Posts tagged Google Labs
Google Visualizations
Aug 6th
While working on my idea of presenting on this website also the Romanian National Bank exchange rates (very useful in this crisis time), I end up in choosing a form of visualization.
One might argue that text is good enough, but for me frankly graphs and charts are the best. So I started looking on the internet for free and customizable charting tools.
From the plethora of choices on the web I will present just a few:
1. An interesting tutorial on how to build a chart of your own – it’s the easy way to get exactly what you need done as it should be. It is quite old, but still actual, as Macromedia MX programming is still supported in Adobe CS3
2. OpenFlashChart GWT Library – very interesting, free library and highly customizable. But it comes with a big drawback : it has approx 375 Kb .. quite big for my requirements.
3. Origamy Flash graph component – amazingly nice and costly . 99$ ..
4. Google visualization – free, fast, light and with a ton of settings. They have pies, tables, charts … with really lots of settings. The added traffic isn’t much … around 30 kb per graph ( and I measured biggest one – Annotated time line ).
Customize your Gmail web interface
Nov 7th
Google has been the most improving mailing web interface that I know. Having a whooping 2 GB storage space when launched, he slapped over the face all his competitors, whom at that time had 4- 5 MB of storage space. Now is 7.5 GB and increasing.
The interface is very clean and intuitive, but not lacking the good looking ( example of bad looking is Squirrel Mail who looks obsolete, due to the right angle corners, opposed to the round corners approach in Gmail). Also the code completion for emails, the spell checker and other goodies makes this interface the most interesting in my opinion.
Recently, I learn about something that is quite hidden in Gmail interface: the plugins.
These can be activated by going into Settings in your Gmail mail account, click on Labs tab and search the desired plugin. In order to add it’s functions on the interface, you must activate first by checking the Enable option. It will be applied as soon as you click ‘Save Changes’ button on the bottom of the page.
 |
I have activated the following plugins:
Give it a try! |
