Revolution Web Design Blog - Google

Google Wave grows a little...

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 06:41:00 -0600

Although it's not quite the tsunami they may have hoped for *yet. I believe it's gotten one step closer with Notifications to your email address of Wave activity in your Wave account. Here's a great blog post by the Wave team on how to turn these notifications on. I turned mine on, and I hope that we can use Wave to our advantage at Navtrak.

10 things Google has taught us...

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 15:40:00 -0600

While this article "10 things google has taught Us" originally appeared on cnn.com today, I thought it was a great read, and I didn't want to forget where I could read it, and show it to others. The 5th thing that Google has taught us really struck home for me :) (i wonder why)


5.) Treat engineers as kings

For most Valley companies, engineers are the equivalent of the television writer, the movie director, the book author. They are the creators. The 20% time Google grants its engineers gives them a sense that they are liberated to take risks, to follow their passions.

Innovation, as Bill Campbell told The McKinsey Quarterly, comes when "the crazy guys have stature, where engineers really are important.... empowered engineers are the single most important thing that you can have in a company."

It is no accident that Page and Brin and Schmidt spend so many hours each week in meetings with engineers. For most traditional media companies, the engineer is less central.

However, as digital is now part of the mainstream, and as older media companies struggle to master its challenges, they would do well to heed the advice Google's David Eun offers: Don't do what these companies traditionally do and stick "the geeks in a corner." Instead, CEO's should have at their elbow "a top Chief Technical Officer."

The rest of the article is filled with 9 other great tips and things to think about and it was well put together by Ken Auletta. Hop on over to cnn.com to view this interesting and thought provoking article. Hopefully I can help permeate some of these things into the culture of Navtrak, although I have to admit... we really happen to be quite like the points described here, we are very lucky! And one more, the last point in fact is also good to ponder:


10.) "Life is long but time is short."

The words belong to Eric Schmidt, who explained: "Life is long in the sense that we have long memories. Time is short in that you have to move very quickly. But to me the most important thing to know is that life has a way of working things out. We forget so quickly what the problem was three or four years ago. So my personal view of life is that every problem is an opportunity."

This is a reason to think and act boldly, as Google has, to take risks, and not to be anchored down by "long memories."

Bing me? You want to do what?

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 05:49:00 -0600

So, I did what probably a lot of my Geek Friends around the web did this morning and that was an attempt at "bing-ing" myself... the results of my search for "tony weeg" are at the end of this link: http://www.bing.com/search?q=tony+weeg&go=&form=QBLH and with that, I want to look at the results... as of the time of posting this article, i notice a few things... (first and foremost, google has 36,700 articles about me today, and bing has only 23,900) 1. there appears to be a reliance on "Social Networking" sites for top billing 2. the first link, LinkedIn, is the only social networking site that I am part of that I do not use at all, and that got 1st place :( 3. the results are mostly like google's search results, not much difference there, however if someone were searching for me on google, they'd find better more relevant information, as they would find my domain TonyWeeg.com and i got bored after page 4 looking for my domain on Bing.com 4. the mouseover-right gutter "info" tab that shows up is cool, doesnt really make me NOT want to click on the link, so, I guess it does its job, but not a necessity when im searching, im going to click on it anyway, regardless of that 5. i guess ill bookmark it and see if it helps me at all, but i have to say, as entrenched as i am in using google's tools, it would be weird to LEAVE gmail, and go search for something else in another window, for what? the same results? eh... probably not. 6. search history is cool on bing, but not a game changer, google search has had this a long time. 7. the obligatory image search for "Boobs" that most of us do to test new search engines (you do too, right??) came up with a REALLY neat way of showing an image search... a seamingly ENDLESS grid of images... and when i say endless, i mean, i kept scrolling, and scrolling, and scrolling and they never seemed to stop... EVER! brilliant idea #1 so far... good job bing peeps. (so far this is the coolest feature) and at 1.6 million results, thats a LOT of boobies they are droppin on the screen in a VERY ajax fashion. 8. they (microsoft bing developers) took a major note from the search preferences page of google's - and anyone familiar with turning off "Safe Search" will recognize this page... minus a few

's and some colored cells, its basically the same page! so, all in all, it looks to be a well thought out application, but im going to have to say, why? why now? why try to take on google at this game that they have mastered? i just dont get it guys and gals. it would have been a great time to innovate something else, not search. leave that to the search pro's, google!

to all my non-geek friends (shameless blog promotion)

