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November 5, 2006

Options for Gmail Attachments Yet to Come

Now that Gmail added the option to open XLS files in Google Spreadsheets, it's time to add options for more file types. Here's my wishlist:

1. Image files (.jpg, .png, etc.)
* add to Picasa Web Albums
* create a slideshow

2. Videos
* upload to Google Video

3. Music (MP3, WMA, AC3, OGG)
* listen
* find lyrics
* information about the artists

4. Archives
* view file structure
* extract file

5. KMZ files
* view in Google Maps

6. MBX, EML files
* import in Gmail

7. C, CPP, etc.
* syntax highlighting
* compile

8. ODF, ODS
* convert to Microsoft Office formats
* open in Google Docs & Spreadsheets

9. PDF
* OCR this

10. All documents (DOC, PDF, PS, TXT)
* summarize
* find related web pages

What would you like to see?

9 comments:

  1. Compile c, cpp files? That seems dangerous option

    ReplyDelete
  2. You say, you would like to have an option to listen to MP3s? Well, this feature is there for quite a long time. I use it few times a week. Anyway. I would like to see the same option for videos. So that you will see the Google Video Player embedded (or have a pop-up after clicking Play) that would play the video. I get tons of "funny" videos from my family everyday and it is bothering to download everything to check whether I already watched that video week ago :-)

    ReplyDelete
  3. The existing options in Gmail are:

    1. View the following types of files as HTML: .pdf, .doc, .xls, .ppt, .rtf, .sxw, .sxc, .sxi, .sdw, .sdc, .sdd, and .wml.

    2. Play MP3s.

    3. Open .xls files in Google Spreadsheets.

    ReplyDelete
  4. To: Paolo

    Well, I think that View as HTML for PDF files is just what you want. Is that so? Or you mean it should OCR pictures of text within PDFs?

    ReplyDelete
  5. I asked for that, so I should explain. As defined by Wikipedia, "OCR, is computer software designed to translate images of handwritten or typewritten text (usually captured by a scanner) into machine-editable text, or to translate pictures of characters into a standard encoding scheme representing them".

    So Google could use the technology from Google Books to transform typewritten text into computer-recognizable text. They work on an open-source program that does that, but its performance is far from great.

    ReplyDelete
  6. With the MP3's...

    Why not have a seperate window/tab for a "gmail playlist" instead of having to open each song in a seperate window/tab?

    ReplyDelete
  7. For the first one - jpg, png etc. it is so simple to add this feature - I often put nearly all of my pictures to Flickr using email. Its just "email forward" function. I wonder why this one is not implemented - maybe Google is waiting for some very tight integration of Picasa web galleries and Gmail?

    ReplyDelete
  8. I think KMZ files should also offer an option to open with Google Earth and I think Image files should also offer an option to open with Windows picture & fax viewer.

    ReplyDelete

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