Who doesn't love pop-ups? Really, I mean, it has to be the world's most effective and well-respected mode of advertising. You're browsing along, reading something on the Web, and suddenly your screen explodes with color and NSFW video clips. Seriously, how can you not enjoy that?

If you're one of the odd few who aren't enthusiastic about pop-ups, you might appreciate Better Pop Up Blocker. While Chrome already features some pop-up blocking measures, they're not very serious. Even when you add the popular AdBlock extension, Chrome's blocking abilities still leave something to be desired. This point is made quite convincingly by the Better Pop Up Blocker homepage. If you're using Chrome, just click the image that says Click me, I'm an image, and see what I mean.

By default, Chrome allowed three different huge pop-up windows to appear. After installing Better Pop Up Blocker, no pop-up appeared when clicking the image. I was still able to see what pop-ups were blocked using the extension's menu and open them if I did want to access them. The browser action icon will every time it blocks a pop-up, just to let you know it's working.

All in all, it's a welcome addition to my Chrome installation - and one that will remain installed on my system.

Better Pop Up Blocker for Chrome blocks pop-ups -- better originally appeared on Download Squad on Sun, 28 Nov 2010 12:31:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

The Web is all about being social these days. When you take this "social" buzzword and reduce it down to brass tacks, you often end up with a bunch of widgets, buttons and other annoyances crowded around the content you're actually interested in reading.

WidgetBlock is a Chrome add-on that makes short work of a whole bunch of common widgets and buttons for social services. In one fell swoop it eradicates the presence of Facebook, Twitter, Meebo, Digg, Buzz, and a ton of other omnipresent Web 2.0 services. Of course, if you happen to like some of these you can switch them on selectively.

When I tested WidgetBlock, it made the site I was trying to load noticeably faster (about two or three times as fast, in fact). It also makes the Web feel a tad "cleaner", at least for me. Definitely recommended.

WidgetBlock for Chrome blocks annoying social widgets, makes Web faster originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 26 Nov 2010 10:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

One of my favorite Gmail features is the ability to drag-and-drop attachments onto email messages. That's so cool! There's no more browsing for files - the whole thing feels much more like a desktop app.

drag2up is a Chrome add-on that aspires to bring that same functionality to the whole Web. It's super-cool - when it works. I've selected the screenshot above for that exact reason. The imgur.com link is the result of a successful upload attempt. I dragged an image onto a text area, and drag2up uploaded it to imgur.com in the background, and then it populated the text area with the URL of the image. It even wrapped it in forum-friendly [img] tags for me.

The second line (the one starting with Error) is what happened when I tried uploading a ZIP file. No joy, but I guess that might be resolved in time.

When I tried using drag2up with another edit control (CKEditor running in a heavily-customized environment), it couldn't even modify the text shown in the control. But it did work with a simple text area control.

Bottom line: It's really, really cool, when it works. Let's hope it'll gradually start working with more and more files and editors.

drag2up for Chrome brings drag-and-drop uploading to the whole Web originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 24 Nov 2010 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Scraping is a technique whereby a website or tool extracts select information from another website. For example, when you type a difficult word into Google and instantly see a definition for that word from some Web dictionary, that's because Google "scraped" that information from the dictionary. The term (and practice) has some negative connotations, because scrapers can be used to steal blog content and for other nefarious purposes. But as Google (and many others) show, it doesn't have to be used for evil.

Scraper is a Chrome add-on that somewhat simplifies the process of scraping information from a webpage. I say "somewhat" because you still have to know XPath or jQuery selector syntax, but that's pretty easy to master if you know a bit of HTML.

Once the extension is installed, you can right-click any page element and select "Scrape similar". You then get a window with a single table row, and the XPath expression leading to the exact element you've selected. It is now up to you to generalize that expression so as to get a broader match. As you can see in the screenshot, it was quite simple to write an expression that yields all of the post headlines and links on the DLS homepage.

Once you have the information you wanted, you can click Export to Google Docs and get a spreadsheet with all of your data in tabular form, ready for further processing.

Scraper is very much a work in progress; while jQuery selector syntax is supported, you only get the XPath expression filled in automatically (and it's too specific). Also, it does not support saving expressions as templates, so every time you want to use it, you have to re-build the XPath expression you need. I'm sure this will all get fixed in due time.

Scraper for Chrome lets you easily create spreadsheets from Web data originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 22 Nov 2010 14:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Google Cloud Connect plug-in connects Microsoft Office to your Google Docs originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 22 Nov 2010 13:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Google's HTML5 e-book begins to appear in newspapers originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 22 Nov 2010 06:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Google now offers call recording in Gmail originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 22 Nov 2010 05:17:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Chrome Dev and Beta updates bring UI and Web Store tweaks, more functional print preview originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 19 Nov 2010 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

As a long-time Google Apps user, I was overjoyed when I could finally start using Google Reader with my Apps account a few months ago. And now, Google has announced that all Google services are to become available for Google Apps users over the coming months.

After the jump you can watch a beautiful video explaining the change, but in a nutshell, you will now be able to access over 60 Google services via your Apps account, including Blogger, Picasa Web Albums, and more.

The change will be rolling out over the next few months, and administrators would be able to control which of their users could access what services.

