Claiming your Google Places listing is an important part of establishing your presence for local searches. Before you go ahead and add your listing you should always check if Google Places already has a listing for you, which you can do simply by going to Google Maps and performing a search, if you can’t find it then you can add one yourself by going here.

One of the most frustrating parts of dealing with Google Places is the process for uploading your own photographs (you can add up to 10 photos), as in typical Google fashion the error message they give you is not helpful at all:

As you can see this gives you no additional information and if you click on the link it takes you to a submissions guideline page, which further refers you to individual submission policies for both Google Maps (for images) and YouTube (for video). The Google Maps submission policy doesn’t give you anymore information as to the types of images, their dimensions and maximum sizes.

So it was off to Google (Search that is) to find some answers and low behold with this query: “maximum size for uploading photographs to google places” the first listing was for a similar question in the Google Places discussion forum. Midway down the page I found a link to an answer to my question provided by Lance Mayhew, who had clearly done a great deal more googling.

So the link is here, but if you want the short answer you can upload the following types of images, dimensions and file sizes:

When adding a photo to your listing, keep in mind the following guidelines:

• Each photo must be smaller than 1MB.
• Each photo must be under 1024 x 1024 pixels.
• Photos must be in one of these formats: JPG, GIF, PNG, TIFF, BMP

Why Google can’t add such helpful information to their Google Places page when a the submission of a photograph fails is beyond me. Oh and this is what success looks like:

This helped me, I hope it helps you too.

Spanning Sync v3.0

So. Spanning Sync turned 3 last week and as I’ve been using their service to sync calendars between my many computers since it was in early beta that means I’ve had 3 years of calendar syncing bliss.

Don’t get me wrong there have been problems; as software moves through early betas there always are… but overall the service has been an incredibly good fit for my needs, infinitely superior to google’s offering.

I eulogised them in an earlier blog post, Contact Sync, but if you’ve not got round to giving their service a go and you need to sort out your calendars then I highly recommend you check them out.

Like most of us I’ve been the frequent and appreciative beneficiary of the wonderful talents of the Google engineers, however, all too frequently I experience the downsides that are a clear consequence of the fragmented results of a company run by engineers (and sometimes I think for engineers). Take this most recent experience:

At the beginning of last year I setup Google Standard Apps for one of my clients. It is really the perfect solution for practically any business (to be honest though I know some people who pay for the business version I can’t really see the advantage; what SME really needs more than 7gb of email storage per account?).

At the same time I moved them over to my hosting account (only £25 a year inc. setup of the Google Standard Apps) but for the moment that was all she wanted to do, although we discussed re-vamping her website, we decided to leave it for the moment.

So at the end of last year we started to discuss a revamp and over the last few days we have done exactly that. In just a couple of days, with a few adaptions to a free WordPress template (cleanr if you’re interested) and we got the new site up and running. Check it out here if you’d like to take a look.

As part of this process I had to setup Google Analytics for her site and as experience has taught me rather than adding it to my account (after all I’m probably the person most likely to use it for her) I prefer now to set it up in an account in my clients name.

Now my client uses a private msn email address rather than Google. So I had to setup a new Google account for her. It is possible to setup a Google account using another email address so I used her work one (from a Google Standard Apps account) and off I went.

It surprised me that there is no method within the Google Standard Apps account management interface that would allow me to add a Google account for an individual user (or at least an administrator) or to link an existing account in any other way. Just so everything was under one roof so to speak.

It seemed a natural leap for me to assume that if you were going to use Google Apps for your website then you would likely be going to use Google Analytics, Google AdWords, Google AdSense and maybe Google Checkout to think of just a few; all of which you need a Google account for.

In the SME arena (mostly under 25 employees) if you’re a business owner then setting up an additional account for a business is pretty straightforward, though an unnecessary extra step, but if you are hiring someone to do it and you’re not sure what is going on this can place alot of power in the hands of your consultant.

