Add New Features like Mouse Gestures To your Gmail Account using Google Labs
Yesterday when I was going through my Gmail account settings and I saw a new tab there named “labs” which represents Google Labs, a cool new feature which allows people to try experimental features added to gmail, I remember reading about it on other blogs few days ago but I didn’t really tried it, anyway I opened that tab and saw 13 new feature that I could enable including “custom keyboard shortcuts- which allows you to change the current keyboard shortcuts in Gmail, “Mouse Gesture”- this allows you to do tasks by just moving your mouse (works great!) , “random signature” allow you to add multiple signatures and then shows them randomly with your outgoing mail and a stupid snake game! If these Features get good feedback they are permanently added to Gmail and if not they are buried, you can suggest feature using this link. Google Labs feature has been enabled on all Gmail accounts but Google apps user will have to wait before they can start using Google Lab
To enable Google Labs you need to follow these steps:
1.Open your Gmail inbox and click settings on the top left corner
2. in the settings page click on the Labs tab
3. now you will be shown all the experimental features you can add to your Gmail account, enable the features you like by click the enable radio button
See your previous Gmail Sessions and sign out of them remotely
Few days ago the Gmail team added a new feature to Gmail I.e now you can see your last activity on your Gmail account, this come as a very useful features for people who use public computers to check their email as if they forget to sign out then anyone can access their mail account which may have personal information or important files
To see how this feature works scroll down your Gmail inbox, at the bottom you will find your last account activity along with the IP address, when you click the details link you will get a pop up window with last five session details which contains the IP address from where Gmail was accessed and the time of access, you can sign out of all other sessions from your computer by clicking the “sign out all other sessions” button, using this feature you can also track if someone has got your account password and reading your emails without your knowledge, you can check that by seeing the IP address from the account is accessed and if you find any suspicious activity you can change your password
For more details Check out the official Gmail blog post
Changes to GMail Contacts Manager
One thing I like about Google is that they keep on adding new features and improving the current features frequently, the latest being the changes to the contact manager, earlier when you used to send email to someone he would be added to the contacts list so that when next time you want to send an email to the same person you type first few letters of his email address and a bunch of suggestions show up in auto complete list (which is a good feature) but now the problem is that if you send a lot of emails to different people then they all get added to the contact list and the auto complete list grows huge with time making it less efficient.
The Gmail team in a bid to fix this have modified the contacts manager and sorted the contact in to three categories that are as follows:
- “My Contacts”-these are the contacts you have manually added or contacted a lot in the past
- “Most Contacted”-the people you have contacted the most, if number of times you have emailed a certain person increases he is automatically added to My Contact (at least five time)
- “Suggested Contacts”- all the people you have emailed are added automatically in this category
To access the contact manager click on the contacts link under Gmail folders and above labels box on the left sidebar:
as you click on the contact button you can now see the Gmail contact manager which looks like this:
Gmail Contacts Manager
More on the official Gmail Blog
Mozilla Firefox 3.0.1 Released Fixes Two Severe Security Flaws
A while ago Firefox 3.0.1 was added to the Firefox FTP site, I was waiting eagerly for this release and I hope that it fixes the issues that were making the browser crash very frequently with the Firefox crash reporter showing up every time, sometimes it would crash five to six times in a single browsing session! anyway I updated to the latest version and out of 25 extensions that I use only 1 is incompatible with this release, and as soon as the browser opened I got a page from the Mozilla site thanking me for trying out the beta, seems like the website hasn’t been updated yet!
this release fixes two severely rated security flaws, the first one being “remote code execution by overflowing CSS reference counter” and the other one being “command-line URLs launch multiple tabs when Firefox not running”, you can read more about these flaws here and here
Get Mozilla Firefox 3.0.1 from here
Update: Here is the official Mozzila blog Post
Take Screenshots of web pages in Firefox using ScreenGrab
As a blogger I sometimes need to take screenshots of websites and for that purpose I use a Firefox extension called ScreenGrab, using it you can take screenshots from within Firefox, that way it is more convenient than loading a special software just for taking a screenshot. ScreenGrab has a very fast engine unlike other screenshot extension’s for Firefox and doesn’t uses much resources.
ScreenGrab can take screenshots of entire web pages unlike special screen grabbing softwares which can only take screenshots of the visible area, the options available to you are save or copy the complete page, save or copy visible portion of the webpage only, save or copy a selected area in the webpage, you can choose between JPG and png as the format of screenshots and you can also choose between gecko or java as the engine.
Get ScreenGrab from official Firefox add-ons site
