Google mail

www.youthsprouts.blogspot.com

With Google mail increasing it's user's storage capacity, I've decided to delve into other ways to extend and enhance Google’s popular webmail service. Presenting: 60+ tools and resources for Gmail.

GCount - An application for Mac OSX that alerts you to new mail.

gDisk - An app for Mac OSX giving the ability to turn Gmail accounts into storage drives.

gFeeder - A small ticker for your Gmail that will let you know at a glance what’s coming in for you.

GetMail - Allows you to migrate your emails from Hotmail to your Gmail account.

Gmail Drive - Another tool for turning your Gmail account in to a virtual storage drive, this one works directly from inside Windows Explorer.

Gmail Loader - For Windows or Linux, aids you in loading your email to your Gmail account.

GMailFS - Turns your Gmail space into a virtual drive that your Windows Explorer can see.

GotMailG - A Mac widget to display the number of unread messages in your inbox.

POP3/IMAP server for GMAIL in JAVA - Allows you POP3 access via your favorite mail reader to your Gmail account, IMAP still in development.

Send To GMail - With one click, you can back up any file you want from your computer to your Gmail account.

Firefox Tools

Better Gmail - Combines some of the most popular Greasemonkey scripts in to one extension. Includes things such as skins, saved searches, keyboard macros, and more.

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LINUX----Google Web Toolkit

www.youthsprouts.blogspot.com

We're excited to have another guest blog post for you, brought to you by Jeet Kaul, VP of Sun's Developer Products and Programs. He's here to talk about using NetBeans to build web apps with GWT.

Google Web Toolkit is getting a lot of attention in the web developer community thanks to its interesting way of avoiding the need to write JavaScript code for interactive web applications. Developers from the NetBeans community recognized the benefits of such a solution and created a plug-in which integrates GWT support into the NetBeans IDE. NetBeans users can now choose GWT as one of the supported web frameworks, and NetBeans then helps them with all the important tasks such as editing, building, running and debugging GWT applications. Here's how to get started with GWT development in NetBeans and where to find more information about the plug-in.

Although GWT is not supported in NetBeans 6 out of the box, you can download this GWT plug-in and start developing GWT-based applications in NetBeans.

The first step is to install the plug-in using the Plug-in manager. Go to the "Tools | Plugins" menu action, switch to the "Downloaded" tab and locate the plug-in on your disk drive. You don't even have to restart your IDE - GWT support is instantly available for you!

The plug-in is seamlessly integrated into NetBeans IDE. That means that when you create a new web application GWT is shown as one of the available frameworks in the last step of the New project wizard. Here you can specify the GWT installation folder and choose the main entry point class of your GWT module.

You can use the plug-in both if you start from scratch or if you want to work on an existing GWT application. So if you used a different IDE than NetBeans before, it is easy to switch the GWT application to NetBeans. You just point the wizard to your existing GWT application and create a new project from existing sources.

Once you get the project created you can run the application simply by hitting the Run button. There are two options – you can either use the default Run action which deploys the application to the application server and opens your default web browser. The other option is to run GWT in hosted mode and then the GWT development shell is opened and you can see your application inside of it.

Debugging is also supported, so you can just run the Debug action and then the runtime is ran in debug mode. You can simply add breakpoints, step into, step out, etc. as you would expect in a regular web application.

NetBeans already provides lots of tooling out of the box that you can take advantage of, like a powerful XML editor, HTML editor and of course a Java editor with code completion and quick fixes. NetBeans 6 made huge strides in improving the editing experience and it shows when developing GWT applications, too. All GWT APIs are available for you including javadoc documentation, because the GWT jars get automatically added into the project during it's creation.

To learn more about GWT support in NetBeans, the project homepage and screencast can help you get started. Sang Shin, a member of the Sun technology evangelism team, also created a free course for GWT and NetBeans, so you can learn from his examples and do the hands-on lab.

The plug-in was developed as an open source project so we encourage developers to join the project and contribute. There are many ways you can contribute, even submitting an issue or request for enhancement counts.

The future roadmap contains exciting features such as refactoring for GWT and GWT-specific quick fixes in the editor which will make developing GWT code even more comfortable. We are always looking for feedback, so if you try out the project let the developers know what you think.

Another project that may be of interest is jMaki, an AJAX framework that provides a lightweight model for creating JavaScript centric AJAX-enabled web applications using Java, Ruby, PHP, and Phobos. jMaki has an integrated NetBeans module for all the above languages, and some new features are being developed that will expose all the jMaki widgets as GWT java components, easily accessible to GWT application developers using NetBeans.

There's also Project Woodstock, which provides the next generation of User Interface Components for the web, based on Java Server Faces and AJAX. This open source collaboration enables a community of developers to create powerful and intuitive web applications that are accessible and localizable, and which are based on a uniform set of guidelines and components, to help ensure ease of development and ease of use. These components enable visual web application development in NetBeans. Just drag and drop from the palette into the designer canvas and visually bind them to heterogeneous back end data sources (e.g. databases, Web Services, EJBs). Build powerful applications in minutes.

The NetBeans community has been growing a lot in past several years and NetBeans became a truly universal IDE, so if you haven't tried it recently, you may be surprised about the progress it has made. After all, it won't cost you much - it's free and open source. So give it a try today!

