Google Weather Service And GMail Improvements

Philipp Lenssen writes "Google has added US-only weather forecasts to their web search. Type e.g. "weather palo alto, ca" (zip codes work too) and you get a small illustrated weather forecast on top of the search result. (Yahoo has been providing a similar service for quite a while.) You can also send your query as SMS to 46645 (GOOGL), as the official Google blog reports." Relatedly, Shachaf writes "Looking at my GMail account, I see that Google has added two new features: integration with Picasa and plain HTML support. Now you can 'Log in to Gmail directly from Picasa and send the photos from your Gmail account', and view your email from any web-browser."

Comments

Coverage of New Gmail Feature

[sammykrupa]

Here is a link to screenshots and coverage of the new plain-html-only-view Gmail has gotten:

http://www.theplaceforitall.com/2005/03/report-on- gmails-basic-html-view.html

yes but it pales in comparision to NOAA

[bsdpanix]

The National Weather Service at noaa.gov is excellent. Detailed local forecasts with NO ads.

Re:Looks nice

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

Yes, use google "Convert (degrees)F to C) and it converts it.

For Firefox users...

[rbarreira]

This is quite cool, but I still prefer the ForecastFox extension for now.

Gmail's forced "basic HTML view" - and a solution

[WIAKywbfatw]

Google's latest changes to Gmail include the introduction of a "basic HTML view" for people who's browsers cannot display the default view properly. This includes MSIE 4.0+ (pre 5.5), Netscape 4.07+ (pre 7.1), and Opera 6.03+, which previously couldn't be used to access Gmail.

Unfortunately, the new browser detection code they are now using seems to have been put together in a rather sloppy manner, which means (amongst others) Opera 8.0 users are forced to this "basic HTML view" when the fully-featured default view works perfectly well with that version of Opera. (Indeed, one of the many new features of Opera 8.0 is XMLHttpRequest support, which allows Gmail to work in full.)

Any Opera 8.0 user who logs into Gmail as usual will no longer be able to do some basic things, including create filters, amend their settings, check spelling, access keyboard shortcuts and autocomplete addresses. Fortunately, there is a workaround, which is to use the URL http://gmail.google.com/gmail?nocheckbrowser, which solves the issue.

This issue doesn't only affect Opera 8.0 users: users of MSIE 6.x, Camino and other browsers have reported the same problem on the relevant Google group. I don't use any of those browsers but I'm fairly sure that the same workaround will work for them too.