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Some of you have already seen this screen in Gmail, which shows that the new inbox tabs have been enabled for your account. If not, click the gears button and see if you can find "Configure inbox". Click this menu item and you can use the new feature. If you can't find "Configure inbox", check back later.


There are 5 tabs:

- social messages from sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or Google+

- promotions: newsletters, offers and other bulk messages

- updates: confirmations, bills, receipts

- forums: messages from online groups, discussion boards, and mailing lists (hidden by default)

- primary: shows all the other messages


It's important to keep in mind that the tabs only show the messages from your inbox. If you have filters that automatically archive messages, you'll not see them in the new tabs.

If you've used the SmartLabels feature from Gmail Labs, you can delete the associated labels and filters after disabling the feature. Filters look like this: Matches: label:social-updates Do this: Skip Inbox. SmartLabels had the following names: social updates, promotions, notifications, forums. Inbox tabs replace the SmartLabels feature: instead of archiving messages, you can keep them in your inbox, but in separate tabs.

Here are some tips that should help you use the new feature:

Inbox tips

1. Click the "+" button to hide or show tabs. You can hide all the tabs except Primary to go back to the old inbox. This doesn't disable categorization, so you can use all the tips from the Categories section (starting from #6).



2. Starred messages are added to the Primary tab, but you can disable this option by clicking the "+" button and unchecking "include starred in Primary".

3. Drag inbox messages to a different category or right-click and select "move to tab".

4. Tabs show the number of unread messages and a list of senders. The inbox unread count only shows the number of unread messages from the Primary tab.

5. Keyboard shortcuts:
` Go to the next inbox tab
~ Go to previous inbox tab

Categories tips

6. There's a new Categories list in the sidebar that lets you find all your notifications, promotions, social updates, not just the messages from your inbox. The list is still displayed if you hide some inbox tabs, but you can collapse it. Click "Categories" to see the messages from all the categories.


7. Search for category:updates, category:social, category:forums, category:promotions to find these messages.

8. You can create filters that use these categories. For example, create a filter that forwards all forum-related messages to a different address.

9. Create filters that exclude messages from these categories by enabling "Exclude from SmartLabel categorization" in the filter editing dialog.

10. Help Gmail categorize messages by creating filters and selecting "categorize as". For example, send all messages that include "unsubscribe" to the Promotions category.


11. You can also drag messages to the sidebar categories and use feature like "move to" or "labels" to categorize messages. The list of categories is displayed below your labels.

Here's a way to find your receipt messages from Gmail: search for label:^smartlabel_receipt. This feature is powered by the Smart Label experiment from Gmail Labs, but you don't need to enable that experiment.


I've found receipts from PayPal, Google Play and Google Checkout, order confirmations from eBay, Amazon and other shopping sites. Gmail automatically detects receipts, just like it finds notifications, social updates, forum messages and other categories of messages.

The Smart Label feature from Gmail Labs creates filters that automatically label messages and convert system labels like ^smartlabel_receipt to user labels like Receipts. You can manually do that for receipts: click the arrow from the search box, type label:^smartlabel_receipt in the "has the words" field, click "create filter with this search", click "OK" and ignore the warning, select "Apply the label" and then "new label", create a label called "Receipts", check "Also apply filter to * matching conversations" and click "Create filter". You'll get a receipts label:

Here's a simple way to find when you've created your Gmail account. You can always find the oldest message from your account by visiting this page https://mail.google.com/mail/#all/p1000000: you'll get an error message and Gmail will redirect to a page that shows the oldest messages from your account. The problem is that this is not a reliable way to determine when the account was created: maybe you've deleted some messages, maybe you've imported messages from other accounts.

If you've joined Google+, you can quickly find the exact date. Go to Google Takeout, click "Transfer your Google+ connections to another account" (don't worry, you don't have to do that), enter your password and you can see the date when you've created your Gmail account in the blue box at the bottom of the page.



Why would you need this information? For example, Google's account recovery form includes a question about this. "If you find yourself locked out of your account and none of your other recovery options work, your last option is to visit our password-assistance page and fill out our Account Recovery form. (...) Since Google doesn't collect a lot of information about you when you sign up for an account, we'll ask you questions like when you created your account, what Google services you use, and who you email frequently (if you use Gmail)."

I haven't tested this, but I assume this trick also works for non-Gmail Google accounts.

