Tiny bytes of tech
Google Browser Size is a new visualization tool for website developers. It basically plasters a bunch of contoured lines onto any website you tell it to indicating what percentage of users can view what window size. So in the above image, the line for 95% means that 95% of the people visiting the site have a window size that lets them see up to that point. Interesting information!
If you’re like a lot of people out there, you probably use a lot of Google services. There’s Gmail and Google Voice and Google Calendar and Google Reader and now even Google Wave. Googsystray is a free system tray app that keeps track of all the services and notifies you with alerts and messages! Nice!
Google announced yesterday the release of a new DNS resolver called Google Public DNS. This is a product in direct competition to OpenDNS. With Google Public DNS, Google aims to bring speed, security and validity to DNS lookups. Try it out and see if you like it better than your ISP!
Even though Google bought FeedBurner years ago, they haven’t done much with it, until now! Finally, there is some integration between Google Analytics and FeedBurner, though it’s not much right now. Basically, if you go into Traffic Sources, click on All Traffic Sources and then type in “feedburner” into the filter box, you’ll get to see some feed item click analytics. More stats coming in the future!
Google Sidewiki is a new feature in the Google Toolbar that lets anyone add information to any web page on the Internet. When you annotate a page, it will be visible to anyone else who visits that page with the Google Toolbar and Sidewiki installed. An algorithm is used to present the most useful information first.
Don’t like to keep Gmail open in your web browser all the time to see when a new email arrives. There are lots of Gmail notifiers out there and another one is Spiffy.
Spiffy has a clean interface and lots of configuration options. Whenever a new email arrives, you get a small popup window near your taskbar that you can click on to view the message. Simple and elegant.
Google Map Saver is a sweet little utility if you ever wanted to convert a Google map to an image and save it to your hard drive. Just download the program, type in an address, choose a resolution, an image format and click Save Image! It’s also standalone, so no install necessary. The watermark can be removed by accepting the license agreement when you click the About link.
Google Docs has a cool feature whereby you can convert, zip and download all of your files. Simply select all the files you want to export, then choose More Actions and select Export. You’ll get the dialog shown in the image above.
You can convert the files to a different format before actually compressing them and downloading them. Google Docs automatically separates the documents from presentations and spreadsheets. Enjoy!
So if you have your own website with a stand-alone domain name, you may be using Google Apps for Domain to manage services like email, chat, calendars, sites, docs, etc for the domain.
If you have never worked with Google Apps for Domain or you just use the very basic features, check out the post from Lifehacker that walks you through the setup and tells you how to use all the other advanced features like a catch-all address for your domain, updating accounts in bulk and sharing contacts and documents with only your domain.
Google is rolling out a new feature in its search results today called Music Search. Now when you search for some music-related, like a song title, artist, or album name, you’ll also see links to an audio preview of the song provided by MySpace or Lala.
You can also search the lyrics to a song, find the song, listen to it and purchase it, all links now being included in the search result pages themselves. Great way to find new music! Very cool!
