My Top 5 Google Chrome Extensions
November 29, 2012
3 minute read
1. Pocket (formerly Read it Later)
It’s almost impossible to read every article I’m interested throughout the day, work related or otherwise. With the Pocket Chrome extension, I’m able to save these articles in one place and read them later either on my computer, mobile or tablet device.
After installing Pocket through the Chrome Web Store, a small down arrow will appear at the top of your browser window. The next time you see an article you’d like to read, but simply don’t have the time, click the arrow to “read it later.” Then, after downloading the appropriate mobile app, you can read these articles on the go.
This tool comes in handy when I’m searching my inbox for images from the various web and graphic designers we work with on a regular basis.
For example, I can type the name or email address of the designer into my Gmail search box and the Attachments.me icon will show me how many attachments I’ve received from that particular sender. After clicking the icon, I’m taken to a thumbnail list of every attachment. I can easily scan these thumbnails to find the image I’m looking for. And a recent integration with Google Drives allows me to save these images directly to Google Drive.
We launched Ask the Gooru just over a year ago and this summer we created the Gooru Chrome extension to quickly alert users when new Gooru videos had been posted. Thousands of users visit www.AsktheGooru.com every month looking for Google Apps and Gmail tips and our Chrome extension provides all of those great tips from directly within a user’s Gmail inbox.
When the Gooru icon at the top of your inbox turns red, it means a new video has been posted. Users can then click the icon to view the latest videos and can even submit a question to the Gooru by clicking the “Ask the Gooru” tab.
4. Eye Dropper
Eye Dropper is a small, but powerful extension I use frequently to customize colors in Google Presentations. The tool quickly grabs and matches the color of any web page or image and generates a color code, which can be used to create that same custom color in a presentation or elsewhere.
The goo.gl URL Shortener is helpful when I need to share a Docs URL, but don’t want to send out the extremely long link. And the extension even provides analytics on shared links so I can see the number of clicks on a particular link, just keep in mind that all analytics are publicly accessible.
