Boomerang Calendar, a gmail addin, looks for date/time information in your incoming gmail messages, compares them against your Google Calendar entries, and lets you know if you’re free or not, and then lets you schedule a time. It also allows you to easily propose meeting times to individuals or groups.

I sent this message to my gmail account.

This is what it looked like when I opened it in gmail.

Boomerang Calendar identified date/time information, and looked at those time slots in my Google Calendar. Green means I’m free, yellow means that the time is bumping up against another appointment, and red means I’m already booked at that time.

If I mouse over those times, Boomerang Calendar gives me a little popup showing the proposed time in the context of whatever else my Google Calendar says I have going on that day. From here I can open Boomerang Calendar by clicking the “Show Calendar” button or add the appointment directly to my Google Calendar by clicking “Add This Event”. (The “Cancel” button seems unnecessary because the popup disappears when you move the mouse off the popup.)

When I click on “at 10am” Boomerang Calendar generates this popup, the same that’s generated if I were to click on “Show Calendar” in the mouse-over popup above. In the bottom left corner are the times it extracted from the email message. The 10am time, the time I clicked, shows up in orange and purple. The other proposed times are in orange and yellow.

Since the email I received suggested a time when I’m available, I’ll go ahead and schedule that by clicking on that orange and purple appointment time. Boomerang Calendar gives me another popup. It automatically enters “Meeting with Sue Frantz” by pulling the name off the email message of the sender, in this case, me. It defaults to an hour-long appointment, but I can change the length. The note field is prepopulated with the email message contents of the sender leaving space for me at the top to add any additional notes. Using the checkboxes, I can remind myself or others of the meeting, and I can use Google Calendar Invite if I’d like. At the very top of the popup Boomerang Calendar selected my Google Calendar named “Sue Frantz” because that’s what I told it to use by default. Using the dropdown menu, I can select from my other Google Calendars. Finally, I click “Add event” to add the appointment to my calendar.

I still have to email the sender back to confirm the time when we’re meeting, however. Just because it’s on my calendar doesn’t mean that they know it’s on my calendar.

Note: Boomerang Calendar does a very good job at guessing the dates/times meant in the email, but it’s not perfect. Double check Boomerang Calendar’s dates/times against what was written in the email.

Propose alternate times.

But let’s say that I don’t like any of the proposed times. I can click anywhere in my calendar, in this case 11am on Tuesday and 10am on Wednesday. Boomerang Calendar defaults to half-hour appointments but I expanded these by grabbing the white equals sign at the bottom of the appointment times and dragging them down so that each appointment is an hour long. In the bottom right corner, I can see the proposed times, and now I’m going to generate an email message with the “Generate email response” button.

And here is the automatically-generated gmail response that I am, of course, free to edit before hitting send.

But what if I want to be the first to propose times to meet?

Compose a new email message, and click “Suggest Times to Meet.”

Now I can click on any times in my calendar I’d like (shown in dark green).

If I click “location” and start typing, Google Maps helps me out.

When I click “Generate Email Template” Boomerang Calendar drafts this gmail message for me.

And, yes, if the recipient of the email clicks on “Starbucks” Google Maps will load showing the meeting location.

Group events.

Boomerang Calendar sits in the top right corner of the gmail window. Clicking its icon allows you to change settings, which, at this writing, are limited to which of your Google Calendars you want Boomerang Calendar to reference when identifying when you’re free/busy and which calendar you want Boomerang Calendar to add appointments to. Also in this menu is “Plan a Group Event.”

Enter the information requested…

And your invitees will get a message.

Unfortunately Boomerang Calendar doesn’t note those time slots in Google Calendar. You’ll have to enter them yourself as tentative appointments if you want to be sure not to schedule anything else at those times.

Each recipient notes when they are available, and they can do it directly from the email message or go to the Boomerang Calendar website by following the “click here” link in the email. If a recipient wants to change their responses, they can just open this email again, and re-enter their availability.

After each response I get an email that updates me on who is available when.

When I’m ready to schedule it, I click the appropriate “Choose Time and Notify Recipients” button. This email reply is generated in gmail. Edit it and hit send. Done.

Conclusion.

If you use gmail and Google Calendar, this is a powerful and easy-to-use scheduling tool worth having in your toolbox.

Boomerang Calendar as of this writing is only available by invitation code. Go to their website, scroll down to where the invitation code box is, and try iuseboomerang. If that doesn’t work, tweet or email per the instructions on that page.

