Adding a star to stuff you plan to get back to reading (honestly!) can lead to an intimidating backlog of no-longer-helpful items. Use NetNewsWire for Mac to wipe away all your stars at once, or warm up your fingers for a rapid-fire keyboard cleansing. More »
iPad: RSS5000 is a clever newsreader that lets you bypass viewing article snippets and browse the full article of any RSS feed. More »
Whether you finally decided to shed sassyhacker957@gmail.com for a more professional handle or you want to swap Google accounts for less embarrassing reasons, Google doesn’t have a built-in system for migrating your data to a new account. So we figured it out. More »
Windows/Linux only: Google has so many different services these days that installing a notification app for each one gets cumbersome quickly. Free system tray utility Googsystray watches Gmail, Google Voice, Calendar, Reader, and Wave so you can set it and forget it.
After installing Googsystray, you can configure which services you want it to watch and what you want it to do for each—upon receiving a new email, SMS, calendar alert, RSS article, or wave, you can have it play a sound and even run a command. The icon of the given service will also pop up in your system tray. Right clicking on it gives you a Growl-style popup with more detailed information about the notification, such as email subject or SMS content. You also have limited actions you can take depending on the service.
Google Voice is the most feature-filled, allowing you to send SMS messages with a hotkey and read voicemail transcripts. You can have Gmail monitor your inbox or specific labels for new messages, as well as mark messages as read, spam, or delete them. Google Calendar support is limited to alerts on upcoming events, and Google Reader can notify you of new RSS articles, although you can tell it to stop notifying you when the number of unread articles reaches a certain point. Google Wave support merely notifies you of new and unread waves, along with a preview.
Googsystray is a free download, works on Windows and Linux (Python and pygtk required for Linux). Thanks, Aldeniszen!
Want Google’s computers to tell you which RSS feeds should be looking at in Reader, and which feed items to read first? It’s now possible, as Reader introduces a “Sort by Magic” filter and an “Explore” section with recommended feeds.
Both features are actually improvements and interface lifts to older features. The “Explore” section is nothing more than the Recommended Items list that Reader has always offered, but given its own left-hand sidebar section with green-colored icons. They also threw a “Popular” feed into Explore, letting you skim through items across the web that have been frequently read, liked, and linked, then have them delivered in an order based on “what we think you’ll like best.”
Sound cryptic, overly personal, and a tad bit 1984? Then you’ll probably want to avoid using the “Sort by Magic” option in your Feed Settings drop-down. Paranoia aside, this seems like a helpful option for those who frequently skip the folder-by-folder view and head right for their burgeoning “All Items” mega-feed.
Unlike the old “auto” ranking, this new ranking is personalized for you, and gets better with time as we learn what you like best – the more you “like” and “share” stuff, the better your magic sort will be.
Tell us how “magic” sorting and the newly-promoted feed recommendations suit your style in the comments.
iPhone/iPod touch: Ever since the FeedDemon/ NetNewsWire RSS readers announced exclusive Google Reader syncing, we’ve been waiting for that anywhere-you-go goodness to arrive on iPhones. Now it has, and NetNewsWire 2.0 is almost certainly better than Google Reader’s mobile site.
To be fair, Google Reader’s mobile view is still a great option for Android, Palm Pre, and other non-iPhone browsers that want a look at what’s new in their RSS collections. But the NetNewsWire app doesn’t require a new browser window, won’t lose your place if you venture off to read a link, stores items for offline reading, and offers some great navigation and sharing options, while all the time syncing what you read and star back to your Reader account. Of course, if you’re using another reader for your feed needs, NetNewsWire can easily work from your OPML file (assuming you’re okay with creating a Google account for backup syncing).
Want to post an item to Twitter, save it for later text-only reading in Instapaper, or simply jump to the next unread item in a full item view? NetNewsWire has you covered. Are you an overwhelmed blog editor who, on a frantic Monday morning, only needs to see items from the last 24 hours? Yeah, that’s in there as well. You can customize which feeds are shown or hidden on NetNewsWire’s home page, collapse folders and categories with a single click, and star items from a convenient button that doesn’t require your finger to tap around the very tiny space between a star icon and your left screen edge. The only thing missing is Reader’s Share/Like/comment tools, but it’s our guess that it’s a small subset of users who really need those from a mobile device.
NetNewsWire offers a free download with (not too annoying) ads for iPhones and iPod touch models running at least 3.0 firmware, or a $1.99 version with no advertising.
The information you keep in Google apps like Gmail, GCal, Reader, and Voice doesn’t just live in one place. There are a few easy but non-obvious ways to plug different Google apps together and share their data and features.
Thanks to things like Labs and gadgets, you can get your Calendar in Gmail (and vice versa), Docs in Calendar and Gmail, Profile info in Google Reader, Google Voice SMS in your Gmail, and just about everything on iGoogle. Here’s how.
The information you keep in Google apps like Gmail, GCal, Reader, and Voice doesn’t just live in one place. Check out a few easy but non-obvious ways to plug different Google apps together and share their data and features.