{ via TechAirlines }

There are many extensions and applications that let you see all the images from a web page. Another way to do that is to use Google Image Search. Search for [site:URL], where URL is the address of the page. This doesn't work for domain names, subdomains and subdirectories because Google shows the images for all the URLs that start with the name you've entered.

Example: [site:http://www.google.com/insidesearch/features/search/knowledge.html].


It's not a new feature, it's just another way to use the site: operator.

If you don't like the tablet interface for Google News, there's a non-obvious way to switch to the desktop interface. Tap the "gear" button from the top-right of the page, select "Settings", uncheck "Use the new Google News (uncheck to revert to the old version)" and then tap "Save changes".


The tablet interface was launched in December 2012 and the goal was to add support for gestures. "You can find new articles, news sources, and even topics of interest with intuitive gestures. Swipe horizontally between sections – from Business to Entertainment, for example – or tap 'Explore in depth' to see multiple articles and other info related to a particular story." Google News for tablets is only available for English editions.


(<offtopic>Google Now Voice Search in a Forbes article? Really? From the article: "Google announced on Monday that the Google Now voice search capability is now available for your iPhone or iPad. The Google Now service is often compared to Apple's Siri – both are considered virtual personal assistants that will work by natural language voice commands." There are at least two mistakes: Google launched Google Now for iOS, not voice search, and Google Now has nothing to do with voice search.</offtopic>)

Gmail is the only Google service that disables keyboard shortcuts by default. They're for power users and some people could accidentally trigger them, especially when you consider that most Gmail shortcuts don't use modifiers.

Google has recently added some new shortcuts that are enabled by default. The old shortcuts are still disabled by default, but you can quickly enable them by pressing ? in Gmail and clicking "Enable" next to "The following keyboard shortcuts are currently disabled".

I've already mentioned some of them, but here is the full list of shortcuts that are enabled by default (you can't disable them):

- arrow keys: you can use the up/down arrows to navigate in a list of conversations and press Enter to select one of them. Gmail automatically loads the previous/next page of conversations. Use the left arrow key and then the up/down arrow keys to move your cursor to a different label or the compose button.

- n/p: if you open a conversation with multiple messages, use the n/p keys to go to the next or previous message. Press Enter to load that message if it's collapsed.

- Ctrl+Enter: use this shortcut in the compose window to send a message.

- Shift+Esc: focus the main window.

- Esc: focus the latest chat or compose window.

- Ctrl+. or Ctrl+,: move the cursor to the next/previous chat or compose window, or to the main window.

- Ctrl+Shift+c: add CC recipients in the compose window.

- Ctrl+Shift+b: add BCC recipients in the compose window.

- Ctrl+Shift+f: change the From email address in the compose window.

- A long list of shortcuts for formatting text when you compose a message.

Ctrl+Shift+2 - insert emoticon
Ctrl+Shift+7 - numbered list
Ctrl+Shift+8 - bulleted list
Ctrl+Shift+9 - quote text
Ctrl+[ - indent less
Ctrl+] - indent more
Ctrl+Shift+l - align left
Ctrl+Shift+e - align center
Ctrl+Shift+r - align right

Some of them were already available in the old compose interface:

Ctrl+b - bold text
Ctrl+i - italic text
Ctrl+u - underline text
Ctrl+k - insert link

Obviously, Mac users should replace Ctrl with ⌘.

Gmail's new compose interface has many useful features, but there are also some annoyances.

The old interface had two ways to upload images using drag and drop: as attachments or as inline images. The new interface only lets you embed an image inside the message when you drag and drop it. There are many reasons why you might find this feature annoying: it's more difficult to compose a message after adding a bunch of images, the images could be distracting, Gmail no longer adds cool options like "download all attachments", "view" or "download" when you open the message, some mail clients block inline images.


Fortunately, you can use the "attach files" paperclip button to add image attachments. The "insert photos" button will embed the images. If you still want to drag and drop a photo, you can drag the photo you want to attach and some other random file (for example, a PDF file or another image) and remove the random file. It's a workaround that forces Gmail to treat images like regular files. When you drag and drop multiple images, they're added as attachments.



For now, you can "temporarily switch to the old compose" interface by clicking the arrow button at the bottom of the compose box and selecting the corresponding option, but the new interface is here to stay, while the old one will be retired in the near future. The new UI for composing messages is now the default for all Gmail users.