A couple months ago I wrote about a new tool that just launched. KeyRocket has grown up in that short time. Time for an update.

Ready to learn some keyboard shortcuts for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook? Download KeyRocket, and you’ll have your own tutorial. As you work, KeyRocket recognizes when you use the toolbar and will suggest a keyboard shortcut to accomplish the same task. (Free for personal and non-commercial use; subscribe for $5/month for tech support and advanced setup with your business.)

[Note: When KeyRocket first launched in beta, free users could only choose one of the four commonly used Microsoft Office tools. Now you don’t have to choose; use it with all 4.]

How it works.

After downloading and installing KeyRocket, I just open up my Office program, in this case word, and work like I usually do. If KeyRocket spots a keyboard shortcut it thinks I’m ready for, it will suggest it.

In this case, I clicked on the “start a bulleted list” on the toolbar.

KeyRocket produced this little popup in response, telling me that if I simultaneously press the CTRL key, the SHIFT key, and L, I can start a bulleted list.

If I use that keyboard shortcut, KeyRocket gives me a wonderful little celebratory message. I can even share it on Twitter if I’d like.

Notice the meter at the bottom of both of those messages. Every time I use the shortcut, the meter advances. After a few uses, all I get is the meter.

After several uses, I earn a gold star!

Now when I use the shortcut, I get no more popups. If I forget and use the toolbar, KeyRocket’s there to remind me.

While there are 1,600+ keyboard shortcuts possible with Office, KeyRocket doesn’t inundate you with all of them at once.

Right click on the KeyRocket icon in the system tray. Select “Shortcut Browser” – or use the keyboard shortcut: WINDOWS + K.

Here I’m looking at the list of some of the shortcuts in Word that KeyRocket thinks would be useful to me. If the “Notify” is set to “On”, then KeyRocket will tell me about that keyboard shortcut every time I use the toolbar. If it’s set to “Auto” it may or may not tell me about it. I don’t know what algorithm it uses to make that decision. Officially KeyRocket says that “Auto” will tell me about the shortcut “only if the shortcut appears to be unknown.” If “Notify” is set to “Off”, then KeyRocket won’t tell me about it.

If there is a particular keyboard shortcut I’m looking for, I can search for it, and then change the “Notify” to “On” if I’m ready to learn it by having KeyRocket remind me when I use the toolbar instead.

I have frequently used keyboard shortcuts with Word, but I have discovered that I haven’t used that many with Outlook – until now. If you like keyboard shortcuts, try it out.

Quick Tech Tip. For goo.gl shortened URLS, did you know that you can get analytics by adding .info at the end of the goo.gl URL? It doesn’t even need to be the URL you shortened.

Try it. Go to http://goo.gl/UGtpp.info (page will open in new window). You will see how many people have visited that link, when they visited, how they got there, which browser they used, which country they’re in, and which platform they used.

It’s handy if, for example, you want to see how many of your students might be reading, or at least viewing/downloading what you’ve assigned. Remember, you can get URLs for any file or folder in Dropbox (see this blog post). Shorten the URL at goo.gl, then watch what’s happening by adding .info to the end of the shortened URL.

If you have Tegrity, Camtasia, or Camtasia’s lightweight little brother Jing, and you’re comfortable with those, no need to venture into new territory. Unless of course you are looking for a quick screen recorder without the bells and whistles with a 15 min. recording limit. (The Pro version gives you much more power at $15 per year.)

Make sure your microphone is ready to go, then visit Screencast-o-Matic, and click “start recording.” No login needed. Say yes to any dialog boxes that might pop up. And then you will get this dotted box.

Anything that is inside the box screencast-o-matic will record. To resize the box, click and drag any of the little squares.

Check the volume on your microphone by looking at the meter on the toolbar. Click the down arrow next to the meter to choose a different microphone.

Click the WebCam icon to choose your WebCam and turn it on.

Your WebCam video will appear in the bottom right corner of the screen. Even though it is outside of the recording area as designated by the dotted box, the WebCam will still be recorded.

Click the record button (red circle). When you’re done recording, you can grab the red triangle at the bottom of the WebCam window to resize it. Click and grab the WebCam video to move it where you want it to appear in your screencast.

Now choose where you want to publish it.

I opted to publish my video (titled Screencast of Screencast-o-Matic) to the Screencast-o-Matic website.

Once available on the Screencast-o-Matic website, visitors can add additional notes, make comments, download the video, or get an embed code.

Here’s a video I just recorded, placed here using the embed code.

