In this episode, David and Katie cover the varied Google services now available.
Links of note Mailplane
Sparrow
Gmail
gmail Key Combos
Google Calendar
Busy Cal
Breevy
TextExpander Touch
Gruber on Going Flash-Free
Google Docs
FlashFrozen
Click to Flash
Jason Snell Workflow Show
RSS Show
Ars Article about RSS feeds
Picasa
Picasa Mac App
Picasa Plug In
Google Voice
Google Apps
Syncing Google Apps to your Mac
Google Privacy Center
CloudPull
Backupify
Mail Act-On
OmniFocus Screencasts
Rands in Repose
MCE Event
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I’ve been using The Gruber Method to get rid of Flash too. I deal with the essential content problem by keeping Chrome in my Dock and dragging addresses onto it. I’ll maybe try David’s Developer Menu tip and see if it’s easier. One problem to be aware of is that sometimes I open an address in Chrome and it doesn’t work because I’ve dragged the resulting “You don’t have Flash, you terrible person” message page and not the original. Hope that stops someone else making the same mistake!
First I would like to thank both of you for the awesome information. I have been listening for about 2 years now and enjoy and learn from every show.
In this podcast you mentioned there would be a link to an article on how to make Gmail / Imap and Mac Mail work better together so that there will be less folders in the sidebar. I do not see it in the links. Could you please steer me to this article?
Thanks again
Rick Stuve
Huntley, Il.
There’s another issue with using Gmail in Mail.app that the Gmail help article doesn’t cover…
All folders (for lack of a better term) are downloaded to your mac. This includes Archive, Trash, Spam, etc. Also, when you delete an email from Archive (“All Mail”), it doesn’t get sent to the trash.
Fixing this involves going into the Gmail labs and turning on “Advanced IMAP controls”. I haven’t done this in a while, and I turned it off to use Sparrow, but according to my notes:
Steps:
1. Go to Gmail webmail “Settings”
2. In “Labs” tab, turn on “Advanced IMAP controls”
3. In “Forwarding and POP/IMAP” settings for “Auto-Expunge”, set to “Do not automatically expunge messages”, and for “When a message is expunged from the last visible IMAP folder” set to “Immediately delete the message forever”
5. In “Labels” tab, uncheck the “Show in IMAP” all the folders/labels you don’t want sync’ed (all mail, trash, spam, etc)
Hi Katie and David, just found out that you guys talked about Breevy a bit in the podcast. Wanted to say thank you for taking the time to do so, it’s much appreciated!
- Patrick
Hi Katie and David,
I listen to you two quite religiously… I have a question about gmail. Is there anyway to see items in your inbox in alphabetical order? I find that that is the best way for me to find stuff, delete stuff, review stuff, etc., but I don’t find that I am able to do that in gmail as I can in mail.
Thanks for all your hard work on behalf of us mackies.
Susan
While I do NOT recommend Yahoo mail (lack of free IMAP is a deal breaker – sorry Yahoo), you can access in a IMAP like experience in the new Lion mail. It seems to work well, but since I really don’t use my yahoo mail address I haven’t really put it though it’s paces, but I’ve done enough to see that it does work.
Just an FYI for anyone interested.
Hi Katie, Hi David,
thanks for this interesting episode again!
As you may know, there’s also a portable version of breevy available that can be used from a USB-flashdrive or the WIN “Desktop” folder w/o the necessity of admin rights on the windows machine.
This is also the content of my blogpost and my audio contribution to Allisons awesome podcast at http://www.podfeet.com/wordpress/2011/09/25/331eudora-powerpc-upgrade-to-intel-silent-film-director-breevy-portable-enigma-project/.
Cheers,
Jans
I was delighted you decided to cover “Google.”
But there’s always a but . . .
It isn’t your fault that you didn’t have time to give more than the most superficial overview.
Take Gmail, which I use daily, and find nearly perfect for my needs. Far better than any of the “local” programs including Apple’s or Thunderbird. I even tried MailPlane and thought, “why?”
Google’s powerful SPAM FILTERS don’t let much through. What does crawl by are usually ad emails from online merchants (and BustBuy) who have my email address. I use Gmail’s filters to #1 mark such mail read and #2 drop it directly in the trash. With some care, I’ve even “trained” Gmail to let through BustBuy’s Reward Zone notices while sending the increasing amount of junk (No, BustBuy, I don’t want a new Windows Netbook) straight to trash.
Gmail (I’ve recently learned)includes powerful search options. I’m using the options to search date ranges, then use Google’s Label Function to tag emails with the date received, e.g., 2007/08. That means I can pull up a month of old emails, skim through, and delete most from my inbox/archive.
I know a lot of MacPowerUser listeners have iDevices. I did, too, but gave mine up for Android. My calendar, email, task lists, EVERYTHING, syncs right to each device, and I can edit everywhere. Much of that functionality can be had in iOS, but requires buying APPS.
It is dead easy to turn an email into a calendar entry, or a Google Task entry. I’ve never been let down by Google’s notification service, either. Every calendar entry I need to not miss sends me an email, a text message, and beeps my desktop if I’m at my computer.
I’ve shared Google Docs across the web and created a “standard” Google Apps account ($10 a year) so I could assign “clients” (relax, David, this isn’t deeply secure data) a Google email account in my own domain so we could jointly work on projects, then turned off the “client” account when the project was finished.
