Better Y! Mail Beta - Less ads, More mail (Oct-2010)

Yahoo! just released a new beta of their Mail web application. Overall, it looks a bit more modern and promises much faster performance (I have not seen any improvement yet...in fact sometimes it is slower than before).

However, it needed a bit of spit and polish. I decided to write a user script (works on chrome and firefox with greasemonkey or scriptish) that tightens up the wasted space in the header and removes the main ads that take up space on the mail home page as well as in the inbox.

Available for Firefox* & Google Chrome
Download the user script directly or from the Userscripts.org script page

* Firefox (You need Greasemonkey or Scriptish already installed)
 
Yahoo Mail Beta Oct 2010 Homepage Before:

Yahoo Mail Beta Oct 2010 Homepage After:

Yahoo Mail Beta Oct 2010 Inbox Before:

Yahoo Mail Beta Oct 2010 Homepage After:

More mail for YOU

Available for Firefox* & Google Chrome
Download the user script directly or from the Userscripts.org script page

* Firefox (You need Greasemonkey or Scriptish already installed)

SymbianNote - Evernote for Symbian - My first WRT Widget

Evernote for S60 v5: hosted on Google Code.

After playing around with the WRT kit and navigating the documentation for the WRT kit and the beta version of platform services 2.0 (you would think these would be more easily available online!), I have created my first WRT App for Symbian v5 phones (eg, 5800XM and N97, etc...).


Version 1 of the app does the following:

1. Provides 1 touch (or run in the background) access to Evernote online
• Add quick notes
• Search and view notes already uploaded to the service
2. Send notes with /  without attachments to Evernote via e-mail.
3. Add your personalized Evernote incoming e-mail address to your contacts list with only 1 touch.  As a contact, it is easier to send files and notes to Evernote from other applications on the phones.
4. Check for updates (in the About view)
   

Some obervations about WRT:

1. The 5800 is not powerful enough or does not have a recent enough version of webkit for its browser to properly display jQuery UI effects.  Effects that are very smooth on the PC and emulator are jerky and incomplete on the actual phone. Hopefully, the new firmware rumored to be coming in October will improve the performance of the browser and JavaScript engine
2. WRT still needs a lot more work before it is a very useful toolkit
• Its APIs are still fairly limited. I wanted to use the Messaging API to send e-mails directly from the application but no such API exists yet. It only supports MMS and SMS (and even the addressing of those messages is limited).
• Users should be able to set security preferences one time for an app and not have to approve every use of an API by an application.  This is a problem with some Java apps as well. Users should have the choice to setup the security preferences one time for each app.  The constant request for approval (just like Vista) is very frustrating.
• The new camera API looks promising, but until the e-mail api exists it will be useless for Evernote (although other apps could work fine).

I hope you enjoy the app and I welcome your feedback on bugs and improvements.  Once I figure out how to upload source code to Google Code and not just final packages, I'll put up the source code as well.

Direct Download link:
http://evernote-s60.googlecode.com/files/SymbianNote.wgz

Link to Google Code Project Page:
http://code.google.com/p/evernote-s60/

I'll try to add some screenshots soon.

Nokia WRT (Web Runtime Toolkit) API Documentation Available

Recently, I have begun tinkering around with the WRT tools for my Nokia 5800 so I can start to develop some handy widgets for my phone (and others).

Nokia has something called the Web Runtime, which allows, developers to write a applications using standard HTML/JS/CSS/DOM based applications that can tap into some of the native functionality of Nokia devices as well as be nicely packaged into installable files.

They even have a plugin to help developing these widgets in Aptana/Eclipse. The only problem is that the documentation online is very bad and incomplete. They information is scattered in various places and no where online can you find a decent set of API docs detailing all of the classes and functions. Whatever you find online is incomplete, at best.

Another developer Jappit pointed me in the right direction to find good documentation, but only available inside of Aptana. I have pulled the WRT help / API documentation from Aptana and uploaded it online.

You can view the WRTKit API Documentation online.
Otherwise, you can download the complete WRT API Documentation for Aptana as a zip file.

