Get A List of All Google Drive Files & Folders in Google Sheet

Have you ever been in a situation where you wished you could get a simplified list of Google Drive files and folders in a Google Sheet?

If you’re working as a graphic designer or web developer, chances are you’ve probably gone through that occasion where you needed to juggle through multiples files and folders just to get the file you want.

Google Drive’s built-in file explorer isn’t that intuitive enough. Rummaging through hundreds of files can be too overwhelming, to say the least. Well right now, not anymore!

How To List All Google Drive Files & Folders in Google Sheet

Meet Drive Explorer, it’s a tiny little add-on for Google Sheet that lets you export all (or selected) files and folders into a much readable spreadsheet format.

Drive Explorer (formerly Drive Direct Links) lets you pick folders/files from your Google Drive, Shared Drive or the files shared with you to export to the Google Sheet. Sheet columns contain metadata of the files like name of the file, containing folder, folder path on your Google drive, direct download link, etc.

How Drive Explorer works:

1. You install the add-on and connect your Google account
2. Once connected, go to your Driver folder and create a spreadsheet
3. Inside your spreadsheet toolbar, click on Add-ons > Drive Explorer > Select files/folder.
4. And finally, wait for a few seconds until your spreadsheet is automatically refreshed containing your files/folders’ meta info such as folder names, filenames, folder paths, links, etc.

When is it useful?

Being able to view your Google Drive files and folders in a list helps us save time and improve team collaboration. If you own an online store and works with VAs to manage inventories, this add-on definitely comes in handy.

In our day job, for instance, we constantly update images on our client’s websites. And our clients usually just share a large Drive folder containing all the images that need to be uploaded to their website. With Drive Explorer, we can now easily get a decent list of files in that shared folder so our team can easily collaborate rather than going back and forth on Google Drive.

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Next-Generation iPhones May Soon Ditch Traditional Wireless Networks

It looks like Tim Cook doesn't want to heavily rely on traditional wireless carriers to beam internet data to its iPhone. And he hopes to see results within five years.

Bloomberg reports that Apple Inc. is hiring dozens of top-caliber engineers from aerospace, satellite, and antenna design industries in its bid to develop satellite technology that can beam internet data directly to iPhone devices.

Joining this newly-assembled team includes Michael Trela and John Fenwick, former aerospace engineers who helped lead satellite imaging company Skybox Imaging, which was sold to Google in 2014. Wireless technology messiah Matt Ettus also joins the team, along with Ashley Moore Williams from Aerospace Corp. who focused on communication satellites, and Daniel Ellis, a former Netflix Inc. executive.

Apple can pursue the costly development of a satellite constellation from scratch. Or they can team up with existing satellite makers to beam internet data direct to Apple devices.

Apple's Next-Generation Wireless Technology

The apparent goal of the said project is probably to mitigate Apple devices' dependence on traditional wireless networks across the globe, which are often confronted with issues on cost, efficiency, and privacy.

Remember that Apple's cash cow doesn't solely come from its devices' sales. Apple also gets a significant amount of revenues from other sources such as Apple TV+ subscription, Apple Music, Arcade, and who knows -- Virtual Reality experiences in the future.

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Tim Cook's reign in Cupertino also requires him to fight tooth and nail in VR wars. In fact, Apple is working on its own virtual headset which is expected to debut as early as 2021.

All these TV and internet contents and VR experiences require a massive amount of internet data that needs to be fed to Apple devices in realtime. So, developing its own wireless technology is a sound decision from Apple in my opinion, as foreign companies like Apple are often held at a gunpoint when trying to penetrate a foreign market.

Developing countries, for instance, have exorbitant internet data prices and there are often data caps to deal with -- issues which Apple nor Google is unable to control, disrupting the company's goal to expand its services to foreign lands.

Satellite technology is an unchartered territory of Apple Inc., but with its massive $16 billion pumped in its research and development in 2019 alone, it can be just a matter of time when Tim Cook's reign at Cupertino surprises us with this wireless ambition.

How To Score Cheaper Airline Tickets with Google Flights’ Fare Alerts

Dreaming to hit Philippines’ white sand beaches this summer? Don’t book that tickets just yet! Chances are, you could be getting pricier round trip airline tickets if you’re too excited booking those tickets a lot sooner.

