A ton of people on this thread on the Apple website are discussing and running into the same issue.

There are apparently 2 ways to fix this issue:

The first one is to simply disable “Use IDLE command if the server supports it” from the Advanced settings for your Account, as shown above.

The second fix is to wipe out all your emails and accounts and start all over. This method is pretty risky and I don’t think you should try it unless you really know what you’re doing. To do this, quit Mail, then using Terminal, move all the files in ~/Library/Mail/V2/ out into another location. Then Open Mail and recreate all your accounts.

Side note regarding Gmail and Priority Inbox
Personally I ran into this disappearing mail issue with Lion when I realized that Gmail was assigning some emails the Important Label without me knowing it. These emails were also skipping the Inbox. So basically, anything the Google deemed “Important” was never being show to me in Mail. How ironic right? The fix was to go into the Inbox settings in Gmail and Set these options:

Inbox Type: Classic (The Priority Inbox drives me insane personally)
Importance Markers: Show Markers (I tried using the No Markers option but it was causing the emails not to appear in my Mac Mail Inbox)
Filtered Mail: Override Filters (Again this option is here to leave messages in your inbox)
And finally in Lion Mail make sure to disable the IDLE option for the account.

Having done all this, I still don’t fully trust that Gmail is not putting things in the Important folder, so I have turned on the Show in IMAP feature for that label in Gmail Settings and check that folder once in a while in Mail.

I am using Mail Version 5.1 (1251/1251.1) for your reference.

Let me know if you are having similar issues with either Gmail Importance mail disappearing or Lion Mail deleting emails automatically.

After seeing how slow the Google +1 button loads and how it can actually degrade your website’s overall pageload time, I started looking around for answers. First of all, I found that I’m not the only one complaining about the issue. Numerous others have started to point out the speed issues with the +1 button. My second thought was to perhaps remove the button from the site, although considering the effect the +1 button has on your website’s ranking that would mean less love from Google.

So what’s a developer to do? If we keep the button on our site, overall pageload times spike. But if we remove the button, or not add it, we might lose out on a potential piece of the social voting pie which most believe affects your search performance.

So here are my techniques for making Google +1 button load faster, or at least not slow down your site. Interestingly enough these techniques are the same set of tips and tricks that Google’s own Page Speed recommends for webmasters.

1) Save a step, Use Https

Make sure you use the HTTPS protocol in the URL for the JavaScript source, as the original version of the button snippets given out by Google included the HTTP version http://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js which just does a redirect to https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js This issue has since been corrected by Google when you use Google’s +1 button generator site.

2) Don’t load the script on Mobile devices

As stated by Google, currently the Google +1 button does not support mobile devices like the iPhone, iPod touch, iPad, or Android. This means if you have the button code on a mobile site you’re basically wasting HTTP connections and adding extra weight to your site’s throughput. To get around this fact you need to write a little utility function in JavaScript that sniffs the userAgent for unsupported devices, and only makes a call to the script if your client is not one of those devices.
For example in the case of an iPhone and iPad website, you would do something like this:

function isMobileUser(){
  return (/iphone|ipod|ipad|android|blackberry|mini|windows\sce|palm/i.test(navigator.userAgent.toLowerCase()));  
}
if(!isMobileUser()){
	//include the plusone.js code here
}

3) Load the plusone.js script asynchronously

HTML 5 has introduced the ability to load scripts asynchronously allowing the rest of the page to load independently of potential bottlenecks. This feature is actually already in use for the Google Analytics code. Keep in mind that only Chrome and Firefox 3.6 and above support the async feature at this time. But it does not hurt your non-supporting browsers in any way so it’s safe to use. Here’s the code that combines the check for unsupported mobile browsers from before to load the +1 button script asynchronously. Note that since this code is loaded asynchronously it doesn’t matter if you put the call in the footer or header.

function isMobileUser(){
  return (/iphone|ipod|ipad|android|blackberry|mini|windows\sce|palm/i.test(navigator.userAgent.toLowerCase()));  
}
if(!isMobileUser()){
// create a new script element in the DOM
var gp1script = document.createElement('script');
// set it's type attribute, not really needed in HTML 5 but just to be safe
gp1script.type = 'text/javascript';
// set the HTML 5 attribute of async to true for the script tag
gp1script.async = true;
// set the source attribute to the https version of the google pluseone code
// change this to your own server path if you are cosidering using option 4 below
gp1script.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js';
// add the new script tag to the head or body of the page
(document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0]||document.getElementsByTagName('body')[0]).appendChild(gp1script);
}

You would then place the tag where you want the +1 button to render, which since it is a proprietry tag will just be ignored if the script is not present on your page.