Thu, 30 Apr 2009 18:22:00 -0600

you can hide these blog postings if you'd like... i understand... they are not for you... and would bore me if i were you... facebook has a great feature whereby you can link your blog to your facebook page and draw interested web searchers that way. conversely, to all of my geek friends, you might want to try adding your blog's rss feed to facebook's "notes" system and see if help's generate traffic! i know that i have enjoyed a 280% increase on my Google Adsense payouts this month, and i'm looking to get that return to increase even more. why not. we have good knowledge, that new people in the industry want - more and more each day! good luck, im sure you will be able to figure it out. but if you cannot... here is some information that i found here at SiteProNews "5 ways to Import and Promote your blog on Facebook"

Import Notes
Notes is an application that allows you to create notes, which are almost like blog posts, for your friends to see. Every time you post a new note it shows in the public timeline for all to see but, many do not know that you can import a blog into your Facebook notes. From the Notes application you will see an option in the right hand column under "Notes Settings" to import a blog. Setting it up is pretty easy, you'll just need to enter either your blog or RSS feed URL. After going over the preview of an imported blog post and confirming the import you'll be all set. Facebook will then check your blog every couple hours for new posts. As I mentioned above, this is also great to set up with your Facebook page.

Hey Google Talk team - "Add Twitter status updates!"

Thu, 30 Apr 2009 17:54:00 -0600

I think this is a great idea... Imagine if you could update your twitter status with the simple change of your Google Talk status? How simple. It wouldn't take much to do it, the twitter api and oAuth are easy enoug to use, and would definitely keep people using Google Talk a lot more! thanks, a VERY loyal google fanboy!

New GMail Labs feature - Suggest more recipients

Sat, 18 Apr 2009 14:03:00 -0600

Very cool new feature was released today... If you typically email people, groups of them and those same people usually get the same messages, well this feature figures to be a nice one for you! As you begin to enter a couple of the email addresses that you want to get this new message, just under the "To:" window on the right hand side, you start to see names that are links, that you can click on, and that action drops the other email addresses into the "To:" field. Phew! So, yeah, not the COOLEST feature Labs has turned out for us, but they are still releasing ABOUT 1 per week at this point, and I love every bit of it! I'm still looking for, and hoping to see a new feature that I really want, and that is the ability to use the "TAB" key inside the message window. So basically disable tabbing out of the window with it let us use it to format text or code or whatever. To replace the VERY favorite "tab then enter" functionality we all love and use now, I'd enlist "ctrl+enter" for sending new messages as the flip side. A lot of Outlook users, use that now, and wouldnt notice a difference!


Suggest more recipients
by Ari L, Naty L & Ron M

Once you pick some email recipients, Gmail suggests more people you might want to include based on the groups of people you email most often.

New GMail interface for iPhone and Android powered phones!

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 12:49:00 -0600

So today, the almighty Google, has released a new version of Gmail for the iPhone, and I must say, my first impression is WOW. it incorporates Gmail, Calendar, Docs and most every other app that they offer through the desktop browser experience. I still want an AppStore app that is specific for the iPhone, but for now, this is going to have to work. Some things that i have found so far: 1. I can't seem to add attachments to messages
2. It's in a browser, which isn't a deal killer, but an app would rock
3. Discard is present, to remove a message without asking me if I'm sure :)
4. Stars work, but not multiple stars like what I have setup in my regular Gmail.
5. Threads and conversation view are here, and work just as expected
6. Archive, Delete and More functions are present
7. Expand/Collapse all are present
8. Colored labels are present!
9. When creating a new message and adding email addresses to the To: field, auto-suggest works! Inside a label

Composing a new message

Viewing my folders

Conversation view

More, Archive and delete

GMail has an Autopilot now... and her name is CADIE

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 04:56:00 -0600

From the text of the Autopilot site...

The easiest email could possibly be.

As more and more everyday communication takes place over email, lots of people have complained about how hard it is to read and respond to every message. This is because they actually read and respond to all their messages.

That's right, GMail now has the ability to respond just like I do. What a fantastic new feature... now, just head over to GMail labs and enable the feature, but make sure you tell 'em "Tony Sent me" and you will get through faster... oh, yeah... Happy April Fools day!!!

Paper vs. iPhone (Gmail takes on the task of beating Paper!)

Thu, 19 Feb 2009 21:04:00 -0600

wow, the gmail team is really doing a lot of great work lately. i was just reading the gmail team's blog and found a killer little application for your iPhone and that is tasks that are on your iPhone as well as your gmail page. they took the stance that they wanted to create a perfect replacement for little scraps of paper or post-it notes. what would be most handy other than that for little tasks, or notes, or whatever and this is what they came up with. the video is good, it explains what and how, and the explanation of how they came about this is even better, go read it. here is what the icon looks like as well as my task list as of today the new tasks icon is the blue check. simply visit: http://gmail.com/tasks in your iPhone's Safari Browser and then save it as a bookmark on your homepage and after you sign it, voila! your tasks are there. full featured too, from what i can see.