With just a few clicks, I’m going to show you how you can snap up the best airline deals for your upcoming trips using Google Flights.

Google Flights, by the way, is another service of Google launched back in 2011 that lets you search flights in seconds. Unbeknownst to many, Google Flights has a ‘fare alerts’ feature that notifies you in real-time through email if there are downticks (or upticks) of ticket prices from your selected flight. And that’s exactly what we’re going to do in order to get the best deals in real-time from different airlines.

Here's how to monitor airline ticket prices with Google Flights

1. Go to Google Flights website

2. Search for your desired flight. You may opt for a round trip or one-way ticket (there are additional filters too such as desired stop-overs, which cities, airlines, etc.) Best to leave them as is to get the best possible deals)

   

3. As soon as you specify the desired departure date, the page should automatically pull a list of flights you can choose. The best flights for the chosen date will appear first on top of the page. So in case you’re happy with those prices, you can book them right away.

4. If the best flights are too expensive for you, you can activate Track prices toggle. Basically, it will monitor the lowest price for the trip and you’ll be notified through email in real-time.

   

As long as you don’t omit those tracked prices, Google will automatically alert you when there are downticks of those chosen flight, as seen below's screenshot:

Both Skyscanner and Traveloka have "price alerts" functionality, but it doesn't hurt to add Google Flights into the mix to get the best possible airline deals.

Google Launches New Recorder App with Realtime Offline Transcription Support

After announcing the latest iteration of its flagship Android phone the Pixel 4 recently, Google introduces a new voice recorder app for Android with built-in offline speech recognition support. Well, thanks to AI.

The new Recorder app uses speech recognition and AI to transcribe lectures, meetings, interviews and more—and makes them easy for you to find later. (English only right now, with more languages to come.) #madebygoogle pic.twitter.com/fdKRItuS4b

— Google (@Google) October 15, 2019

The voice recorder app, as seen on the above demo, can transcribe audio recordings in real-time with utmost accuracy. And the best part: it works offline. You can transcribe whatever is being spoken during meetings, lectures or interviews even without internet connectivity.

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Google’s newest voice recorder app is a massive upgrade from traditional audio recorder apps, which require decent internet connectivity to enable real-time transcription. And in most cases, the experience can be a bit clunky, unpleasant. That’s because your speech is being processed on a remote server before finally returning the transcribed text.

Search Parts of Recorded Audio by Sounds

The new voice recorder app comes with impressive search functionality too. Imagine you have this 2-hours long recorded lecture and wanted to re-visit that part of the lecture but all you can remember is a phrase or word? You can search by voice and the app will automatically highlight playback bar where those spoken phrases or words are mentioned. No more horizontal scrolling.

Google’s offline transcription technology is made possible by combining the power of real-time speech recognition and AI. And with the company’s unlimited resources being pumped in their Machine Learning department, we can expect a better and heaps clever AI-assisted voice processing in the future.

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So, next time you’re in a meeting or lecture, you can pretty much ditch writing notes and just intently listen to whoever is speaking. Let your Android phone do the note-taking.

Again, the app is initially being rolled out on the new Pixel 4, and the offline speech recognition is currently available in English. But with Google’s intention to reach as many users as possible, we can expect it to support other devices and other languages.

This Website Lets You Prank Your Friends with Fake System Updates

Found this really clever and evil site that lets you prank your friends and co-workers with a fake system update and thought you might like this too ;)

If seeing your friends’ worried look delights you, then, this fun website lets you do just that. The website, Update Faker, lets you select a fake system Windows or Mac update on your unsuspecting friends’ computer by simply visiting the website and selecting the “theme”. Just be sure to press F11 to go fullscreen mode on your Windows or Ctrl+Command+F on Mac.

The fake Windows update screen looks too real; from fonts, colors and even progress bars. Your target should definitely freak out upon seeing their computer screen doing the dreaded system updates. Just be prepared for possible reprisal.

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Yet another reason why you should lock your computer when you take a quick break however short that is. Or else you could be a victim from pranksters lurking around your corner.