Gmail's new interface for composing messages has some cool keyboard shortcuts:

* Shift+Esc - focus the main window
* Esc - focus the latest chat or compose box
* Ctrl+. - advance to the next chat or compose box
* Ctrl+, - advance to the previous chat or compose box
* Ctrl+Enter - send message
* Ctrl+Shift+c - add CC recipients
* Ctrl+Shift+b - add BCC recipients
* Ctrl+Shift+f - add custom from

These shortcuts are displayed when you mouse over some buttons from the rich-text editor:

* Ctrl+Shift+2 - insert emoticon
* Ctrl+Shift+7 - numbered list
* Ctrl+Shift+8 - bulleted list
* Ctrl+Shift+9 - quote text
* Ctrl+[ - indent less
* Ctrl+] - indent more
* Ctrl+Shift+l - align left
* Ctrl+Shift+e - align center
* Ctrl+Shift+r - align right

You can see the entire list of shortcuts by pressing Shift+? in the Gmail window.


{ Thanks, Cougar. }

Google used to display the list of search tools in the left sidebar, below the list of specialized search engines. Now search tools are placed below the search box and use less space. Unfortunately, when you click "search tools" and select one of the features, Google no longer shows the approximate number of search results.


It might not seem obvious, but clicking the "Search tools" button again replaces Google's advanced search options with a line that includes the number of results and the time used by Google to generate the search results page. Clicking "Search tools" doesn't disable the advanced filters, you need to click "clear" to do that.


The number of search results is a very useful information because it shows if there's enough content for your query. If Google only returns 50-100 results, you may need to remove some of the keywords, fix some mistakes, disable some of the filters. It's sad to see that Google no longer displays the number of results in the mobile interface (for both smartphones and tablets) and you need to switch to the "classic" interface to find it.

Obviously, Google can't find the exact number of search results, so it only shows an approximation truncated to the first 3 significant digits, but even this imprecise number is useful.

You probably know that Google's site: operator lets you restrict results to a site or domain. Search for [site:cnn.com iran] to restrict the results for "Iran" to CNN's site, search for [site:googlesystem.blogspot.com gmail tips] to find Gmail tips from this blog. You can also use the site: operator for top-level domains and search for [site:fr debussy] or [site:edu ai].

Google's site: operator is a lot more powerful than that. You can leave out some components of the address and replace them with asterisks. For example, you can find results from addresses that match this pattern: maps.*.com. Unfortunately, Google doesn't show all the results that match the pattern.


You can also find results that have URLs which start with "news." like "news.cnet.com" or "news.discovery.com". Just search for [site:news.*].


What if you want to search Amazon's international sites? Instead of typing [site:amazon.com OR site:amazon.co.uk OR site:amazon.ca OR site:amazon.de OR site:amazon.fr], just search for [site:amazon.*].


Google's site: operator also works for directories. For example, you can find last year's posts about Gmail by searching for [site:googlesystem.blogspot.com/2012 gmail].

You can even enter URLs that include parameters and leave out the parameters. Here's a way to search the Google Maps help center: [site:support.google.com/maps/bin/answer.py inurl:"hl=en" 3d]. I've used the inurl: operator to restrict the results to English pages, but it's not necessary to do that.


How to restrict the results for [imap] to answers from Google's help centers? Search for: [site:support.google.com/*/answer imap].


These tricks work for image search, as well:

If you install YouTube's app on an iPhone or iPad, all the YouTube links from Safari will open in the YouTube app. What if you want to open an YouTube video in Safari? Maybe you want to bookmark it or maybe you get a message like "YouTube video not available on mobile" and you need to switch to the desktop interface to watch it. Here's what you need to do:

1. long press the link (tap and hold)

2. select "copy"

3. open a new tab

4. paste the link

5. replace "www" with "m", so that "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=" becomes "http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=" and tap "go".

The explanation is that the links to the mobile YouTube site (m.youtube.com) aren't intercepted by the app.


Another option is to install a different browser like Chrome, which doesn't open the YouTube app when you click on a link to a YouTube video. You can also uninstall the official YouTube app and install a third-party app like McTube.

If you're using Android, this trick worked for me in both Chrome and the stock browser: long press the YouTube link and select "open in [new] incognito tab".