One of the most useful integrations available for Gmail and GCal users, the Google Calendar gadget puts upcoming events on your email sidebar. To turn it on, just enable the Google Calendar gadget in Gmail Labs. Click on the Options link to configure which calendars you want to display events from, and schedule events directly from Gmail using the gadget’s Add link. (Gmail Labs offers lots of other app integrations, like YouTube previews in Gmail, the ability to create a Google Doc from an email conversation, Picasa image previews, Google Docs as well as a Google web search gadget.)
Gmail Tasks’ killer feature is how it can act as a bridge between your email inbox and your calendar. If you add a Gmail message to your Tasks list (just choose “Add to Tasks” from the “More Actions” drop-down) and add a due date, that task shows up on your Google Calendar on that date. Even if Gmail’s Tasks module isn’t your primary to-do list app, this is an easy way to “schedule” email you don’t need to deal with right now but does have a deadline in the future.
Courtesy of Google Calendar Labs, you can easily attach Google Docs to any event—like the batting lineup for the company softball game next week. In GCal's Labs area (in Settings), just enable the "Attach Google Docs" feature.
Gmail has had built-in integration with GDocs since back in 2006; any time you have a Word document or spreadsheet email attachment in a message, Gmail gives you an “Open as a Google Document” link next to it. You can also convert an entire Gmail conversation to a Google Doc by enabling the Gmail Labs’ “Create a Document” feature.
Google’s newish Profiles tool offers an interesting integration into Google Reader: the ability to associate people with the feeds they create. When you configure your Google Profile and enter the web sites where you've set up shop, the feeds available for those sites appear on your profile—as well as in Google Reader. When you're following someone in Google Reader, you can easily see their blog and social network feeds alongside their photo and bio thanks to Google Profiles. From the ever-so-specifically-labeled "Browse for Stuff" section in Google Reader, click on the "People You Follow" tab to browse the folks you care about and subscribe to feeds they're creating.
Just this morning the Google Voice team added email integration with your text messages. As Kevin reported, you can now get your GV text messages forwarded to your email (Gmail or not) and respond to them from there, without ever touching your Google Voice tab or your phone.
You can't mention integrating Google apps without giving iGoogle a nod. GApps addicts' homepage of choice, iGoogle offers Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Gmail Tasks, and Google Voice gadgets for the ultimate, all-in-one, Google apps jumping-off spot. (In fact, last week during the Gmail outage, iGoogle's Gmail gadget was still working—even when the proper Gmail webapp was down.)
Beyond in-webapp ways to access Google apps data across products, you can also hook up browser extensions like Integrated Gmail or iGoogleBar for Firefox. Alternately, for easy Google apps access no matter what web site you’re on, put your browser’s sidebar to good use.
What other ways do you use one Google app’s data in another? Shout it out in the comments.
Gina Trapani, Lifehacker’s founding editor, likes finding new ways Google Apps inform one another. Her weekly feature, Smarterware, appears every Wednesday on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Smarterware tag feed to get new installments in your newsreader.
Firefox only (Windows/Mac/Linux): Last week we showed you how to set up space-saving, permanent Gmail and Google Reader tabs in Firefox, a process requiring four Firefox extensions to get up and running. Now it’s a touch easier.
Our industrious Gina Trapani put Mozilla’s previously mentioned Collections feature to good use to pull together all of the necessary extensions for one quick and easy install. So just head over to the Icon-only PermaTabs collection, install the necessary extensions (they’re all really solid extensions in their own right, so you won’t necessarily only be installing them for this purpose), and head back to our original post if you need help setting it up from there.
Google Reader recently added custom “Send To” controls to its feature list, and we’ve been looking for the most useful links to feed it. Here are 11 excellent send-to tools you can add to Reader, with more on the way.
“More on the way” because, despite trying to keep our eyes and feed readers in as many places as possible, we’re guessing there are a lot of other great URL-friendly webapps that can be hooked into Reader, as these crowd-sourced examples have already proven.
To install one of these Send To items in your own Reader, head to your Settings link from Reader’s main page, click the “Send to” tab, then hit the “Create a custom link” button at the bottom. You’ll be prompted for a Name, URL, and Icon URL, which you can simply copy and paste from these entries.
Know of a web service, a bookmarklet, or any other webapp that can accept text or items through its URL? You can easily set up a Send To item to feed items from Reader to that webapp. Reader lets you automatically include URL-friendly variables from feed items:
${source}The source of the item
${title}The title of the item
${url}The URL of the item
${short-url}A shortened URL that redirects to the item
So if you knew, for example, that MyAwesomeLolcatApp can re-write the text on any web page with deliberate-but-cute misspellings, you could create a Send To item that has myawesomelolcatapp.com/url=${url}, and it’d work just gangbusters.
If you make your own Send To discoveries, by all means, drop them in the comments, or send them to tips at lifehacker.com with “Google Reader” and “Send To” somewhere in the text or subject. Now, onto the neat hacks to make all your RSS items easier to print, save, share, calendar, and even translate:
mail.google.com with the address for your hosted Google apps, and the rest of the code should work. (via Google Operating System)