[Update 5/21/2012: Dropquest deadline is June 2, 2012.  Check out Dropbox’s new “get space” page.]

Last year Dropbox hosted a scavenger hunt of sorts that awarded players extra Dropbox space. They’re ready to launch the second incarnation. As you solve the puzzles, space is added to your Dropbox account. If you finish the hunt, you’re guaranteed at least 1GB of extra space.

The first batch to finish get some additional prizes.

1st place (1) Dropbox employee hoodie, LIMITED EDITION Dropbox Hack Week t-shirt, Dropbox drawing signed by the entire Dropbox team, invitation to help write the next Dropquest, 100 GB for life
2nd place (10) Dropbox employee hoodie, Dropbox t-shirt, 20 GB for life
3rd place (15) Dropbox t-shirt, 5 GB for life
4th place (50) 2 GB for life
5th place (100) 1 GB for life

It starts at 10am PT on Saturday, May 12^th, 2012.

To play, go here, and click on the link at the bottom of the page.

The newest Dropbox feature, made available to all on 4/23/2012, is “get link.” You no longer have to put content in a public folder to share it.

Open your Dropbox folder, right click on the filename or folder (yes, I said folder!), and under “Dropbox” select “Get link”.

Or if you’re accessing your files from the Dropbox.com website, mouse over any file or folder, then click the “Get link” icon.

If you choose to share just a file, your file will open in your browser. Copy the URL from your browser to share with whomever you’d like. The recipients can view the file in the browser window. If they would like a copy for themselves, they can click the “Download” button.

In the image below you can see that I’m sharing a folder called “Syllabi”. In the browser window you can see all of the files and folders I have in there. Clicking on the “Old syllabi” folder, you would see all of the files and folders in there displayed in the same way. Clicking on a file would show the file contents like in the image above and the “Download” button would appear.

When you’re ready to stop sharing, go to the URL. If you can’t remember the URL, right click on your file or folder in your Dropbox folder, and click “Get link” again. If your file or folder is currently being shared in this way, the URL will be the same. To remove the link, click the settings button (the little cog icon), and select “Remove link”.

Once the link is removed, anyone who follows the now-disabled link will get a webpage that displays this image.

If you want to re-enable the link, just go through the process again, and a new URL will be generated.

Interestingly, this new feature only works in folders that are something other than the Public or Photo folder. The files and folders inside the Public and Photo folder still work the same way they always have.

Why use “Get link”?

1. You don’t have to disrupt your file structure to share files.
2. You can turn on and off file sharing without moving files.
3. Sharing an entire folder makes it easy to share a lot of files at once. And you can add or remove files as needed without having to change the link to the folder.

Other Dropbox changes you may have missed

If you use the web version of Dropbox, you can now drag and drop files from your computer to Dropbox.com and vice versa.

If someone signs up for Dropbox through your referral, you now get an extra 500 MB of space whether you have an edu email address or not.

[Update 6/6/2012 : See this newer blog post on KeyRocket.]

I’m a fan of keyboard shortcuts. A few months ago I wrote a blog post on Shortmarks, a service that lets you create shortcuts to websites. This time I’m writing about KeyRocket, a tool that helps you learn keyboard shortcuts in Word, Excel, and Powerpoint. (In the free version, choose one; in the $5/month version, choose all three.)

After installing KeyRocket, I chose to use it with Word. When I highlighted text and clicked the “U” button on the Home tab, this popped up in the lower right corner of my screen.

And then after I used the shortcut, I got this very supportive popup.

With each subsequent use, my progress bar showed me moving further from the trashcan and closer to the star.

And when I reached the star, I got a nice celebratory message.

After that, I got no further encouragement. However, when I returned to using the “U” button on the Home tab, I got the reminder again. And, sadly, I lost my ‘star’ status.

KeyRocket resides in your taskbar. Right- or left-click on the icon to call up this menu. Here you can see your most recently learned keyboard shortcuts, and you can access the “Shortcut Browser” – or bypass this step altogether. Win+k opens the browser from wherever you in the Office program.

In the Shortcut Browser, enter a search term for the kind of shortcut you’re looking for. Here I entered ‘bullet,’ and KeyRocket gave me a couple of possibilities.

Interestingly, it doesn’t pick up everything every time. For example, I inserted the links above using the “hyperlink” button on the Insert tab in Word. I usually use CTRL-k, but KeyRocket didn’t flag it. After I searched for “link” in KeyRocket’s shortcut browser, it began notifying me of the shortcut. I had the same experience with bulleted lists.