Continue reading Google Apps accounts finally get full range of Google services

Google Apps accounts finally get full range of Google services originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 19 Nov 2010 06:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

I find Google's Autocomplete (or "suggest") feature very interesting because it seems to have spawned a quite a few by-products. Web Seer is a nice example. You feed it with a couple of prefixes, and it polls Google for all of the suggestions for them and then spews out a simple visual representation.

The screenshot above shows a snippet of the output for "should they" versus "will my cat." Perhaps that's not the best example because these two searches aren't fully comparable; when I tried "can he be" versus "can she be," I got some more comparable results, such as "be so cold" for the guys and "be so heartless" for the girls (ouch!).

It's a Flash app, so if you happen to be taking part in the crusade against Flash, it won't work. But on the bright side, where it does work, it's very fast. There's no Submit button or anything like that - it's completely live and on-the-fly, with the graphic updating right as you type.

Web Seer lets you visually compare Google Autocomplete results originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 18 Nov 2010 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Google Maps Navigation now available in Australia and New Zealand originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 17 Nov 2010 15:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

My free Google Apps Gmail account has about 7.5GB of storage space, total. That's extremely generous on Google's part, but that amount of space does eventually fill up - especially if you have people sending you huge PowerPoint presentations, videos of their baby's first steps, or hilarious kitten photos in full resolution (because they have no idea what "resolution" means, much less how to reduce it).

What I find perplexing is that Google never included an option to sort or filter messages by size. I have no doubt that this is a business decision, because implementing such a feature would be trivial for the Gmail team. To speak bluntly, I think Google wouldn't mind it so much if I ran out of free space on my Google Apps account; then I'd have to get some more space, and this time it would cost money.

If I actually needed more space, or even if Google was simply upfront about its reluctance to provide such an option, I'd be fine with this. As things stand now, I feel that Google is being uncharacteristically stingy.

This is where Find Big Mail comes into play. While Google does not provide a way to filter by size, it does provide IMAP access. Find Big Mail accesses your Gmail account via IMAP, and it catalogs all of your messages by size. It creates three labels - one for messages larger than 2MB, one for messages larger than 500KB, and the last is for messages larger than 100KB.

Once it completed scanning my account, I simply clicked the label that said FindBigMail > 2mb, selected all messages, and clicked Delete. I then went to the trash folder and emptied that. Voilà - I dropped from 64 percent occupied space to 36 percent. How awesome is that?

Find Big Mail's free option scans only a third of your total mailbox, but it was enough for me. For $5 it will scan your whole Gmail account. You don't have to provide it with your password - only authorize it via Google's own access control. Once it's done, you can revoke its access from your Google account page. I highly recommend it!

Find Big Mail lets you quickly free space on your Gmail account originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 17 Nov 2010 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Continue reading Google Docs gets mobile editing support on Android 2.2 and iOS

Google Docs gets mobile editing support on Android 2.2 and iOS originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 17 Nov 2010 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Google has just introduced a new product, and this time it's a PC application (with a browser-based UI). It's called Google Refine, and it solves a problem that is enormous for some people: it lets you take massive sets of "messy data" and massage them into shape so that they're uniform, make sense, and can be statistically analyzed.

The video after the jump shows a very good example, which is based on a CSV file exported from a publicly available data source (a government contract system, in this case). The data is very realistic - descriptions are inconsistent (Firm Fixed Price on some rows and FFP on other rows), and even the number formats are inconsistent (you get 0.78 on one row and a number in the millions on another row).

Google Refine lets you very easily hone in on those inconsistencies and fix them in a myriad of ways. This is an important data tool because those heaps of messy data are often public records, which are available but not transparent; being able to quickly analyze them could expose some very interesting patterns and anomalies in the way that public institutions and governments behave.

[Thanks, Yanksy, for the tip!]

Continue reading Google Refine lets you fix and handle huge, messy sets of data

Google Refine lets you fix and handle huge, messy sets of data originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 17 Nov 2010 10:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Google Docs adds LaTeX support, customizable autocorrect originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 17 Nov 2010 09:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Google branches out into machine-curated high-fashion with Boutiques.com originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 17 Nov 2010 07:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Here's an operation I need to do quite often: copy both the page title and its URL. For some reason, neither Firefox nor Chrome provides a way to do this in one fell swoop. I need to activate the address bar in order to copy the URL, and I'm not even sure there's a way to copy the page title (I usually just type it out manually).

Copy Fixer is an add-on for Firefox and Chrome that provides a simple and elegant solution. With Copy Fixer, if you hit Ctrl+C when nothing is selected, your clipboard is populated with something like this:

Download Squad
http://downloadsquad.switched.com/

That's it. It's just the page title and the URL and nothing more. I tried out the Chrome version, and it worked perfectly. It did require a restart to begin working, though, but maybe that's due to the Canary build I'm using.

The add-on is very minimalistic. There's no UI to speak of, and there are no preferences. One option that I wish the developer would add is a way to wrap the title and the URL with arbitrary strings and lose the line break. This way, the add-on could be used to produce Markdown-friendly links - page title surrounded by brackets, followed by the URL surrounded by parentheses. Maybe that will come in the future!

Copy Fixer for Firefox and Chrome lets you easily copy the URL and page title originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 16 Nov 2010 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Continue reading Google Goggles goes into marketing

Google Goggles goes into marketing originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 16 Nov 2010 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Google Maps 4.7 for Android adds Hotpot features originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 16 Nov 2010 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Google Voice app for iOS available now originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 16 Nov 2010 14:40:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.