<g:plusone></g:plusone>

If you’re not comfortable with the tag, you can also use an HTML 5 version to render the +1 button on your site, which uses a css class of g-plusone and sets attributes as needed. For example you can display a standard +1 button with counts using this HTML 5 tag.

<div class="g-plusone" data-size="standard" data-count="true"></div>

Note that you can also place multiple +1 buttons on a single page. For example you might have a +1 button that directs its vote to your main parent homepage like so:

<g:plusone href="http://www.your_tld.com/></g:plusone>

4) Host the plusone.js file yourself

This option has been suggested by some users, although I personally argue against it just because you’ll be responsible for continuously monitoring changes and updating your version. The big benefit here is avoiding that dreaded HTTPS server, but keep in mind the script still will make that second call to load the plusone library so you’re still not home free. Only go this route if you’re seriously considering a site improvement and are willing and capable of pushing out updates to your version of the script. I’m sure the Google +1 team is making lots of changes and adding bug fixes which you will miss out on if you forget to update the script on a daily basis. In the extreme case you could perhaps write a program that downloads the latest version of the script from Google’s servers and updates your version on a daily basis, but then again this becomes a new task to keep an eye on.

Hope this helps and let me know if you have other tips and or feedback regarding these ideas. For more details be sure to read the +1 button API page.

What we knew so far about Chrome

• Uses V8 JavaScript engine which supports Classes and compilation. There is a V8 JavaScript benchmark suite that gives FireFox 3 a score of 83, while giving Chrome a score of 1213! Safari 3 gets a score of 128. Judging by this alone, V8 blows away the competition.
• Uses Webkit rendering engine.
• Tabs run as independent processes which can be managed.
• Lots of other features.

First Impressions

• Installation was a breeze and imported FireFox settings.
• No status bar, You only see the status bar when you hover over a hyperlink.
• The Task Manager (Shift + Escape) updates in real time and shows memory, CPU and network usage for each tab, each plugin, and the main Chrome process separately. There is also a link to Stats for Nerds with lots more gritty info.
• The Flash plugin is extremely CPU usage intensive and causes sluggishness when scrolling. I just loaded a popular flash website and noticed my machine came down to a near halt. It seems to happen more with Flash files that contain infinite loops, using as much as 70% of the CPU.
  
• The built in JavaScript console looks like a combination of FireBug and Web Inspector.
• There is a built in JavaScript Debugger (Alt + `)
• Passes the Acid 2 test.
• Chrome gets a score of 78 on the Acid 3 test, which is higher than FireFox 3 at 57, Safari at 72, and Opera at 45.
  
• Omnibar – this is the URL/location bar in Chrome that has some fuzzy logic built in to suggest “smart” autocompletes. This is the current order of the drop down in the auto complete list. There seems to be no way of changing this ordering as of now. Would be nice to be able to customize them.
   
  
   
  1. Search Google for FOOBAR
  2. FOOBAR/ (I’m not sure how useful this one is really)
  3. Link to the FOOBAR Wikipedia page
  4. Link to I’m Feeling Lucky URL for term FOOBAR. This item gives you the ability to search within the URL. For example if you type in Amazon in the Omnibar and select the amazon.com option using the down arrows, you will see “Press Tab to Search Amazon”. See below instruction on implementing this search functionality for your website.
  5. Search Google for FOOBAR ANOTHER TERM
  6. Search Google for FOOBAR ANOTHER TERM
  7. A page in your history pertaining to FOOBAR
  8. Link to history search for pages about FOOBAR

Cool Developer related stuff in Chrome

Google Chrome User Agent String:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.X.Y.Z Safari/525.13.

Chrome has a menu option called “Create application shortcuts…” that uses Google Gears to create a shortcut to your webapp. Users can choose to place the shortcut to your webapp on their Desktop, on the Start menu and even the Quick launch bar in Windows. This is a pretty powerful feature. When a user clicks this icon, Chrome opens up without the Omnibar, and your website will appear in an “Application” format. You can customize how Chrome creates these shortcuts using meta tags. These tags are named: application-name, description, application-url, and shortcut icons in both 32×32 or 48×48 formats. The favicon is used if not specified. For example you can use the following HTML code in the head of your document. Note that with the Mozilla added support which is used in Chrome, you can use any supported graphic format as your favicon, and not just the old school favicon.ico file.

