Posted 11/05/09 at 07:05:29 PM by Jason Barry

Google announced on the official Gmail blog a handy new upgrade to the Offline Gmail labs app. Before the update, you could enable Offline Gmail and it would use specialized heuristics to download messages for offline use.

With the new update, once you enable Offline Gmail, you can find some customizable options under the “Offline” tab in Settings. You can now select specifically which labels to download and how deep into your mailbox you would like the downloading to begin. Once the settings are saved, the app will immediately start downloading any emails weren't already synced to your computer.  Of course, less downloads means faster Offline Gmail so you should be careful with the settings.

It's a substantial upgrade to a very handy lab application for commuters or travelers.

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Posted 10/02/09 at 05:47:45 PM by Jason Barry

Twitter announced at the Future of Web Apps conference in London that they will be implementing a Twitter Labs feature. A seemingly familiar idea, the Twitter Lab will be a formal outlet for Twitter approved plug-ins that are submitted by developers using the API. They expect it to launch “soon” but were skimpy on the details.

Twitter is also testing out a new “Lists” feature that will allow users to compile lists of their favorite tweeters. Users can create their own buckets of Twitter accounts and share them (or keep them private). The lists are linked from the users profile and can be subscribed to by friends. Developer information will be released in the next few days as the feature is rolled out.

Do you find your Twitter account lacking cool, new, functionality? Are you looking forward to organizing your Twitter friends? Does anyone still use Twitter?

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Posted 08/27/09 at 03:30:20 PM by David Murphy

It sounds like Buzzword Bingo, but a new Mozilla Labs project is applying an open-source, crowd-sourced routine to solve common Web developer issues. The program's called TestSwarm, and I must confess, it's a novel idea for increasing a developer's ability to test out new JavaScript framework on a variety of browsers at once. And the fact that this an open-source project is cooler still: Aspiring testers can load the framework onto their own servers and set up their own test

TestSwarm was developed by one of the Mozilla Foundation's JavaScript Tool Developers, John Resig, to deal with the scalability issues that factor into JavaScript code testing. To Resig, the proper testing platform includes at least five different browsers split into 12 total versions per operating system. Although he doesn't go into this length in his example, you should triple that number to factor in the Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7 operating environments.

Factor these (now) thirty-six tests against an average of ten test suite iterations--a minimum number of variances that Resig runs in a common jQuery testing environment. That's three hundred and sixty runs for every test you create, more if you're expanding to include OSX and Linux platforms. And did I mention that the best results tend to occur when actual human beings are behind the testing instead of some automated attempt at user interaction? Yeaaaah...

So how did Resig address this grand problem of JavaScript testing scalability? You should know--you're a part of the solution, after all. Click the jump.

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Posted 06/06/09 at 06:19:18 PM by Justin Kerr

On Wednesday, Google officially unveiled its newest lab project called Google Squared, which attempts to organize search results into a spreadsheet style layout. Although it might appear at first glance that this is a Wolfram Alpha competitor, Google is quick to defend the original aspects of the service. Unlike Wolfram Alpha, Google isn’t actually performing any calculations, and they will simply continue to do what they do best, present information that has been cached from the web. The idea behind squared is to help organize your search results so that you get all of the relevant information you’re looking for in one shot. It is hoped that this will minimize the amount of times users will need to refine their original search terms in order to get the results they are looking for.

The system isn’t quite perfect however, and ARS Technica was able to achieve some pretty humorous results by searching for the term “NYC population”. While reviewing the results, I noticed that Google populated a column named “status”, and listed Queens as “hospitalized”. Another column is titled “white” and the associated image is a heard of deer wandering around an army base. That’s not to say the system is totally broken however, and when it works, it works extremely well. A quick search for the term “Palm Pre” for example, turned up categories such as memory, weight, dimensions, display, etc. They clearly have some work to do on making the columns more relevant, but it certainly is an encouraging start.

Give Google Squared a spin and let us know what you think.

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Posted 05/29/09 at 04:20:32 PM by Andy Salisbury

Just this week Hulu launched their new service, Goog—err, Hulu Labs in the interest of letting their users get a more hands on approach to the development of the site.

“To help us learn from user feedback […], we’re excited to open up a new Hulu Labs section on the site today. At Hulu Labs, we’ll provide sneak peeks at some of the upcoming releases from our product roadmap, some of which are personal projects and hobbies our devs have been cooking up,” wrote Eric Feng, Hulu’s CTO on their official blog. “From new recommendation algorithms to tools for building custom widgets to a time-based view for browsing your favorite shows, we’ll be sharing a variety of these new creations with you at Hulu Labs and looking forward to your thoughts on how to make these products better.”

They also released the beta for Hulu Desktop, an application that has been optimized to let you watch all of your favorite shows (so long as they’re hosted on Hulu) on your desktop or media center PC. The UI has been designed with a small Microsoft or Apple remote in mind, making it a very reasonable contender for all the media center PCs out there.

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Posted 04/13/09 at 05:05:23 PM by Andy Salisbury

Google, never one to sit idly by while there are small improvements to be made on their own web-based email client, announced this week that they would be releasing a new, experimental feature that would allow users to insert images into an email rather then sending them as attachments.

The new feature, aptly named “Inserting images,” will allow users to send email messages with inline images that show up at an exact, user-defined location inside the body of the message. Once you enable the feature in the Labs tab in Gmail’s settings, you’ll be all set to go. So be sure to check it out and let us know what you think!

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Posted 11/18/07 at 03:11:37 AM by Maximum PC Staff

Trouble is always a'cooking in the Maximum PC lab. In this week's podcast, the editors talk about all the crazy testing they've been up to!

Subscribe: http://feeds.feedburner.com/maximumpc/1337

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