David, when you head up to Petaluma soon for the user group check in with Leo at his new Twit Brickhouse. TWIT.TV co-ordinates their many fast moving podcasts through Google Docs Spreadsheets. Allison interviewed Tom Merritt about exactly that. And they (mostly) use Macs —
A last word about Android. Where iOS has that kludgy connection (maybe to be improved away with iOS 5), I can plug my Android devices right into my Mac, and drop files over, no problem. Not that I much need to, what with much of what I’d need to transfer over in Google’s Cloud.
You did mention Picasa. I paid Google $20 for 80 GB of storage, dragged my pictures out of iPhoto into sensibly organized file folders, then let Picasa upload them. Now if the burglar raids my house and steals my gear, my pictures are still safe . . .
Tip: thanks for mentioning the Gmail keyboard shortcuts. I love keyboard shortcuts, and found the list on Google! I download the list, and am keeping it in Preview (minimized, but on my second monitor) while I train myself to use the shortcuts. You’re right, they could save boodles of time!
For the Develop menu solution for viewing a page in Chrome, I was using Keyboard Maestro to automate the launching. It doesn’t seem to work now that the Develop menu is showing the version so the menu item name isn’t consistent. I was going without Flash, but since I started watching my TV via the web streaming, I had to add it back so I could use it outside the browser (in apps like Boxee and Plex).
I hate that combined search/address bar in Chrome. Far too often, it does a search rather than taking me to the appropriate Web site. That’s a major reason I switched back to Safari after trying it for a few weeks. I use LaunchBar for all my searches these days anyway.
Oh, for things like keyboard shortcuts, I highly recommend using NerdTool (or GeekTool) to display a text file on the desktop. Brett also has a number of handy suggestions for other ways to use both. But, displaying keyboard shortcuts is something I love it for. Just save the list in a text file and point the program at the file and it will show up on your desktop.
For people who like chrome’s omnibar and want it in Safari, there’s a SIMBL plugin that works well:
http://hackemist.com/SafariOmnibar/
You mention that you don’t like having Google read your mail, but EVERY server that your mail passes through reads every word of it (and can store it indefinitely). That not only includes the server that you and your correspondents use (whether ISP, MobileMe, Gmail, Yahoo, or whatever) but all of the servers on the Internet that your mail passes through on the way (if you look at the raw format of an email, each of the “Received:” lines in the header represents one such server), which may include companies you’ve never heard of (and that you cannot choose to use or not use based on their privacy policies).
The only way to avoid this is to send and receive encrypted mail (using something like PGP). The servers still read the mail, but they can’t understand it.
Thanks for a useful podcast!
Here is the link to Lion Tweaks, When this program came out I changed my ICal and Address Book to plain grey. It took less than a minute.
http://ifredrik.com/applications/
A quick way to see the GMail keyboard shortcuts while in GMail is to press Shift and ?.
Thanks for the show!
In the feedback section, you mentioned Pages files being packages; .docx is the same idea, where the .docx is essentially just a .zip archive that contains a text file of your text and a bunch of other files that manage all the styles and such that are contained in the Word format.
The .docx format isn’t something to reject in favour of the older .doc format, as it actually gives you more control over your data than the old version, since you can always pull the text file out of the .docx in the event of the file being corrupted or other horrific happenings.
The only thing about gmail I do not like is the All Mail Label. When I delete an email, I want to permanently remove it. From what I see, a deleted email goes into the trash, which one would expect and remains there until x days goes by or a manual delete is accomplished. Until recently, I did not realize that the email first goes into the All Mail Label and, in addition, into the inbox. When deleted, it goes to trash as mentioned above but does not get deleted from the All Mail Label. Other than deleting an email from the All Mail Label manually, I do not see any way of accomplishing this. Does anyone know how to do this/
Guys, why doesn’t’ anyone talk about the amazing chat functionality when talking about web Gmail? For me, that’s the killer app for it.
Entourage doesn’t use the MAPI protocol. Here’s a source.
http://www.officeformachelp.com/outlook/exchange/
I’m looking for a link to the product David mentioned at 24:25.
I don’t see it in the show notes. Any guidance?
Found it: http://www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/answer.py?answer=98563
I too have happily lived the google lifestyle with my gmail taking the place of all other email addresses. Spam is a thing of the past and I can easily find old messages although I find I need to use the gmail web interface to do so. Gmail and contacts and calendar played nice across my iPhone 3G, my iPad and my old PC and had been playing nice with my new iMac which I bought to replace the PC UNTIL a great big iCloud fell across everything.
I foolishly updated with iCloud in anticipation of the arrival of my new iPhone 4s and now I have a me.com address that I have no idea what to do with (and I suspect no use for) which refuses to play nice with Mail. Have just lost an hour resetting my apple ID and reinstalling the me.com in Mail because its been bugging me for a password it keeps rejecting every 2 minutes ALL morning.
Something about iCloud has also affected how Mail is playing with gmail’s imap and its not pretty.
I hope you guys can do an episode soon about how (and how not) to integrate iCloud’s features into existing workflows and especially how they might change/affect the google lifestyle.
The following link was shortened by Google’s URL shortener.
It points to a summary on Lifehacker of new Gmail tips and tweaks, November 23, 2011
http://goo.gl/ViN1w