This is probably one of the meanest websites we’ve come across.

Enable Front & Back Simultaneous Video Recording on iOS 13 with this App

Apart from the updated keyboard, new editable emojis, system-wide dark mode, and other tiny yet much-needed bells and whistles, iOS 13 also brings a plethora of enhancements under the hood.

One of them is the introduction of a new API that lets you use both front and back camera of your iPhone to simultaneously record all the action in front and back all at the same time.

We saw it from a demo at Apple’s event last week, which showed an iPhone 11 Pro with Filmic Pro installed that delightfully activates and captures both front and ultra-wide back camera.

Newer versions of iPhones will certainly get this multi-cam sessions support. At the recent WWDC event last week, Apple also confirmed that the same multi-cam recording functionality will also be supported on iPhone XS and XR. That’s pretty much good news.

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Filmic Pro, being one of the biggest names to incorporate this feature on its app, is said to be releasing an update to its app later this year.

However, if you want to try it yourself right now without spending a penny and see how this front and back simultaneous recording works, then, you’ve got to check out Dualgram.

Dualgram: Use Your iPhone’s Multiple Cameras To Record Back & Front All At The Same Time

Dualgram was a brainchild of Junda Ong, who says there are so many occasions where he wished he could capture all the actions on both sides of the phone. And he’s not alone. Imagine you’re in your vacation abroad and wants to update your family back home and so you excitedly update them with your pictures and videos. Isn’t it cool to show all the sights in front of you while at the same time showing all the fun right behind you?

A multiple camera recording isn’t new. In fact, it’s been around for years on select Android devices — and it proved to be fun and more personalized.

With the latest iOS 13 and Dualgram, finally you can try it on your iPhone.

How To Turn Off Geotagging on iOS to Permanently Remove Locations from Photos on iPhone

iPhone and iPad camera has this built-in geotagging feature that automatically attaches your current location (aka EXIF metadata) every time you snap a photo. This geotagging support enables iOS to organize your photos by location, making it easy for you to browse through your past photos including personal travel photos and selfies.

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Most iPhone and iPad have iOS camera geotagging enabled by default. You can tell if photo geotagging is enabled when you go to iOS Photos > Albums, there’s a Places folder where all your photos are displayed on a map.

A lot of people may find it cool that their iPhone detects their location and attach it on their selfies. What these people don’t realize is that they’re exposing their exact location coordinates which could turn them into easy prey from people with malicious attentions.

So, if you’re uncomfortable about unintentionally sharing your location data and want things a little bit private, it’s highly recommended to permanently disable geotagging on iPhone before finally sharing them online.

Here’s how to turn off geotagging on iPhone 6, 7, 8, XR, iPhone Max Pro & iPhone 11

1. Go to Settings > Privacy > Location Services

2. Tap Camera and set Allow Location Access to Never.

   

Preventing iOS from geotagging your photos should be that easy. Once done, it should remove geotag from photos on the iPhone moving forward.

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Please note that past photos with existing geotag won’t be removed. You’ll have to use EXIF remover such as Metadata Remover EXIF GPS TIFF or EXIR Purge to strip off sensitive metadata from iOS photos.

How To: Automatically Capture Web Page Screenshots At Regular Intervals

Previously on this blog we’ve talked about how we can use Google Sheet as Wayback Machine Internet Archive alternative to automatically capture web page screenshots. In that post, we’ve demonstrated how we can use screenshotmachine.com’s free API to generate a screenshot of website using Google Sheet script and store them in a dedicated Google Drive folder Web page captures.

It worked hitherto of course. The bad news is: the script suddenly stopped working, probably because of Google’s API changes or similar. But the good news is: there’s a good alternative to do just that for a minimal fee.

PageCapture: Automatically Capture Website Screenshots Daily, Weekly or Monthly

PageCapture is a nifty web app we discovered few days ago and we thought you’ll love it too. In a nutshell, PageCapture automatically creates a screenshot of any web page URL on schedule. There are a handful of capture frequencies to choose from: hourly, daily, weekly, monthly and even custom hourly intervals. You choose.

All screenshots are securely stored on PageCapture website. However, you have the option to sync it with your DropBox or Google Drive account. And if you’re a regular Slack user, PageCapture can automatically push all web page screenshots to your Slack account.