<head>
  <meta name="application-name" content="Gmail"/>
  <meta name="description" content="Google's approach to email"/>
  <meta name="application-url" content="http://www.gmail.com"/>
  <link rel="icon" href=gmail_32x32.png sizes="32x32"/>
  <link rel="icon" href=gmail_48x48.png sizes="48x48"/>
</head>

To open a new tab from your webapp in a separate process using JavaScript you can do this in Chrome.

var w = window.open();
w.opener = null;
w.document.location = "http://differentsite.com/index.html";

Chrome lets users search your website from its ominbar. To enable and include your website’s search in Chrome you have to create an OpenSearch description document (OSDD).
For example you can create something like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
 <OpenSearchDescription xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/">
   <ShortName>Web Search</ShortName>
   <Description>Use Example.com to search the Web.</Description>
   <Tags>example web</Tags>
   <Contact>admin@example.com</Contact>
   <Url type="application/atom+xml"
        template="http://example.com/?q={searchTerms}&amp;pw={startPage?}&amp;format=atom"/>
   <Url type="application/rss+xml"
        template="http://example.com/?q={searchTerms}&amp;pw={startPage?}&amp;format=rss"/>
   <Url type="text/html" 
        template="http://example.com/?q={searchTerms}&amp;pw={startPage?}"/>
   <LongName>Example.com Web Search</LongName>
   <Image height="64" width="64" type="image/png">http://example.com/websearch.png</Image>
   <Image height="16" width="16" type="image/vnd.microsoft.icon">http://example.com/websearch.ico</Image>
   <Query role="example" searchTerms="cat" />
   <Developer>Example.com Development Team</Developer>
   <Attribution>
     Search data Copyright 2005, Example.com, Inc., All Rights Reserved
   </Attribution>
   <SyndicationRight>open</SyndicationRight>
   <AdultContent>false</AdultContent>
   <Language>en-us</Language>
   <OutputEncoding>UTF-8</OutputEncoding>
   <InputEncoding>UTF-8</InputEncoding>
 </OpenSearchDescription>

Fore more tips read the Google Chrome FAQ for web developers page.

ps. Don’t use the Google gears Chrome download page which gives a JavaScript error!

_GU_SetupOneClick is not defined
onload(load )

Google shares have plummeted to all time low of $41 per share on the news of the buyout, while Microsoft shares opened trading at an all time high of $121 this morning. Google is shipping its PageRank and search index which contains 1.34 Petabytes of data stored in over 550,000 tape drives over to Microsoft using 3,000 Armored Trucks, driving up north from Mountain View to Redmond. The 848 mile road trip will be overseen by law enforcement agencies both on the ground and in the air.

There is yet no official announcement as to what Microsoft plans to do with the new Google acquisition, but rumors are flying around that Microsoft plans to start selling a new search based operating system with a new built in software called Windows Internet Search that will perform web searches at an alarming fast rate using Google search. The new upgrade will cost around $149 for existing Windows Vista users. Microsoft has no plans of providing search functionality to Apple users.

Microsoft will also be offering a subscription based search to its customers starting next year that is said to incorporate the new Google logic. The search feature will provide subscribers with 10 Google searches per day starting at 0.99c.

In related news, Google announced that it is experiencing unusually high traffic today, as users of the search engine giant around the world are are frantically trying to back up the entire search engine’s database before Microsoft officially shuts it down in the coming weeks.

Google employees have made a pact to never give up and are voicing their disapproval of the announcement by forming their own Open Source startup search engine company called AprilFools that is expected to be a noteworthy replacement for the many fooled Google users worldwide.

Then I discovered something interesting in Google Analytics.

Google Analytics tracks and stores connection speeds for your visitors as part of the Network Properties category. The data provided includes Connection Speed and this corresponds with Pages per visit, Average time on Site, Percentage of new visits, and the Bounce rate. But how in the world does Google compile this data? It appears that people are guessing that Google uses the visitor’s IP address or hostname to do a lookup in an IP database or a reverse lookup, and then makes a guess based on what ISP that IP address belongs to. But Google also loads a small .gif file with each urchin request. This article explains a little trick for using time stamped image loading and log analysis which seems related.

