by Aaron Pek

9 Great Google Lab Applications You Can’t Live Without

Gmail, one of the earliest pilot projects by the search engine giant Google, has surpassed expectations by becoming one of the biggest contenders in providing email services in the face of huge competitors like Microsoft and Yahoo. So what’s so special about Gmail? One of its highlights is Google Labs, “experiments” which are technically still in the testing phase, but which have garnered positive reviews from critics. After years of using them, here’s my personal Emmy Awards for the top 9 Google Lab Applications that you just can’t live without.

9. Offline

Offline is a nifty little feature which allows you to save your email messages onto your computer. This can be useful if the emails you receive contain important or personal information which you’d like to keep at hand at all times, in case an incident like a denial-of-service attack or a tornado makes the Internet inaccessible.

8. Superstars

If you’re a Gmail user, you’ll probably have attached a gold star on some of your more precious emails for easy reference. Superstars allow you to add different kind of stars, so you can tag even more emails according to their categories. There are 12 different “superstars” for you to choose from, so you can have even more flexibility in arranging your messages.

7. Message Translation

Made a new friend in Istanbul? Got a lover who doesn’t speak French? With the new message translator, you don’t need to go for long, boring courses just to speak the language of love, friendship, or whatever. Google uses its extensive database of languages to translate your messages for you, and they’re surprisingly accurate. FYI, it’s one of the most useful features I’ve ever used in my 12 years on the Internet.

6. Custom keyboard shortcuts

Gmail has a nice interface, but what’s even nicer about it is that it even has keyboard shortcuts for really lazy people like me. For instance, I don’t have to grab the mouse, move it 3 centimeters in the general direction of 42^o North East and click the button anymore, I just have to press ‘C’ to compose a message? Seriously, how cool is that?

5. Canned responses

Ever received one of those annoying automated reply emails? Well, now you can send them too, almost. Canned messages allow you to save a message so that you can spam it whenever you want. Great for business people who need to send a certain request to a lot of people at different intervals, or for annoying your friends with those forwarded emails.

4. Mail Goggles

When it’s late at night and you’ve come home from a lousy day at work, it might be a great idea to send expletives to your boss congratulating him for not giving you any credit for that 10 million dollar project. That’s where Mail Goggles come in to save the day. Mail Goggles gives you time to reconsider whether you really want to send that email by making you count arithmetic sums first. If you still think it’s a good idea to send that message after crunching elementary school numbers, then it probably is.

3. Undo Send

Does exactly what it says; it gives you an extra button so you can undo the sending of a message. Probably the greatest invention of all time since sliced bread. However, it should be noted that the ‘undo’ button only appears for about 5 seconds before you can’t change your mind anymore. Still, it’s a great solution for all those ‘uh-oh’ and ‘oopsies’.

2. Forgotten Attachment Detector

The second greatest invention of all time since sliced bread. I’ve lost count of the number of times this little reminder has, well, reminded me that I’ve forgot to attach something when I should have. I’m not sure how it works, I think it looks out for words like ‘attached’ or ‘enclosed’ in your message or something. That’s one small step for email, one great leap for email-kind.

And finally, the winner goes to…

1. Multiple Inboxes
   

I’m sorry, did I say something else was the greatest invention since sliced bread? Well, this little app is greater than sliced bread. By itself, it doesn’t really do much – all it does is display the messages under a different label on your front page. But with a little tinkering under the hood, that label can become the inbox of another email! Yes, that means that you get to manage not one, but two (or three, or four…you get the picture) inboxes from different email addresses under one roof! To find out how you can manage 2 or more inboxes in one primary email address, you can find some instructions here: http://news.cnet.com/how-to-use-gmails-multiple-inboxes-for-extra-gmail-accounts/.

World of Goo

World of Goo has captured the imagination of millions around the world without having to rely on millions of dollars and heavy special effects. Indeed, the bulk of the game was created by just two people, who in their spare time, just decided to have some fun. The game revolves around ball-like creatures called goo who live on their world, World of Goo. Mysterious happenings have occurred on their planet, and together they work together to try to figure out what’s going on.

The game uses 2d rendering and a very realistic physics engine to simulate the movement of real-time objects. For instance, if you were to pick a goo ball up and drop it from a high place, it will fall with increasing speed for awhile until it reaches terminal velocity (the highest speed a falling object can achieve), then bounce back up realistically when it reaches the ground. The 2d rendering effects give the game a pleasant and very attractive feel, and since the bulk of the game is pretty simple, it doesn’t require a powerful computer to play this game smoothly.

The game comprises of sticking goo balls together in various sequences until you reach a pipe, where a certain number of goo balls have to be sucked into to complete the stage. There are many unique challenges which keep the game fresh, and different goo balls have different uses and abilities which help in different ways. There are balloon goos which help float your structure above obstacles, sticky goos which can be detached, and match goos which ignite on contact with fire. As you can see, there’s a lot of variety to keep the fun going.

I highly recommend World of Goo for both seasoned and new gamers alike. 5 Stars.

Lunar Landing: 40th anniversary

“That’s one small step for man, *static*, one big leap for mankind.”