Gmail Themes has a new feature - Custom Colors

Thu, 19 Feb 2009 20:28:00 -0600

that's right... it's sorta uncanny how i happened upon this new feature... i actually went to the themes area, for the 4th time this week, hoping that that feature was there, and it never was... didn't stop me, i still went back to check tonight... and guess what!?!?!!? they have it :) and now i see they've even blogged about themes and custom colors at the gmail blog very cool new feature doesn't give me anything other than the ability to change the colors to what i want and just another in a long line of great changes that the gmail team have implemented recently! i personally think that the following are the coolest:

New Google Calendar Beta?

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 19:44:00 -0600

im not sure if this is new or not, but i can tell you its the first time ive seen it... anyway, i had to turn on the Calendar setting in Labs under my GMail account, and then from there click "Add" and then "Edit Event" and all of a sudden this new header was on my Google Calendar add event window.

google chrome - my first 5 hours

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 15:34:00 -0600

Google Chrome i gotta say, ive been using it for 5 hours now, and im in love. im in love with google. holy shit they've nailed it again. im serious. and i dont know about you... but its just this thing inside of me that loves google.. its truly love. cause i dont care what it does i love google. the collective emergence of the brains at google are destined to create time and time again the BEST there is on the internet. hands down. i can load a flash heavy application in one window and browse a text based blog on the other page, and my blog reads and scrolls as fast as i want, notwithstanding the pounding the other window is taking. WHAT!? in a browser. yeah. and no matter what microsoft does, they'll never do it for me like google has done it for me. i remember the day that google.com launched. it was a wild day at my first web development job. we heard about this THING called a googol. ok. well, whats a googol? heh. it wasnt anything but a number. its G-O-O-G-L-E dumb ass. not googol. and google is hardly just a number. our first thought! get our domain names into their search... so we spent a day on that one little page that had a entry field and some sort of "Thank you for adding your site to our index. It will be indexed soon!" message that kindly left you with a good feeling... that maybe someday your site would show up on top of Google! And then when it did, we would sometimes "seed" the bottom of the pages with keywords. Well, that all changed, and so did google. it became something totally different. it became this living breathing thing that creates internet goodness for fun! hah. what a concept. so here we are today... and google does everything for me. it lets me plan, email, express ideas through words, charts or store photographs, i can chat with my wife we can store our bills calendar, we can do almost EVERYTHING i do on the internet, through google. i mean. why not a browser. of course. you knew they'd nail it. you knew it. and i think they have. and best part is... this is V freakin 1.0 thats right. 1.0 ... public beta wow. there's just too many cool things about it already and its hour 5. so google, if you're lookin for a coldfusion developer :) im here... haha i cannot wait to see whats next!

Google Chrome - my first impression

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 12:26:00 -0600

so... at about 2:45 est today, google chrome became publicly available to at least us, on the right coast ;) of the united states... and i gotta say, im impressed. you can:

drag textarea's to increase their size
view how much processor is being used by individual apps in tabs
TABS are across the top now... NOVEL concept.
you can browse in "incognito mode"
flash player works!
oh and the tab navigation at the top, the tabs move sooo slick... very nice ui work there!
you can right click on anything on a webpage and "inspect element" which takes you to a cool interface to check out whats going on on the page!
you can view and work on javascript during runtime... nice feature.

im sure there is more that ill be figuring out... now we just need some developer tools in it and this might just become my new browser! oh and just to get note of it on here... the user agent string for chrome is Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13 later

google chrome - launch early and iterate.

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 07:09:00 -0600

that line was taken from this article A fresh take on the browser" this has to be the mantra of any web application company going forward. our position has become... "release early, release often" but i think i like this one just the same... nothing is perfect on the first run, and nothing helps shape a product other than monitored human interaction. if you can release an application with as much features as it needs to run, and the go from there, you have already beat the competition. oh, this is all good and stuff, but it helps if you are google. anyway, the launch of google chrome is imminent and ive not been this geeked out for like two weeks, when i got my iphone :) i hope coldfusion applications run correctly on it (har har har) cheers.

Demo of the Google Android Platform

Tue, 12 Feb 2008 05:48:00 -0600

this cool little video gives a brief demo of the Google Android Platform capabilities as well as some cool video shots of some real live applications running on a Android enabled phone.

my favorite take-away from this is the message that steve horowitz gives about a 14 seconds into his part... where he says

"The first device I'd like to show you today is a prototype I've been living with for about the past six months, why? Because we believe that in order to make a great product, you must live with it."
WOW. thats amazingly simple, yet so profound!
So, hopefully we can write some web services in ColdFusion, and hit them with the Android platform, and deliver cool tools to our phones with ColdFusion stuff we build on the backend!!!