Anyway to get to the point, you have to activate each of these services, individually authenticate them. For example, if you’ve verified your Google Standard Apps account, you still need to verify your Webmasters account, your Analytics account, and so on.

This all adds additional costs, additional time, and additional hassle. It’s the perfect example IMHO of an unnecessarily fragmented service. This seems to be something Google is attempting to solve (see Analytics in AdWords) but it doesn’t seem to be taking the easy route. So come on Google cut us some slack, start integrating your services.

Oh and before I go. Why do we need a separate account for Google Wave?

I’ve only had Google Chrome installed a few weeks, but it is already changing my browsing habits.

The most evident of which is using the url bar to search. This is perhaps the single most natural development of the browser I have experienced in years. It is becoming, however, quite irritating… and you’ve guessed it: I keep on expecting Safari to search using the same method.

I’ve always considered Apple to be the leading light of software minimalism, after all look at the trouble Steve Jobs went to to get rid of the screws on the Macbook Pro or the edge to edge glass on the new iMac (tablet hint anyone?) so I am puzzled that there has been no adaptation of this Chrome method to Safari.

Come on Apple give me a little New Year cheer and adapt Safari now!

It’s finally here. Some of you may have been using the developer releases and hacks to get google Chrome working on your Mac, I certainly have, however, it is now possible to get the real versions, albeit with plugins disabled. To join the google love visit: here.

Unfortunately for lots of Mac users google has only made Chrome compatible with Intel chips, which is a real shame as I know a good number of older Mac users who would really benefit from Chrome.

So it seems that you can now buy additional google space, which is kind of cool, but it seems to me that google’s apps are still rather fragmented, for example: you cannot currently share your gmail space with your picassa account, although email takes up a infinitely smaller amount of space I’m currently using 2210 MB (29%) of my 7398 MB allowance covering about 50,000 emails and all their respective attachments, whereas I only have 13 albums in my picassa account and I’m using 378 MB (36.97%) of my 1024 MB allowance.

Although it is great to be able to buy additional space and it is certainly something I’d consider, if they can share purchased space why do they not allow us to have a single quota shared between all of the google apps? It’d certainly make more sense… In the mean time if you want to buy more space you can do so, at ever depreciating prices by visiting: here.

So I upgraded to Snow Tabby almost a month ago now, and despite constant checking of appfresh there are still a few programs that have not got on the 64 bit train yet… despite me crossing my fingers! So here is a delightful image of my Activity Monitor (unfortunately it doesn’t include all the 32 bit programs)

The most annoying of these has got to be the flash plugin, which frequently crashes and often wreaks havoc across my system. Adobe has had a year to correct this problem. Why hasn’t it been done already? What its really shown me is how many pages have flash installed, most seem unnecessary and could be easily replaced with HTML5 features (#dieie6 or if you must keep it add Chrome Frame! cheers google) For me the long death march for Flash has begun.

There are some programs that I expected to be converted to 64bit much more quickly amongst these are:

Google Quick Search

A great program, a worthy successor (or at least quickly becoming one) to Quicksilver, still very much beta – so why no 64bit love?

Evernote

Another essential program, no clear mention about 64bit yet – their most recent blog post on the topic doesn’t go into details.

Mozy

I use this program on all my computers to give me a secondary backup for libraries and essential files like contacts, calendars and the like. It’s particularly useful for my MBP and my Mac Mini, which I don’t care to try and backup using Time Machine over the network. But it’s had real problems since I’ve updated and it’s rather driving me nuts, so maybe I might start to look for a solution if it doesn’t get fixed soon, which is a shame really.

Update – After posting I thought I’d give it another go. But it seems to be stuck at the magic 60.5% complete. Crazy. Bye bye Mozy, it was good whilst it lasted.

Update 2 – So it’s been updated to version 1.5, still no 64 bit loveliness but maybe it’s going to be stable?