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Track Your Money. Effortlessly. ALL FOR FREE

www.youthsprouts.blogspot.com

Your Buxfer home page shows you:

• How much money (or debt!) you have in your accounts
• The breakdown of your recent expenses
• Who owes you money and who you owe money to

We just released a brand new mobile interface for Buxfer, which provides offline access to your data with the help of Google Gears for mobile. So you can access Buxfer from your mobile device even when you are not connected to the internet! If you are always on the go, and hate to go online just to check your bank balance, then this is just what you have been looking for. Just point your browser to:

 http://m.buxfer.com 

Google Gears is an open source browser extension that enables web applications to provide offline functionality. Today, Google released a version of Google Gears for the Windows Mobile platform, and we are glad to launch our offline mobile app in collaboration with Google. Support for more mobile platforms is in the works.

In online mode, the mobile interface lets you access your bank account balances, transactions, and analysis charts. You can add/edit accounts, transactions or tags. You can even synchronize your bank accounts right from your cellphone! More features should be coming your way shortly …

In offline mode, you can access all the above features in a read-only mode. You won’t be able to add new transactions or edit your tags, but you can still view your account balances, recent transactions and analysis charts.

We are very pleased to announce that you can now access your Buxfer data and analytics programatically with our REST API.

So, what can you do with the API?

• You can create a widget to automatically update your account balances on your desktop every 15 minutes. Simply send the following request periodically and you are done!

  https://username:password@www.buxfer.com/api/accounts.xml

• Perhaps, you want to look at your analysis pie chart, but you want to restrict analysis to your credit card account. Just type in the following and out comes a pie-chart! Tweak the URL to your heart’s wish, and get near-instanteneous analytics!

  https://www.buxfer.com/api/analysis.html?accountName=Mastercard

  

• Mash up your financial data with other services out there on the web! In the previous example, we used Google’s Chart API to produce compelling visualizations. You can do so with tons of other services to create useful tools.

So get creative and start hacking!

Need more info?

• Read the API overview
• Understand the security issues
• Dig into the complete documentation
• Get started with sample clients in Perl, Python, Ruby and PHP.

Like all things, we think this is only a first step; please let us know whether you can build interesting applications using the API. If not, let us know which API calls you would like to be added, and which cut out to keep the API lean.

No its not an April Fools gimmick. We have added an easy way to synchronize all your bank and credit card accounts. Click on the ‘Synchronize all’ link you see on your account summary page, and you will see a list of your accounts that can be automatically synchronized. You can login to them all at once, and download all your new expenses in one go. You can use Google Gears to store these credentials offline on your computer, so next time you don’t even have to type in your username and password.

TAKE TOUR. USE THIS COOL, ALL FOR FREE __

This is not an April Fool's joke!--- what happend on April 1st

www.youthsprouts.blogspot.com It is possible to use Google Docs offline. We've all been working on this for a while now, and I think sometimes we take it for granted. A web-based word processor you can use without an internet connection?! Who'd'a thunk it? Gigantic congrats to the Docs team, from all of us working on Gears. We especially love how simple you have made the setup and synchronization process. Sometime soon, we'll have to get one of the Docs engineers to write a blog post about some of the challenges they faced bringing this together. There are some really interesting stories and lessons in there that would be useful to anyone aiming to offline-enable their web application. __

What's new with Google Gears? A Tech Talk

www.youthsprouts.blogspot.com Brad Neuberg and Ben Lisbakken of the Gears team gave a brown bag talk on some of the new and interesting features in Gears. They show a lot of examples and tools such as:

• PubTools: Brad developed this set of tools to enable offline caching of content in minutes. This is perfect if you have a set of content that you want to make available offline.
• Google Gears for Mobile: Just yesterday we launched our first Google mobile application using Gears, with Picasa
• Cross Domain Web Services: A good example using Flickr search
• Dojo Storage has just had a new release so it plays in the new Dojo 1.x land, and has a Gears storage engine
• blog.gears: Pamela Fox did a great job with this GData/Gears blogging application
• Gears + Greasemonkey = GearsMonkey

It is fun to hear some of the fellow Googlers probe with their own questions! Brad and Ben will both be at Google I/O, May 28-29, 2008, in San Francisco. We are keen to hear your thoughts on Gears and the Open Web. Permalink __

Hydrogen-powered plane takes off

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The hydrogen-powered plane in action

The first manned, hydrogen-powered plane has been successfully tested in the skies above Spain, its makers say.

The small, propeller-driven craft, developed by aviation giant Boeing, made three short flights at an airfield south of Madrid, the company said.

It was powered by hydrogen fuel cells, which produce only heat and water as exhaust products.

The tests could pave the way for a new generation of greener aircraft, the company said.

Boeing's chief technology officer John Tracy said the flights were "a historical technological success" and "full of promises for a greener future".

Small future

Three test flights of the two-seater aircraft took place in February and March at an airfield at Ocana, south of Madrid. The plane was modified to include a hybrid battery and fuel cell system developed by UK firm Intelligent Energy.

The fuel cells, which create electricity by combining oxygen and hydrogen, were used to power an electric motor coupled to a propeller.

Other organisations have demonstrated solar-powered planes

During take-off the plane's batteries were used to provide an additional boost, but whilst in the air, the plane relied entirely on the cells.

Boeing said the plane has a flying time of 45 minutes but tests were limited to around half that time.

Although the test had been successful, the firm said it did not believe fuel cells could be the primary power source for large passenger aircraft.

However, it could be used as a secondary source of energy for large planes, according to Nieves Lapena, the engineer responsible for the test flights, but this may take some time to develop.

"In my opinion, we are talking about a delay of about twenty years," she said.

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