Vimium is an incredible Chrome add-on for keyboard-only Web navigation. Its basic shortcuts are modeled after those used in the ubergeek-oriented Vim text editor. The idea behind Vimium is that all of the most common actions (scrolling up and down, switching tabs, zooming) can be done using keys that are either on the home row of the keyboard, or otherwise very easy to reach (such as "zi" for Zoom In). Fortunately, they can be customized. That's one of the main things I like about it, since I use an alternative keyboard layout (Colemak). Once you get used to the shortcuts, you can do just about anything (navigate to links, find text, switch tabs, zoom in and out) without moving your fingers, much less reaching for the mouse.

My interest in procrastination-busting applications is almost as intense and old as my interest in procrastination itself. One of my favorite ways to procrastinate is by fighting against procrastination in all sorts of new and creative ways I haven't found yet.

I actually have a very good system set up, mainly based on the incredible Leechblock Firefox add-on. After tweaking some settings, it now lets me browse my time-wasting sites for exactly as much time as I think is appropriate, and not a minute longer (I'm not telling you how much that is! That's personal, people). The only problem with my system is that Firefox isn't the only browser in the world. I have Chrome, Opera, Safari, and even (god forbid) IE.

Google's Gmail team added two nice features to the Webmail application April 15: Drag-and-drop attachments and calendar invites.

Users can now drag-and-drop photos, documents, spreadsheets and other files from their computer to Gmail.

You have to access Gmail Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox 3.6 to enjoy all of this AJAX-ey goodness.

I dragged-and-dropped a photo, Word document and PDF in that order in seconds using this tool, which Google had automatically enabled. No Gmail Labs tenure here!

My blue arrows point to how the attachment I'm dragging hovers like a ghost or shadow over the attachment box, which turns green. Here's what the final result looks like:

When we demonstrated Google Chrome OS last Fall, a few folks asked us how it would handle printing. Today we wanted to give developers a little more insight into our approach for printing from Chrome OS and other web-connected platforms.

While the emergence of cloud and mobile computing has provided users with access to information and personal documents from virtually any device, today’s printers still require installing drivers which makes printing impossible from most of these new devices. Developing and maintaining print subsystems for every combination of hardware and operating system-- from desktops to netbooks to mobile devices -- simply isn't feasible.

Since in Google Chrome OS all applications are web apps, we wanted to design a printing experience that would enable web apps to give users the full printing capabilities that native apps have today. Using the one component all major devices and operating systems have in common-- access to the cloud-- today we're introducing some preliminary designs for a project called Google Cloud Print, a service that enables any application (web, desktop, or mobile) on any device to print to any printer.

Rather than rely on the local operating system (or drivers) to print, apps can use Google Cloud Print to submit and manage print jobs. Google Cloud Print will then be responsible for sending the print job to the appropriate printer with the particular options the user selected, and returning the job status to the app.

Google Cloud Print is still under development, but today we are making code and documentation public as part of the open-source Chromium and Chromium OS projects. While we are still in the early days of this project, we want to be as transparent as possible about all aspects of our design and engage the community in identifying the right set of open standards to make cloud-based printing ubiquitous. You can view our design docs and outlines here and we hope you stay tuned for updates in the coming months.