I also have uploaded the latest WRT Library (1.4) online as well.

Hopefully, now I can start creating a few interesting apps for S60 users...

Export Google Trends to Google Docs Script

Feeling inspired from the success of the script that I wrote to export from Google Analytics to Google Docs , I decided to see if I could reuse most of the code for other Google CSV exports.  My first sub-project was to tackle Google Trends.

I made the necessary front end changes to put in the new links and collect the correct export URLs.  Generally everything worked on the backend as well after only a few minor tweaks.  However, I kept receiving a lot of junk in the export and the content was not legible.

There seems to be some issue with the format of the CSV file being delivered by Google Trends.  It opens fine is a pure text editor like Notepad++ , but the browser recognized thousands of "invalid" characters in the export.  Basically, the CSV contains a null value in between every other valid character and it included rare form feed characters at the beginning and end of the file.  These invisible characters were blowing up the import to Google Docs so that while I would receive a "success" message for the upload, everything came out as gobbledegoop .

After multiple attempts to try to request a different file format, I finally decided to work a little string magic using RegEx.  I stripped out all of the junk characters before sending it up to Google Docs and voila! Everything works fine now.

Unfortunately, Google Trends only allows exports for keyword comparisons at the moment, but not for website data.  In the meantime though, for anyone doing SEO Keyword research, this could be of some valuable use to you.

Here are the links:
Download GM script directly
Greasemonkey Script Page

Enjoy.

Integrate Google Analytics with Google Docs using Greasemonkey

UPDATED 07/31/09: Not sure if the problem was upgrading to firefox 3.5 or if the GDocs API folks changed how they handle uploads, but the script started returning 415 errors from GDocs.  I worked with Google and now we have the problem fixed.  Should work for all again.

Any suggestions? Please add them in the comments.

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UPDATED 05/04/09: All fixed now. However, I am starting to notice some odd 404 errors coming from the Google Docs API. The file uploads nonetheless, but every once in a while the confirmation message comes back as a 404. Any suggestions? Please add them in the comments.

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UPDATED 04/30/09: Google just made another change to their code which broke the script. I will work on fixing it starting next week. When it is fixed, I'll make another post. Thanks for your patience.

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UPDATED: I updated the script with many improvements to reliability and functionality.

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UPDATED: I updated the script to handle security changes made by Google to Google Analytics

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Recently I was inspired to start tinkering with Google Analytics using Greasemonkey after listening to a presentation by Avinash Kaushik.

One problem that we have at work is that our version of Excel for some reason does not like the CSV files that GA exports. Our copies of Excel XP (I know its 6+ years old, but we just moved to it last year) only see the graphing data, but they do not recognize the tabular data further down in the CSV files.

After seeing the Juice Analytics integration for seeing new reports in GA, I realized that I probably could solve my export problem too using Greasemonkey. I decided to integrate GA with Google Docs, so I can do a one-click export to create a Google spreadsheet for analyzing the GA data.

Now, on any report that offers a CSV download, the user sees a new option for Google Docs:







Clicking the link will log the user into the Google Docs service and upload the report. Currently I have the # of records limited to 10000 rows of data, but I may make that a configurable option. After the report is successfully uploaded, the user received a confirmation message with a choice to open up Google Docs in a new tab or just to remain in GA:











Greasemonkey handles your data securely and only limits access to values stored by the user script to the user script itself. There is an additional measure of security I added that fully encrypts user passwords. Finally, the export service can only upload to Google Docs using the exact same account that you are currently using in GA. If you want to share, I suggest you share the spreadsheet after it has been created.

Installation Instructions

• You need Greasemonkey & Firefox 2+ installed
• If you have Greasemonkey working you will see a little monkey icon in your status bar:
  
• Now, download and install the user script (click OK/Accept on any message boxes. The file used to be called exporttogoogledocs.user.js, but apparently Userscipts.org renamed the file!)
  
• After opening choosing to open up Google Docs, the pop-up blocker may stop the new tab from launching...if so, you will need to allow pop-ups from the domain www.google.com because of the way Google handles the redirect.
  

Happy Analysis!