Having said that, at this writing the product is still in beta, and it’s free to use with Word, Excel, or PowerPoint.

New data from the Pew Internet and American Life Project finds “63% of all teens say they exchange text messages every day with people in their lives. This far surpasses the frequency with which they pick other forms of dailycommunication, including phone calling by cell phone (39% do that with others every day), face-to-face socializing outside of school (35%), social network site messaging (29%), instant messaging (22%), talking on landlines (19%) and emailing (6%).”

Next quarter I’m trying out SendHub, a group texting service. This will allow me to text all of my students at once. Students can sign up by texting a word I’ve given them to the phone number SendHub has assigned to me.

In the free version, you can have up to three groups with up to 50 people per group, and send up to 1,000 messages per month. (One text sent to 50 contacts counts as 50 messages.)

To send a message to my students, in the “To:” line I start typing the name of the relevant group, and SendHub gives me everything that matches what I’ve typed. Then I type my text message. If I’d like to schedule it to be delivered at some later time, I can click “Schedule Delivery.” Finally, I click “Send.”

To create a group, on the “Contacts” tab, click the “New” button on the left. Type in your group name. If you’d like your students to be able to add themselves to this group via text, check the box next to “Enable Text to Join.” Enter a keyword. This is what your students will text to your SendHub number to join the group. The keyword defaults to your group name, but you can change it to whatever you’d like. Don’t worry about whether some other SendHub user is using that keyword. Since students are texting to your SendHub phone number, SendHub knows that the student belongs to you.

To unsubscribe a student, you can do it by selecting “All Contacts,” clicking the checkbox next to the student’s name, and selecting “Delete.” A student can unsubscribe by replying to any text from your SendHub number with the word “stop.”

To access your settings click the cog icon in the top right corner.

In the “Plan” section, track your usage.

If someone calls your SendHub number, the call will be forwarded to the phone number you have on record (“My Number”). If you don’t want the call forwarded, check the box next to “Disable voice.” Want to add a signature to your texts? Add it in the “Signature” box.

If you send out a text to your class, and a student responds, you will receive the text at the number you have on record. Texts back to you in this way will count against the 1,000 free texts, however. If you don’t want to receive texts through SendHub, check the box next to “Disable Incoming Messages.” If you disable incoming messages, add an auto-response that will be sent to everyone who texts this number, something like, “This number does not accept texts. Email me at…”

When you’re done with your changes, click the “Save” button at the bottom of the page.

Are you using text messaging to communicate with your students? Why or why not?

I sometimes use my computer’s desktop to store newly-created files or newly-downloaded files that I’m working on. On more than one occasion I have gotten home only to realize that the files I want are on my work desktop.

A solution comes to us from this Lifehacker blog post.

The author of the post goes so far as to sync both desktops. That’s more than what I need. I just want to access the files on my work desktop from home.

The solution: Change the location of my work computer’s desktop folder. (Did you know that what shows on your desktop is just stuff stored in a folder called “desktop”?)

First, in Dropbox, create a folder called “Desktop.”

Next, on your work computer navigate to your “User” folder. To get there, go to your computer’s hard drive, click on “Users,” then your login name. The “Desktop” folder should be there.

Right click on the “Desktop” folder and select “Properties.” Click on the “Location” tab. Click “Move,” then navigate to the “Desktop” folder you created in your “Dropbox” folder. Click “Select Folder.”

Done.

Anything saved on your work computer’s desktop will now be available to you in the “Desktop” folder in Dropbox. Any file you add to that folder from, say, your home computer, will show on your work computer’s desktop when you get back to the office. How cool is that?

*****

In other news, as of February 2012, Dropbox.com “adhere[s] to the US-EU Safe Harbor Framework and the US-Swiss Safe Harbor Framework.” See this Dropbox.com blog post for more information.

Dropbox users,

If you’ve visited the Dropbox.com website recently, you’ve noticed some changes. The site is now ‘cleaner’ and easier to use – not that it was difficult before. For those of you who spend a goodly bit of time accessing your Dropbox files from the web interface, there are some features for you.

Right-click on a folder to share, download, delete, rename, copy, or move. Right-click on a file to download, delete, rename, copy, move, or view previous versions.

Click and drag on multiple folders or files to select more than one.

Drag and drop files or folders to move them.

Looking at images you have saved in Dropbox? You not only get thumbnails, but you also get a built-in image viewer making it easier to identify the image you’re looking for.

For a rundown on the rest of the changes and for updates on future changes, visit the Dropbox.com blog.