I hope google doesn’t become evil, they do so many cool things.
On Tuesday they launched maps.google.com/ for the US. It’s got the best maps I’ve ever seen online. And they’re so slick! Not done with flash or java, it’s a very impressive piece of web craftsmanship. I want to box up it’s excellence and keep it all to myself! I spent quite a lot of time last night playing around with the maps.
I got my latest box of books from O’Reilly, and one of the books is the Second Edition of Google Hacks. It’s so much different than the first! The first spent a lot of time focusing on the Google API (which is great, I use it now in R2D2, but the second edition goes into less programming oriented things and more images, news, groups, and gmail! I dove into the gmail section as soon as I got the book.
I knew about GmailFS, the linux filesystem for gmail, but I didn’t know about GmailDrive. So I tried out GmailFS but couldn’t get it running (I’m sure I’ll figure it out, it was written with Debian in mind and Gentoo might do something different with mounting, or python script placing, or something…). I then thought I’d give Gmail Drive a shot, so I booted into Windows.
All you do is download the zip, extract, and run the .exe. You’re then presented with:
Oh, it can’t be this easy.
But it is! Just type in your username and password, and you have a gmail “drive” as seen here. Then you can move files to the “GmailDrive” like any other drive, within limitations. Since it stores the files as attachments there is a filesize limitation, and there is a filename length limit as week.
I moved an mp3 and one of the default images that comes with XP onto the GmailDrive (see here). Then logged into gmail: see. I opened up the “mail” that had the Sunset.jpg: see. Just like a normal attachment! Very cool.
What’s the point? Well none really, I don’t need more storage space, and there are probably tons of security concerns. It was just a geeky fun thing to do %)