New gmail interface

I have loaded the new Gmail interface for my mail and love how fast it seems to work. I like the instant inline tools that appear as I roll the pointer over the email list and the convenient calendar, and tasks tools menu to the right. I don't know all the other changes that have been made under the hood but my immediate reaction was where are my contacts. They used to be under the GMAIL dropdown but no more. 

All is not lost though since they can be accessed using the nine dots google apps dropdown. If they are not on your list click More to pick the contacts icon. You can drag this up to the top of the apps list using click and drag.

Another feature is Snoozing where you can mark an email as remind you at a particular time or place etc. More about this I am sure to come. 

Gmail can now nag you if it feels that you have ignored an important email or content needs responding to. I am not sure this feature is for me but others have commented that when they have no time to respond to everything the idea or priority mail is attractive

Googles proposed confidential mail has not arrived just yet but I am sure that it will be along soon giving more control over mail with features such as time limited availability and two step verification.

The desktop layout is a cosmetic change that I find makes little impact on my working practice and the idea of focussed attachments for opening in preview mode could be a bonus.

Adding colour palettes from adobe color cc to your documents

We love using Adobe color cc to create custom palettes to use from photos and other existing documents. Importing them into high end publishing and design tools is pretty straight forward with the ASE file that you can save and download. (See our colour wheel tutorial here). What happens when you wish to apply the theme to applications like Word or PowerPoint. There are two ways that you can transfer the colours into a palette in your application without the ASE file.

First generate your palette using the color wheel or imported picture. I have chosen an imported picture that I use on my Blog.

From the top left corner select import image

A file browser appears and you can choose an image. If you prefer make up a palette from the color wheel instead.

Now select COLOR WHEEL and scroll down to the bottom of the page so that you can see the color swatch and the writing underneath. The writing is the RGB (red green blue) values of the color palette.

These values can be written down and used in your documents or shared with colleagues so they use the same colours for club or company documents.

Click here for examples of how to apply the colours in Word, PowerPoint or Libre Office.

Opening PDF files for editing

PDF (Portable Document Format) is a proprietary format designed by Adobe. Viewers are available for almost every device so anyone can open a PDF for viewing or printing.

PDF has been extremely successful in the desktop publishing and print business as designers and authors can create documents that can be sent globally. More recently PDF has become a popular ebook format too. A shared PDF can be printed or viewed with custom fonts, drawings and layouts faithfully reproduced. The original program does not have to be on the device the document is sent to.

Many office and drawing programs can make PDF files including Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop. Others use PDF printer drivers to do the same thing.

PDF documents are meant to be 'read-only' but many people wish to edit PDFs sent to them. Adobe Acrobat designed by Adobe is able to do this but Adobe Illustrator, Scribus and Libre Office can open PDF multi-page documents, edit and export PDF files.

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A visitor to our garden

Dawn and I were chilling in the garden - just finished our lunch in the conservatory - when with a thud a large flying thing with wings darted in, made enough noise for Dawn to beat a retreat, bashed its head a little around the skylights of the conservatory and settled on a blind for a rest. I saw it was a dragonfly and was obviously confused as our conservatory is not a pond and our pond is only just over a metre square, not your typical resting place for a big monster.

We caught it in a jamjar so that we could photograph it and release it. A camera fetched, and as we took pictures it seemed quite happy to sit on the (much calmer) hand of Dawn. Neither of us are great dragonfly fanciers and so had no idea what it was. So onto Google.

I used the google images tool to upload a picture and identify our dragonfly

To use it go to the google homepage and look for images on the right hand side or just go directly to google images https://images.google.com/ The camera icon allows you to upload a picture from your device or camera and away you go. We have found this pretty succesful so far although not foolproof. It prefers images that have few other objects to confuse so plain backgrounds are a bonus. A couple of the pictures we took were confounded by Dawns finger.

Our search took us the the broad bodied chaser. It turns out that the one we had visit was a female.