Mobile Google Contacts Alternative

For some reason, Google doesn't offer a mobile interface for Google Contacts. Sure, you can use the autocomplete feature from Gmail to find an email address or sync your contacts using CardDav or Exchange, but there's no mobile app for Google Contacts.

I've tried to use the standard desktop interface available at google.com/contacts, but it's slow and hard to use on a mobile phone. Fortunately, Google still offers the old version of the Google Contacts site at google.com/contacts_v1 and it works a lot better on a smartphone.

Update: There's another option - https://mail.google.com/mail/h/?v=cl (thanks, Alexandre).

From Sleekbooks to Chromebooks

What happens when you take a thin and light Windows PC and transform it into a Chromebook? Here are 2 examples of laptops from HP and Lenovo that have been morphed into Chromebooks. Both replaced an Intel Core i3 CPU with a Celeron CPU, the standard HDD with a 16GB SDD and Windows with Chrome OS. HP made some additional changes and removed 2GB of RAM and replaced the 2 USB 3.0 ports with USB 2.0 ports.

The price dropped from $590 to $330 for the HP laptop and from $620 to $430 for the Lenovo laptop. The less expensive Intel CPU and the free Chrome OS license help manufacturers save about $200.

Chromebook Pixel

Chromebooks started as an experiment and ended up becoming best-selling Amazon laptops. They're so popular that more and more computer manufacturers release Chromebooks: Lenovo launched the 11.6-inch ThinkPad X131e Chromebook for schools and now HP launches a 14-inch Pavillion Chromebook.

Today's Chromebooks are a lot more powerful than the original Chrome OS devices, since they traded Intel's Atom for Celeron and Cortex-A15, but they're not high-end devices. Celeron is a low-end CPU, displays are average, build quality is not great. It's hard to come up with a premium notebook that costs less than $500.

Well, it turns out that Google works on a new Chromebook that features a backlight keyboard, aluminum casing and a high-resolution 2560x1600 display with touch support. Unlike the previous Chromebooks, it's designed entirely by Google. Here's a leaked ad for the upcoming Chromebook Pixel:

Nexus 10 has the same resolution and Chromebook Pixel could use the same Cortex-A15 SoC that also powers the Samsung Chromebook. It's not clear how much it will cost, but the ARM SoC is a better option than a powerful Intel CPU since the device could be a lot less expensive. If Samsung's Chromebook costs $250 and Nexus 10 costs $400, it's likely that Chromebook Pixel will cost less than $500. The first premium ARM laptop.

YouTube Background Audio in iOS 6.1

For some reason, the latest version of Apple's mobile operating system breaks one of my favorite features: playing videos in the background. It worked in Apple's old YouTube app, YouTube's mobile site and almost any other video app/site (an important exception is YouTube's official app). Close the app, double-tap the Home button, swipe from left to right and tap the "Play" button to continue playing the video in the background. In iOS 6.1, the "play" button doesn't work.

It's a great feature for music videos, podcasts, ambient sounds and it's unfortunate that Android doesn't include it and Apple (accidentally?) disabled it in iOS 6.1. Until Apple fixes the bug, you can install two third-party YouTube apps that use some undocumented APIs to support background audio: McTube and YouPlayer. McTube continues to play the video after closing the app, while YouPlayer lets you manually enable background audio.

New Interface for YouTube Channels

YouTube tests a new interface for channels. For now, the updated layout is only available for a few channels like Sorted Food, iJustine, The Pet Collective and YouTube's own channel, but it will soon be enabled YouTube-wide.

What are the changes? The persistent left sidebar and the list of featured channels limit the channel's real estate, but make the interface more consistent. Most of the features from the old interface are still available, but they're more difficult to find. For example, to find the "feed" view, you need to click the arrow next to the home icon and click "feed". The list of playlists, the featured playlists and the list of likes are buried in a drop-down. There's also a new "about" section that shows the channel description, the number of subscribers and the video views, which is used to be placed in the right sidebar. The search box is only displayed when you click the new search icon.

The channel trailer replaces the featured video for non-subscribers. "You can show a trailer that will only appear to viewers who aren't already subscribed to your channel. This is your chance to let visitors know what your channel is all about and tell them why they should subscribe."

{ Thanks, Sterling. }

Permalinks for Google Drive Images

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. }

Convert Images Hosted by Google to WebP

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/AVvXsEiA0REYsUk_N8FtUoQ6zNeFjB5lT2HTRjbOvV-0kmgGwoFYIlIH6_rzaQbXGzGGfbg6Q0LNATG1P5GTd9Cb8aENDVN3R_5POzHKrU0Byal-cxkTi5RFWaTOcW9ipsyZbjsklLZhw421f1-F/s640/new-gdrive-create-menu.png [21 KB]

Here's the WebP photo:

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiA0REYsUk_N8FtUoQ6zNeFjB5lT2HTRjbOvV-0kmgGwoFYIlIH6_rzaQbXGzGGfbg6Q0LNATG1P5GTd9Cb8aENDVN3R_5POzHKrU0Byal-cxkTi5RFWaTOcW9ipsyZbjsklLZhw421f1-F/s640-rw/new-gdrive-create-menu.png [14.5 KB]