So if your IP belongs to RoadRunner, then we can assume you are on a cable connection and file you under that category. This can sometimes get somewhat hairy and lead to ambiguity as evidenced by the Unknown category shown in Google Analytics. It is also interesting to note the Unknown category is the single largest category in my case with 36% of the total data collected. What happens if you are on AOL or EarthLink? Will the database contain the accurate information to pinpoint if you are on dial-up or broadband? How often is the database updated with new information? What about edge cases, for example if you work in an office where you have a “broadband” connection but share it with a large group of people?

The good news is that with Analytics the work happens without interfering with the user experience and no additional HTTP connections are needed. The bad news is, it is not done in real time. So if you are looking for a real-time test this will not work for you, unless you build your own seriously fast IP database web service that you can use asynchronously. The other option is to use the binary image payload test, but that also makes life hard for your users.

So, If you are looking for general statistics for a webapp over a date range then Google Analytics might be the way to go. Keep in mind you will end up with a chunk of Unknown data. As for making snap decisions, you can sniff user bandwidth while they surf with payload testing. Here is another sample page at AOL where they put up a simple fork page and determine your bandwidth speed using JavaScript image loading and setting a user cookie. I can think of a dozen reasons why this is a bad idea but I won’t go into that here.

PS. It is worth mentioning that Internet Explorer supports a built in behavior called clientCaps, which provides information about features supported by Microsoft Internet Explorer, as well as a way for installing browser components on demand. The connectionType property of clientCaps returns either lan, modem or offline. Since this only works in IE and doesn’t offer too much granularity, it might be a good test if you are only trying to test IE users specifically.

if (window.console && window.console.firebug) {
  alert("found Firebug");
}else{
  alert("can't find Firebug");
}

Demo: Sniff for FireBug

You may have noticed this message in your Gmail homepage recently:

The reason for that is Firebug by default logs all XMLHttpRequests made for all the websites you visit. The problem is that the data that is logged never gets disposed of or cleared out. Therefore, FireFox having to collect and store that information and the memory for Firefox will eventually get large enough that will cause your computer to start using paged cache. This will then make Gmail seem like you are swimming through molasses. Gmail by default seems to make 22 XMLHttpRequests when I load the main page. It then makes a new XMLHttpRequest every 30 seconds, to check for new emails, so in the span of 1 hour you will have 120 new Ajax calls tacked on. This is a nice feature of Gmail which makes life simple for its users (Notice there is no “Get new mail” button anywhere). But now every new Ajax call is another 1kb of data which adds to the memory usage and tacks on more CPU and RAM consumed by Firebug.

No need to worry though since, another nice feature of Firebug is that you can disable it on a domain name basis.

To turn off Firebug for mail.google.com first open Firebug by hitting the green icon or F12. Click on the bug icon in the top left and choose the second option labeled “Disable Firebug for mail.google.com”. Now Firebug will be turned off and the green icon will be changed to a silver icon for this domain. You should notice a smoother and faster Gmail experience. You can also turn it back on by clicking on the link “Enable Firebug for this website”.

The other and better method of speeding up your Firefox and still keeping Firebug around, is to disable Firebug all together and enable it for specific sites that you are working on. To disable Firebug, again you click on the Bug icon and this time choose the first option “Disable Firebug”.
Now visit any site that you would like to use Firebug on and then “right click” on the silver icon on the bottom and choose “Allowed Sites…” From here you can add the domain name for any sites you want to override. This makes your life easier and makes general surfing faster in FireFox, yet allows for using the powers of the almighty Firebug when needed.

If your application is similar to Gmail where XMLHttpRequests are called in a loop you may want to use the sniff script to warn users to disable Firebug for your domain as well.

This will allow you to use both a regular Jabber account and GTalk simultaneously withing Miranda.