These famous words have been etched into our memories as one of the most outstanding achievements that man has accomplished, the first landing on the moon. Since millennia long past, great philosophers and scientists ranging from Galileo, Michelangelo, Leonardo and such, have dreamed of one day setting a real, living human being on the great bright globe that hangs in our night sky. And their wish was fulfilled, albeit a little past their time, on July 20^th, 1969, when Neil Armstrong set his first steps on the moon.

It was a great moment, greater perhaps than the historical win by Barack Obama, the first black man ever to clinch victory in the presidential election of the United States. Imagine the soaring emotion of the world, the collective glory felt by people from all corners of the globe, as they watched a man step on the earth. You’d have to remember that this was a time when black and white TV just came on the scene. TV itself was already such a great achievement; watching a man on the moon on TV must have seemed like a miracle.

The space race also transcended all barriers of time, race, and politics. Space was the most neutral topic of them all - after all, did anybody own space? In a time where people fought over almost everything, from the way women dressed to the artificial border lines, the space race was like a competition where everybody could focus whole-heartedly on achieving the goal, not get mixed up in side issues. It also united everyone, from the Russians, to the Americans, to the Australians, because everyone could connect to the dream that man would one day, finally, reach the dark craters of the moon.

But there are people who, even to this day, claim that the whole lunar landing was a hoax. How could man possibly reach the moon when the television was just invented? Indeed, the whole idea seems a little ludicrous to the average person, and nobody could have faulted them for carrying their doubts. The motive for such widespread deceit was certainly there, as the Russians were also desperately trying to land their men on the moon first. If the Americans felt like they had no hope, what was there to stop them from creating the perfect video? Plus, the then president had made a goal to put a man on the moon in ten years...and he did it in nine. A little too coincidential, per se?

Then there’s the issue about the footprint. The footprint in the photo seemed to leave a deep impression, something critics say would not have happened in the dry, waterless sand on the surface of the moon. There’s also the doubt over how the video looked like it was recorded on fast forward. Lastly, the greatest conspiracy theory of them all was about how the flag shouldn’t have waved so much in the airless atmosphere of the moon. So many theories, and NASA still isn’t able to back them up with proof. What would you have believed?

Still, for all the things the critics have to say, there’s no doubt that the space race was a positive event which happened in the midst of a crumbling world. It restored hope, passion; a sense of purpose in people who had resigned themselves to a routine life. Even if it was false, it sure brought a lot of good to this world. And now, in the coming 40^th anniversary of the lunar landing, let us salute the men and women who made all this possible, and the spirit of unity which made such a big leap for mankind.

Chrome OS

Google, the small startup which began its life as a PhD project by two university students, has evolved over the years into one of the world’s largest companies boasting quarterly revenues of billions of dollars worldwide. Beginning as a magnificently efficient search engine, it quickly ventured into other fields such as mobile platforms, with their take on Android, and browsers in the form of Google Chrome. Recently, they’ve announced their plans for continuing their takeover of the world with the Chrome operating system(OS), a direct challenge to the company with a monopoly over this industry, Microsoft.

The new Chrome OS has announced its bid to move into the world of netbooks. For the uninformed, netbooks are micro laptops which are barely bigger or thicker than the size of a regular paperback, sacrificing their bulk and fancy resources for the advantages of speed and light internet surfing. Netbooks have been hailed by the computer industry as the doorway to cloud computing, a term used to describe the concept of using the Internet as one big computer to get everything done, rather than having to buy expensive hardware to get the same work done today. In sync with the reputation that netbooks have obtained, Google plans to create its operating system around the concept of speed and availability. That means that users no longer have to rely on Microsoft’s bulky Vista OS, which has attracted complaints ranging from being not user friendly to being too slow. And with a balance sheet the size of Google’s, consumers need not worry that services such as supports and updates will vanish overnight after spending the time to familiarize themselves with the OS.

However, sceptics are quick to note that Google’s high flying plans will not go as smoothly as some might think. They note that the Android mobile platform has not reached the heights that so many had expected, even after being available for so long. Plus, Microsoft will definitely not sit on the sidelines waiting for little brother to catch up. With so many netbooks already sporting the Windows OS, it will surely see the move by Google as a threat and rank up its forces to defend its turf in the upcoming war.

Second, Google has announced that the OS will be open sourced – meaning free, in contrast to Microsoft’s pocket burning operating system costs. While that’s good news to the regular consumer, how will Google keep up the pace without a steady income? Who’s going to satisfy the payrolls on the staff working on the project, and where will that money come from. To be sure, running an OS can’t be cheap, as can be clearly seen through Microsoft’s efforts in keeping Vista in good graces with their customers. Will future Chrome OS users have to put up with hanging advertisements on the sides of their screens? That’s not going to fare well with most folks.

Of course, nobody is denying that Google’s move to create an OS is a good one, and the competition between the search engine company and Microsoft will surely be healthy for consumer choice. However, doubts and shadows remain in our minds as to how it plans to provide the best of both worlds while keeping its market share. Let’s cross our fingers and hope that Google comes out with something that will smack us on the side of the head and make us go “Wow”, and seal its reputation as a company that’s genuinely working for us.

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