Instapaper

I find interesting content while using my phone, either from my6sense or by finding links on Twitter.  Often, I don't want to read the content on my phone, either because I don't have time, or the form factor of my phone doesn't make it easy to read long content, so I would save it for later reading.

I had used Gmail to save these urls.  I setup a filter to automatically archive and add a "Bookmark" label if the message came from one of my accounts, and it had the "bookmark" keyword in the subject.  This works well, though it the experience going through the bookmarks is not ideal.

The type of experience that I ideally would like would be similar to the New York Times Chrome App, and the Flipboard experience.  These present content in a clean, visually pleasing way.  The closest experience that I have seen to this, for bookmarks, is with Instapaper.

Instapaper is a service that lets you save pages for you to view later.  They have a bookmarklet that you can use to save any page that you are viewing in a browser.  When viewing the list of saved sites, the presentation is a simple list.  There are some interesting features, that I like:

• When viewing content, you have the option to view a Text-only version, which strips all extraneous formatting.


• You can have content downloaded in Kindle or ePub format

Auto-import for TripIt

I have used TripIt for a while, as it is pretty convenient way to track travel itineraries.  But, since I haven't had to travel for work in a while, I missed their announcement that they have added the ability to automatically import travel itineraries from Gmail accounts.

This removes the need to forward itineraries to TripIt, but I wonder how it will handle an email being archived before it has been imported into Tripit.



[via Lifehacker]

Unsubscribe.com

On Friday, I heard about the Unsubscribe.com service.  This service is supposed to make it easy to unsubscribe from mailing lists. I beloved that their service knows about the various mailing lost software commonly used,  and knows what actions are required to unsubscribe from a list managed by each.

Since the charge for the premium level of their service, I hope that they also will help unsubscribe from lists where manual steps are required.

I signed up for an account, and then when I got to the step where I needed to install the browser plugin, I stopped. The Chrome browser plugin requested permission to my data from mail.google.com. I didn't see a way to restrict the access to one account. Since I can't verify what information it accesses, and there are certain accounts on which I want to make sure that no unauthorized access happen, I will not install the plugin.

What Unsubscribe.com should do is create a Google Apps Marketplace application. Then I could install it on the account that I am interested in trying out the service, and none of the other accounts could be compromised.

Sending links via Gmail using Chrome

This page has a javascript that makes it easy to send the url for the current page in Chrome as an email using Gmail.

I did have to modify it to make it work for my Google Apps for Your Domain account.  I just had to modify

mail.google.com/mail/

with

mail.google.com/a/{your domain}/

[via Lifehacker]

GPush

The iPhone supports push notification of new emails, bit only for Exchange and for Mobile Me. Apple could implement this for IMAP accounts, with the IMAP IDLE command, but this would remove one of the features that differentiates Mobile Me from the other mail services.

GPush is an iPhone application/ service that enables push notifications when receiving new emails at a gmail account. To configure the application, you enter your gmail credentials in the application, and then it validates them with google. When you then receive a new message on that account, a notification will be sent to your phone, and the GPush application icon will display the count of the number of unread messages.

One main reason I am interested in this application is to potentially save battery. I currently have my phone set to check mail every 15 minutes. Theoretically, with this application, I can turn off periodic checks, and I will be notified when a new message is receives. Then I would launch the mail application to actually download the messages.

Unfortunately, it doesn't work that well.  I have only received about 10 notifications on my iPhone, for emails that I have received, even though I have received many more email messages.   This seems to be a problem on the GPush servers, as I receive more push notifications on the iPhone from Boxcar for direct messages that I receive on Twitter.

Gmail search operators

I never remember all of the things that you can do with searching inside Gmail.  This post describes some useful filters, and mentions Search Autocomplete.

Maybe now, I will remember these.  (At least I will remember where to go to find them.)

Google Mail Labs Suggestion

Google has been coming out with some prety cool/useful features in their Labs section of Gmail.  I have an idea of something that I, and maybe others, would find useful.

I often leave myself logged in on my home computer when I go to work.  The computer is set to go to sleep, but it does wake up for backups or if someone logs on.  The problem that I have is that, since I leave a browser open with Gmail in one of the tabs, if someone attempts to chat with me with Google Talk, I will not see that attempt on any other computers, when I next log in.

I would like to see a setting, where I can configure Google Talk to replay the last chats that were sent to an inactive browser session, on the next successful Gmail login.  With this setting, I woudln't miss chat atempts.