When is it useful?

Web masters and internet marketers will surely benefit such an automated screenshot-capturing tool. Web page screenshots act as visual backup which you can turn to when you want to recover something or just want to look back how your client’s sites look like in the past.

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Or if you’re an internet marketer, you can use it to spy on your competitor’s website and monitor SERP positions on Google search results on daily or weekly basis.

While massively popular Wayback Machine is awesome, it only crawls public pages at unknown intervals; no daily or weekly snapshots. So it’s not that totally reliable if you want a simple visual snapshot of a web page daily.

Why PageCapture is awesome

Aside from the fact that you can automatically capture web page screenshot on schedule, there are also other advance options you can explore such as the ability to choose device screen size (e.g. desktop, iPhone, iPad) and user-agents. So, web masters will definitely find this useful too especially if you’re maintaining highly critical sites that requires constant monitoring.

Go check out PageCapture and don’t forget to share this to your friends who might need this.

Finally, An AI-Powered App That Transforms Sketches Into Interactive Digital Prototypes in Realtime

The latest advancement of AI continues to offer us a whole new way to experience our digital lives. We’ve seen how Google predicts traffic delays & bus crowdedness, well, thanks to AI. We’ve also seen how YouTube enables you to virtually try on makeup and help you with your purchases decisions, thanks to its immersive AR Beauty Try-On.

With millions of power users’ growing appetite for anything automated, it’s not difficult to imagine a future where mundane, routinary tasks are being kept to a minimum. And fact is : it has already begun.

One of the coolest finds we’ve come across is Artyline, a free iOS & time-saver app that converts hand-drawn sketches into digital equivalent in realtime. All you have to do is to give a good scan on your sketches and you’re done.

Not everyone will appreciate this app, but such an app comes in handy if you’re an app developer or designer who wants to skip NinjaMock or any online mockup tools to quickly visualize your ideas.

Why Artyline is such a great app

The trouble with hand-drawn sketches is that it can potentially be misunderstood by most clients who normally aren’t adept in UX design elements. So whether it’s a simple app or not, the best way to present your idea and get their approval is to give prototypes as realistic as possible.

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With Artyline, generating prototypes is as simple as scanning your sketches and you immediately get an interactive version of our mockup. Think of it as an additional team member in your UX / design department where design sketches drawn from whiteboard or paper are quickly converted to digital formats. So you’d come well-prepared when meeting your client to discuss the next big app.

Artyline limitations

Because Artyline is powered by AI, it has a limited set of training to recognize basic shapes and transform them into design elements. Good thing is Artyline has this easy-to-follow guideline to make your sketches more recognizable by their AI.

Pro Tip: Use markers instead of writing pens. Don’t use pencils as they’re too illegible to recognize by Artyline scanner.

Artyline is still in its infancy and got tons of areas to improve especially in the execution side. However, I can’t easily denigrate an app idea this good just because of those hiccups. So, we are still impressed.

Give your app designs workflows an upgrade. Get this iOS app while it’s free. Thank me later!

Download: Artyline [Apple App Store]

WordPress.com To Acquire Tumblr for Less than $20 Million

A once popular blogging behemoth Tumblr will soon get a new home. It’s WordPress.

Automattic Inc, the maker of world’s most popular Content Management System, is currently in talks with Tumblr’s Verizon Communications Inc for potential acquisition as part of the latter’s media overhaul.

While no definite sum floats around the deal yet, one source familiar with the matter says it will be a “well below” $20 million deal.

Automattic Inc is said to rehome Tumblr’s 200 existing employees and vowed to maintain Tumblr’s existing porn ban.

Tumblr’s Early Years

Back in the days when no Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter yet, Tumblr used to be the go-to place for people who love to share online contents such as photos, music, videos, and blogs. The free service grew exponentially, with millions of daily active users soaked in addictive, user-generated contents hosted on their platform.

With a userbase that large, that got the attention of Yahoo, which acquired Tumblr for a whopping $1.1 billion under the helm of Marissa Mayer last 2013 until Verizon acquired Yahoo in 2017 for $4.8 billion.

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