Google Translate has a quick way to translate pages: just drag and drop links to the Google Translate page. You'll see a big yellow box at the bottom of the page when you're about to drop the link. Instead of copying the URL, pasting the URL and clicking "Translate", you can translate the page using a simple drag and drop.


This feature would be even more useful if you could drag and drop pages that are already loaded in a different tab. I've tried to do that in Firefox, Opera and Chrome, but it only worked well in Chrome. The other browsers added some new characters to the URL and Google had to translate error pages. Chrome is already integrated with Google Translate, so you don't have to use this feature.

You could also select some text from a page and drag it to the input box (ignore the yellow box this time). If instant translation is enabled, you don't even need to click "Translate".

If you don't like Google's black navigation bar or you don't use, there's a simple way you to hide it: just bookmark this URL https://www.google.com/webhp?esrch=Agad::Public. It's used by the A Google a Day site, which shows daily puzzles you can solve using Google search. Unfortunately, this interface doesn't show very recent results (from the past week), so you can solve the puzzles on your own, without spoilers.


You can right-click the search box in Chrome, Opera and Firefox, select "Add as search engine", "Create search" or "Add a keyword for this search" and create a new search engine you can trigger using a keyword.


Tecno-Net reports that Google tests a new interface that hides the navigation bar on search results pages and only shows it when you visit the homepage.

While Google Drive lets you upload any file, the support for files that can't be edited using Google Docs/Sheets/Slides is limited. For example, you can embed PDF files and videos, but Google doesn't offer permalinks for images.

So you've uploaded a photo to Google Drive and the only options are to download the file and link to the image page. But what if you want to embed that image in a web page or simply post a direct link to the image? You may think that right-clicking the image lets you copy the image URL, but that's not true. Even if you check the source code of a page or use features like Firefox's "view page info", you'll get a link that doesn't work.

Fortunately, there's an easy solution - replace this URL from the address bar:

http://docs.google.com/file/d/FILEID/edit

with:

http://drive.google.com/uc?export=view&id=FILEID

(where FILEID is a long sequence of digits and letters).

This only works if you've changed the visibility options to "public on the Web" or "anyone with the link" in the Share dialog.

Here's an example:


You can also use:

http://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&id=FILEID

to trigger a download and this works for any non-private Google Drive file, not just for images.

{ via Stack Overflow. Photo licensed as Creative Commons Attribution. }

WebP is one of the best thing that happened after Google acquired On2 in 2010. While WebM doesn't have a strong adoption outside YouTube and Firefox started to support H.264 after a few years of fight, WebP is an image format that's already used by many sites and applications. It can replace both JPEG and PNG and you can use it to create images that are compressed more efficiently (by about 35%) and look better. "By converting PNGs and JPEGs to WebP, the Chrome Web Store was able to reduce image sizes by about 30% on average," informs Google.

The format is supported by Chrome, Opera, Android 4.0+ and there are many tools that help you convert images to WebP and view them. It's also interesting to find that all the images hosted by Google services like Picasa Web, Blogger and Google+ can be converted to WebP using a simple URL adjustment.

Here's an example of JPEG photo hosted by Google+:

https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-b1qAbtG7VuI/TqON2f_eReI/AAAAAAAA4P4/r_5AKUt42rg/s633/DSC03146.JPG [57 KB]

To convert the photo to WebP, just replace "/s633/" with "/s633-rw/" ("/sNUMBER/" with "/sNUMBER-rw/") :

https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-b1qAbtG7VuI/TqON2f_eReI/AAAAAAAA4P4/r_5AKUt42rg/s633-rw/DSC03146.JPG [33 KB]

I'll also include the URL of a PNG screenshot from the previous post:

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKZ7wpZinDPK_Gn7SHg77jLuRfC661A2hDvDa7gExN5BfpB3Zn8kN7WSVxXbZMugqcnACgnf5JVrUUSeSwW-GbFRpQamLtfXxk4yBSbJhr3O-T7srkNhyphenhyphenBwvdwmOotsbW_nKXWrOkFHazU/s640/new-gdrive-create-menu.png [21 KB]

Here's the WebP photo:

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKZ7wpZinDPK_Gn7SHg77jLuRfC661A2hDvDa7gExN5BfpB3Zn8kN7WSVxXbZMugqcnACgnf5JVrUUSeSwW-GbFRpQamLtfXxk4yBSbJhr3O-T7srkNhyphenhyphenBwvdwmOotsbW_nKXWrOkFHazU/s640-rw/new-gdrive-create-menu.png [14.5 KB]

Google's search engine has a cool feature that lets you restrict the results to a certain time range. It's mostly used to find recent results, so the default options are: past hour, past 24 hours, past week/month/year, but you can customize the time range. Just click "search tools" below the search box, then click "any time" and select "custom range" from the list.