Coda

This is the most user-friendly web html coding program I’ve used, now I’m also partial (after some pressing from my web-designer bro) to Textmate, but I still regularly use this program for its great inbuilt previewing features and its easy-to-use ftp management. I can’t really live without it, but I’d really like it to have some 64 bit love soon!

iTerm

I like all my apps to be tabbed and a tabbed terminal was just a must. It’s updated frequently but no 64 bit love yet…

Skype

It’s just been upgraded for more Snow Tabby compatibility, but still no 64 bit version! Maybe the new owners will give it a more radical update in the near future (I’m hoping for proper integration with Apple’s Address Book)

Adium

Multi-IM compatible goodness, allowing me to log in to all my various chat accounts everywhere. I’m looking forward to it’s upgrade to 64 bit (and again Address Book love soon please – I’ve had some success with a program called AdiumBook but I hope for more)

and some that have been upgraded, but might have problems!

VLC

The 64bit version is working great for me, but apparently not so great if you use handbreak.

I’ll keep you updated as my conversion to 64 bit loveliness… later

UPDATE -

Growl

My favourite notification system has just been updated to include 64 bit loveliness. Yey!

Spanning Sync v3.0

Though I’m trying out Google’s sync capabilities in my latest installation its not my sync tool of choice as I’ve been syncing comprehensively since I got my iPhone. I had to find a suitable solution for managing all my contacts (986 and counting) so approximately a year ago I stumbled upon Spanning Sync, which has been taking care of my contacts and calendars ever since.

As Google’s contact API has developed, slowly I must say (why can’t most companies understand this is perhaps one of the simplest problems for them to solve that would rid their consumers of daily irritation?) it has improved and improved, but I have to say it still has some way to go. Anyway despite this being  a critical product my impatience got the better of me earlier this year and I decided to try out the beta of version 3.

Now this should have been fine, but I was one of an unfortunate number of users that ran into a duplication bug that I just haven’t been able to shrug completely from my MBP, iMac, Mac Mini and thereby my iPhone. Now I don’t think I lost too many numbers and time machine on my iMac managed me to rescue those that I had, but it has left my contacts addresses pretty messed up.

See what I mean! 3 Duplicate Addresses! Argh!!!

I finally bit the bullet late this evening, after finding my mother’s address duplicated twelve times and bought a relatively new product released by the spanning sync team – their contact and calendar cleaning software. And I have to say it runs like a dream. Now I reckon it will take a good deal of passes to properly weed out these problems across all my machines, but finally I won’t be editing them manually again. Phew.

The interface for Spanning Sync Contact Cleaner is simple and straightforward:

It usefully highlights some of the problems that the google contact API has and presumably most similar contact sync systems. How can BSc be a bad suffix? How about Sir or Lady being bad prefixes? Come on. Real world here. We might not all know a Lord or Lady, but I find it particularly useful to at least be able to add a persons qualification to the end of their name, especially when I’m dealing with a professional.

It is however eminently handy to be able remove blank spaces from the end of words, to change people to companies and vice-versa when it detects an error, as well as removing duplicates properly (why Apple couldn’t have built a better system into address book for this I’m not sure). Anyway once you start to bulk up with contacts all of these problems become tiny irritants for sufferer of OCD like myself and a mostly automated system is very helpful.

At the end of all of this it might occur to any Mac Fanboys out there to ask, why not just use MobileMe? Well. I don’t like to be forced to only use Apple stuff and I’ve tended to find their software, which whilst better than Windows in almost every conceivable way, not that polished in comparison to tools specifically designed for the purpose. Plus $99 a year. Really? After I just spent £2k on a laptop, leased for 2 years, and you want me to pay extra. No thanks!

Oh I nearly forgot to say that there is a $5 discount if you’re already a subscriber to Spanning Sync proper! Excellent. All in all $14.99 isn’t a great price to pay to save a couple of OCD hours tonight spring cleaning and I’m sure it’ll save many more hours in the future…

PS – My results -

95 Duplicated Addresses Removed

10 Duplicated Phone Numbers Removed

23 Duplicated Contacts Merged