family access to your calendar, giving them the ability to see what you have added to your calendar and essentially what you've got going on. The search capability can be quite useful. I'll give an example to illustrate my point. I am an alumni of UNC Charlotte (who's Computer program is recognized by the Department of Defense -- a sidenote =) and still have friends who attend the university. I am interested in the school's calendar and what date's the semesters end and such because I can more easily keep up with my friends by knowing this. It would be useful for me to have these dates on my own personal calendar that I can view whenever I want, with very little effort--checking of a box, aamof. So how did I achieve this, you ask, without having to put tons of effort into entering and editing the calendar myself? Well, I logged into my GCal, and clicked Settings > Calendars > and Add Calendar at the bottom of the window. By typing in UNC Charlotte as my search string, I got 128 results. By the descriptions I could tell that most of them are not what I'm looking for, but the one labeled UNCC Academic Calendar, that's the one that will get the job done. I add this calendar to my collection and select the green that most closely resembles our school color and I can now view the school dates any time I like. Nifty, eh?! I'd say so.

One of the most wonderful things about this GCal is it's reminders. I've set things up in such a way that when there's a chance I may forget an event, I have it send me a reminder, usually a day in advance. Now, I don't spend quite all of my time in front of a computer, though some of my friends may argue that point, I do in fact spend a nice chunk of my time at a computer. The majority of that time, I have my gmail open, so I check it way more frequently than I probably should. This has proven a perfect way to have setup my life, if you will. As long as I check my e-mail with some frequency, I will know what I have scheduled for the days, weeks, etc. GCal will even send you a daily agenda, if you so wish, though I find this to be a bit redundant, because I will certainly remember the days I have to work, and other consistent events that I have added to my calendar.

I recently decided to try out a service called Remember the Milk (RTM). This is a description of their service, in their own words:

Managing tasks is generally not a fun way to spend your time. We created Remember The Milk so that you no longer have to write your to-do lists on sticky notes, whiteboards, random scraps of paper, or the back of your hand. Remember The Milk makes managing tasks an enjoyable experience.

Something I'd like to mention is RTM's ability to integrate seamlessly into GCal. You can add the RTM calendar to your GCal and a little checkmark will appear above each day, which you can click and add different tasks to for that day. It's quite useful, if only I could remember to keep up with RTM, my tasks wouldn't have to be stored in memory (my personal memory).

If you can't already tell, I'm particularly enthusiastic about the Google Apps, and have been for quite some time now. Next time, I'll discuss the Google App, Documents & Spreadsheets, and how much easier this could make your life. If you've enjoyed my take on GCal or Gmail, please let me know by leaving a comment, or just leave a comment anyway, whether you liked it or not, 'cause I know I'd sure like it. =D

So I've decided that since Google has infiltrated my life as it has, that I should devote a little time to sharing, what I consider, the magical wonderful goodness that is Google Apps.

Now, when you say Google Apps, many utilities are implied. I intend to go over these mostly individually. We'll start with Gmail. So let us begin...

Gmail is the e-mail that ended all other e-mails. It began as being a geek elitist sort of e-mail, because it was invitation only, you had to know someone to be one of the privileged to get one of these babies. I, being the uber-geek I have become, received a Gmail account only a few short months after its conception. It took a little while to spread, at least in its first days. But ever since it has become one of the most treasured freebies on the net. (I should add that it is not invitation only anymore and it is now open to the public. You too can get a Gmail account by going here. I will be more than happy to invite you as well, should you want an invitation just e-mail me at rainbowCipher {at} gmail {dot} com.)

I, personally, had several e-mail accounts previously. I had a Hotmail account, a Yahoo! account, and my school e-mail. I primarily used my Hotmail but was displeased with its spam filtering. I despised having to sift through the hundreds upon thousands of spam messages because the spam filter was so laughably robust that unless you added your new friends e-mail address to your address book, their e-mail was imprisoned by the spam filter, to soon be deleted. I wasn't too excited about the interface of Yahoo!, so I guess you could say I was in the market for something new.

I received my glorious invitation from a friend, who had a friend, who had a - well you get the point - and created my account right-away. I decided to pick an e-mail address that I could use for a long time, something that could be both serious, easy, and uncomplicated. I chose my first name and last name separated by a period. I know, I should have used my avatar, but I created a separate account for my avatar and had all mail forwarded to it to my main account, where I could send mail masked as my avatar.

The things I liked the most about Gmail were the same that everyone liked most about Gmail. I loved the ever-growing extra storage (almost 3gb now), the ability to use filters to separate your mail into different labels before you ever see them, and then labels themselves. Labels are Google's approach to folders. You can apply multiple labels to an e-mail, and have certain mail automatically archived. This is the greatest invention since VoIP, if you ask me.

I've recently found a couple of Firefox extensions (if you don't use Firefox yet, you definitely should, it's exponentially better than IE even on a bad day) that makes the 'ole so wonderful Gmail, as well as using any of the Google Apps, even better. Is that even possible, you say? Well, as amazing as it may sound, yes.

I got the first extension from Lifehacker, so who better to explain it's purpose, than Lifehacker itself... check out the article here, or just read below:

Gmail's good, but it could be better. We've featured several Greasemonkey scripts that enhance Gmail in lots of different ways - like adding saved searches, attachment icons, label colors, keyboard macros, a filter assistant and right-click conversation previews. But not everyone wants to install Greasemonkey and hunt down all those scripts.

To save you the time, I've compiled the best Greasemonkey scripts for Gmail into one handy Firefox extension, called Better Gmail. After the jump, put your Gmail on steroids with Better Gmail.

Better Gmail Firefox extension

Version: 0.3
Released: April 16, 2007
Updated: April 19, 2007
Creator: Gina Trapani, using scripts by Mihai Parparita and others, compiled using Anthony Lieuallen's Greasemonkey Compiler.

License: Better Gmail is licensed under the Mozilla Public License; all included scripts copyright their original authors.

What it does: Adds a menu of optional extra features to Gmail.

A fantastic video of what this handy little extension can do for you can be found here. You can download the extension here. I highly recommend this extension because it adds some basic and advanced functionality to Gmail, and it has a handy little menu to let you see the shortcuts and such so it's easy to learn the new stuff. It's advanced enough for the expert, but easy enough for the novice.

The other extension I highly recommend is called CustomizeGoogle. And quite simply (taken from the Customize Google website):

CustomizeGoogle is a Firefox extension that enhances Google search results by adding extra information (like links to Yahoo, Ask.com, MSN etc) and removing unwanted information (like ads and spam).

Since getting CustomizeGoogle, I've learned to love Google even more, which is something I thought wasn't possible. You can download CustomizeGoogle here.

Well, I've probably written too much already, though I could go on-and-on about my love for Gmail, but for now I'll leave you to experiment with your new Firefox extensions that I know you'll love. And again I add, if you don't already use Firefox, please, go now to www.GetFirefox.com and download it. The web is not done justice without Firefox. These are my words of wisdom for today, take care. Next time I'll discuss my love for Google Calendar, so stay tuned, I know you're dying for my opinion. =D