You can use Google's calendar widget to pick the dates, but there are some tricks that help you enter dates faster:

1. Enter "2011" in the "from" field, instead of "1/1/2011". Obviously, you can use any other year.

2. Enter "3/2011" or "March 2011" in the "from" field, instead of "3/1/2011" (or "1/3/2011", depending on your country).

3. Enter "2011" in the "to" field, instead of "12/31/2011" (or "31/12/2011", depending on your country). Obviously, you can use any other year.

4. Enter "3/2011" or "March 2011" in the "to" field, instead of "3/31/2011" (or "31/3/2011", depending on your country).


5. To restrict the results to pages from 2011, enter "2011" in the "from" and "to" fields.


6. To restrict the results to pages from March 2011, enter "3/2011" in the "from" and "to" fields.

7. Leave the "to" field empty instead of entering today's date.

8. Leave the "from" field empty to find pages created before the day entered in the "to" field.

If you don't like the new Google Image Search interface, you can't go back to the previous interface. Fortunately, Google still includes a link to a much older interface without infinite scrolling, but with useful information like the file size and a page snippet.

Infinite scrolling makes it difficult to get to the bottom of the page because Google continuously loads new image results as you scroll down. The best way to find the link that switches to the old interface is to press "End" on your keyboard (Fn + Right Arrow if you have a Mac) and click "switch to basic version". Google doesn't remember your setting, so the switch is not persistent.

Some people complained that Gmail doesn't automatically archive "social updates". It's a new category of messages created if you use the Smart Labels experimental feature from Gmail Labs.

It turns out that that the "skip inbox" rule is only enabled for newsletters and promotional messages (the smart label name used to be "Bulk", but now is "Promotions"). They're not exactly spam messages, but Google assumed that they're less important and it's a good idea to archive them automatically. If you take a look at the list of filters from your Gmail account, you'll notice that Google added 5 special filters:


You can remove them, but you can't edit them. If you'd like to automatically archive social updates, forum messages or notifications, just click the smart label in Gmail's sidebar and enable "archive incoming social updates (skip the inbox)" at the top of the page. Obviously, the setting will use the smart label name: "archive incoming notifications", "archive incoming forums", "archive incoming bulk."


What if you accidentally delete a filter or a label added by Gmail's Smart Labels experiment? Just disable Smart Labels from Gmail Labs and enable it again. Don't forget to click "save changes".

It's worth mentioning that Gmail has 5 built-in labels: ^smartlabel_group - for forum messages, ^smartlabel_newsletter for newsletters, ^smartlabel_promo for promotional messages, ^smartlabel_notification for notifications and ^smartlabel_social for messages sent by social networks. You can use the built-in labels to create your own filters or queries and they work even if you remove the filters and user-friendly labels added by Gmail.

{ Thanks, Frank. }

If you've enabled Gmail's new interface for composing messages, there's a simple way to open any Gmail message in the chat-like panels:

1. open the message

2. edit the URL from your browser's address bar. Replace the last slash (/) from the URL with ?compose=

For example, replace:

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?shva=1#inbox/13a111c6f50b9084

with:

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?shva=1#inbox?compose=13a111c6f50b9084


Gmail actually creates a new message with the same content and saves it as a draft. That's the reason why you can edit the message. When you no longer need the message, click the "close" button. You may need to delete the messages from the "drafts" label.

You can open multiple messages using the same trick. After using the instructions above:

3. open a new Gmail message

4. edit the URL from your browser's address bar. Replace ?compose= with & and the last slash (/) from the URL with ?compose=.

I mentioned last week that you can join an experiment that lets you see results from Gmail and Google Drive in Google Search.

Google shows personal results if they are likely to be relevant to your query, but there's an easy way to trigger the results. Start your query with "gmail" to see Gmail results and "drive" to see results from Google Drive.



Unfortunately, you can't use advanced search operators to restrict results to a Gmail label, to messages from a contact, to starred files or use other features because they're ignored by Google.