From the Miranda Wiki

Miranda can handle as many multiple connections to different accounts as one might need. The way it’s done in Miranda requires the user to clone the dll file for the appropriate protocol as many times as many accounts of that protocol he wants to stay connected to at the same time.
To connect to multiple AIM/ICQ/Jabber/MSN/Yahoo and other protocols you have to:

1. Turn off Miranda
2. Browse to the Plugins directory
3. Rename the protocol’s dll file to a preffered name, for example: ‘aim_1.dll’ or ‘aim_home.dll’ etc.
4. Copy the renamed dll file to a different directory
5. Rename the copied dll file to a name that will let to easily distinguish the accounts, for example: ‘aim_2.dll’ or ‘aim_work.dll’ etc.
6. Move the just renamed dll file back to the Plugins directory

Once you have that setup start up Miranda and configure your new GTalk DLL with these settings from the Google Talk Support page for Miranda.

• Username: Your Google Talk username (without any @ symbol or domain information)
• Password: Your password
• Login Server: gmail.com

• If you’re signing in with a Google Account that’s not linked to any Google email service, enter gmail.com
• Google Mail accounts should enter googlemail.com
• Google Apps users, please visit the Apps Help Center for instructions.

• Use SSL: Yes
• Manually specify connection host: Yes
• Host: talk.google.com
• Port: 5223
• Keep connection alive: Yes

Clicking on Video Units the first time will take you to a page where you are shown a video presentation on Video Units. here is the video:

So how do you actually make money with Video Units? The FAQ section of Video Units talks about this. When you place a video unit on your website, you’ll earn revenue from two types of ad formats: companion ads, which sit above your video content within the player and can be either text or image-based, and text overlay ads, which appear in the bottom 20% of the video content area. Ads on video units can be paid on either a cost-per-click or cost-per-thousand impression basis.

So companion ads are like banner ads and text overlay ads are like AdWords ads.

The setup page walks you through creating the code to place on your site and is quite simple to use. You just pick a color theme, the size of the video ad unit and you can also filter the content to be shown in your player. You can also save the player by giving it a name and description.

Video units come in 3 different sizes:

• 400 x 415
• 500 x 510
• 780 x 560

You can pick from 9 preset color schemes:

Click on Generate Code, Copy the code, and Paste it into your site. Below is a sample video unit which I’ve created for testing out the service.

Some of the advantages of Video Units over regular ads are:

You will now deliver content to your site as opposed to ads. You can also make the content relevant by choosing from categories you wish to have shown. The ads in videos are not obtrusive and you make money from them. You are actually enhancing the user experience and helping to attract and retain users.

From what is available on the promo page it looks like you the ads will not be in the same area as the movie, but they appear as part of the YouTube player and outside of the video content to ensure a smooth user experience. Here is a sample screenshot of how the new YouTube video Ad Units will look like. You will also be able to customize the color scheme of the flash player to fit your blog or portals look and feel.

The content of the ads will be relevant to the video itself, something that AdSense has already perfected down to a science. Let’s hope that publishers will have the option to choose specific videos to be shown, or at least choose from a narrow range of topics.

This is a win-win deal for all the parties and great for you publishers, since it will allow you to not only improve your content by adding the YouTube content to your site, but also give you a new source of income.  Checking my Google AdSense account, I am not seeing any information on these video ads yet. There is a mention of a “button” on the YouTube promo page, but the button is not there! Hopefully we will hear more from Google soon.

We’re sorry…
… but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can’t process your request right now.

We’ll restore your access as quickly as possible, so try again soon. In the meantime, if you suspect that your computer or network has been infected, you might want to run a virus checker or spyware remover to make sure that your systems are free of viruses and other spurious software.

We apologize for the inconvenience, and hope we’ll see you again on Google.

Here is a screenshot of the page I get.

I am guessing this had to do with the number of queries per minute or some other type of quota put on the blog search page. I’m not quite sure I understand the logic behind this limitation. The only thing I can think of is that the application is running low on physical resources.

What happens when non-techy users see this error page? They freak out! They go buying all sorts of virus software and get all paranoid thinking their PC is infected. This is not a user friendly message and Google should find a nicer way to handle this, especially when their stock is trading at over $500 per share. After a few minutes of “googling” around, I found a few other people mentioned getting this same error on other Google search properties, even on the Google homepage.

The easy fix for me was to delete the browser cookies and Voila I’m a human again. I have also heard that somtimes google can blacklist your IP in which case you might have to flush your DNS and renew your IP hoping to get a new one.

I have to say, this was an alarming, annoying and somewhat scary event, especially coming from a company who sends its own robots to my servers dozens of times every day. If Google were to really block me one day it would change my life or maybe I would just stop googling and start asking.