We get letters (2)

Posted by Karen Wickre, Google Blog team

The Google mailbag is filled with stories like this one, demonstrating the reach of Google across countries and between people. Occasionally we'll feature such a story here. If you have a noteworthy tale about how you've used Google, write to us.

Howard and Melissa of Boca Raton, Florida, were the happy new parents of twins, a boy and a girl named Andrew and Carly. Though they were preemies born in mid-July, both babies were safely home two weeks later. "Then suddenly," Howard wrote to us, "Andrew had to be admitted to the ER. We thought it was for something little - but the doctors discovered something major." The doctors observed that his hemoglobin levels had dropped substantially - from 14 to 7 - since he was born. (Carly was not tested.)

"Since hemoglobin is what takes oxygen to the brain," continues Howard, "the doctors wanted to do an emergency blood transfusion - and time was of the essence." But to the dismay of the parents, the doctors said the cord blood they had conscientiously saved would not help: They would need to use a stranger's blood, since there was no time to process theirs.

"We were shaken and quite upset," Howard recalls. "Armed with only a cell phone - and a very low battery - I was able to Google [hemoglobin "premature infant"] and found a medical journal article claiming that it's perfectly normal for preemies to have their hemoglobin levels drop to 7 between the first and third months of life, and apparently this is especially true with twins." He showed the mobile screen citing this fact to the neonatalogists, who went off to research the issue for a couple of hours. They returned, says Howard, "and sheepishly admitted that our son was indeed fine - no treatment was necessary."

Howard concludes, "Google literally saved our newborn son from having to endure an extremely dangerous, and totally unnecessary, blood transfusion. Melissa and I really appreciated your help with this one." And as you see, Andrew and Carly are both in good form now:













We can only add that we're thrilled to have played a role in the family's health and well-being.

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Extras for your Mac Gmail Notifier

Posted by Greg Miller, Software Engineer

As some clever users have already discovered, the Gmail Notifier for Mac OS X we launched last week can do a little bit more than meets the eye. A couple interesting features:

1. Fetch mail for only one Gmail Label
This is very useful if you only want to be "notified" about certain emails. For example, to only fetch mail with the label "ImportantStuff", run the following command from the Terminal:

defaults write com.google.GmailNotifier Label -string "ImportantStuff"

2. Extend the Notifier using plugins
The Gmail Notifier supports plugins written in AppleScript, or full-blown Cocoa Bundles in Objective-C. Details about the Objective-C plugin API can be found inside the Gmail Notifier application bundle in the required header file, GGPluginProtocol.h (control+click Gmail Notifier.app -> Show Package Contents -> Contents -> Headers).

AppleScript plugins are written by simply implementing a handler like:

on NewMessagesReceived(messages, fullCount)
-- Your code goes here...
end NewMessagesReceived

To install, simply copy the script (plugin) to Library/Application Support/Gmail Notifier (create the directory if it doesn't exist), and restart the Gmail Notifier. An example of a great plugin for the Gmail Notifier for MacOS X is the Gmail+Growl plugin, which sends Growl notifications when new mail arrives.

Our thanks to those of you who have already written cool plugins. We look forward to many more!

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Cerf's up at Google!

Posted by Vint Cerf

The news is out that I will join Google on October 3 as Chief Internet Evangelist (I tried for Archduke, but it didn’t work). What I really like about Eric, Larry, Sergey and the whole Google family is its collective and eminent practicality and seemingly boundless creativity. In fact, my recent interactions with many of Google's senior staff have simply underscored my admiration for the extraordinary talent at Google that has been assembled in a short amount of time. Google has come so far since the early days!

Among other things, I am committed to the vision of Google’s criticality to the daily lives of hundreds of millions of people. The public Internet and the growing cadre of corporate virtual private networks are already enablers of Google applications. As information pours into the Internet from all sides, Google tools will become, if they are not already, indispensable.

I appreciate deeply the opportunity to become part of the Google family and to do what I can to contribute to its future.

See you on the ‘Net!

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Finding that needle in a haystack

Posted by John Fu, Toolbar team

As someone who prides himself on being a reliable source of useless trivia, I tend to search for pretty obscure stuff. A lot of times, the pages I find have more text than I want to wade through. Using the Google Toolbar, though, it's pretty easy to see what I'm looking for. My search terms show up as clickable Word Find buttons in the Toolbar, so I can quickly find where they appear on the page (clicking on it repeatedly takes me to each instance). This came in handy when I needed to figure out what species made a jumping bean hop around.










Try it out yourself.

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Post-Katrina images of New Orleans on Google Maps

Posted by Bret Taylor, Google Maps Product Manager

Satellite imagery of New Orleans taken on Wednesday, August 31st is now available on Google Maps.

Enter “New Orleans” in the search field at the top of the page, or drag and zoom the map to the area. A red "Katrina" button will appear at the top right of the map, next to the existing map buttons. Older images for the area are still available too - click the "Satellite" button to switch to those.

API developers can also access this new imagery, which should aid the development of hurricane relief sites. Find more details at the Google Maps API discussion group.

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Seeing what Katrina has wrought

Posted by Bill Kilday, Google Earth team

A natural disaster brings out the need for up-to-the-minute maps and images, and Google Earth community members have created more than 100 overlays in the last 24 hours that tell the story of Hurricane Katrina's effect. These overlays drape on top of existing satellite images, and NOAA has been posting these flyovers so people can actually see the incredible devastation.

If you don't already have Google Earth, download it to see some of the overlays that illustrate the change from previous images to the way things are now. Click on any of the overlays, which will open the application.

Here's an aerial "before" image of the Superdome area.



When you're in Google Earth, use the slider function at the bottom of your Places on the lefthand side (shown in this screen grab) to move the image from the left (before) to the right (after). More viewing and navigating help is here.



When you use the slider, much of what was light before is now dark -- with water.



We hope you'll find all the images useful. Please note you'll need a good video graphics card to handle the graphics.

UPDATED: Clarification on seeing the Google Earth images.

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Gmail Notifier for Mac OS X

Posted by Greg Miller, Software Engineer

I'm a Mac user. Most of my friends are Mac users. After a little coaxing, most of my family are now Mac users. So I decided to spend 20% of my time here on a small application that may help all of the Mac users in my life: a Gmail Notifier for Mac OS X.

The app is small and nonintrusive, but hopefully still has all the features a Mac user would want. With it you can:

- view messages without opening a browser
- open Gmail in your browser without forcing you to log in again
- make Gmail your default email program
- even more...

Though this is the first, it won't be the last native Mac application that Google delivers. So please, Mac users, stay tuned!

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