Google chat badge not working anymore? - gmail

I was using google talk chat badge (chatback - small iframe code that enables remote user to chat with you as anonymous) for some years but now it is not working anymore. The generated code is fine as it seems it opens a new window and all but after a second, it redirects to support.google.com page which of course is not of much use.
I rechecked the code, generated new code, didn't help. Again redirects to support.google.com. The code is generated from http://www.google.com/talk/service/badge/New
Anyone knows what's going on? Have they discontinued it or?
Also, a suggestion - is there any alternative web-presence button like that for other messengers which don't require client on other end. For Skype, Windows Live or some other messenger?

According to KatherineG at Google the chat badge is no longer supported. http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chat/_VpluJc6IfU
We are looking into using Crafty Syntax for a replacement.
http://www.craftysyntax.com/

Yup, been a while now - it was great while it lasted. The personal workaround that I am using is to sign up for a live chat service and hook it up with Gtalk. I am currently using ClickDesk - http://www.clickdesk.com/
Visitors chat using the live chat interface and I use the Gtalk interface.

For a while I used MeeboMe in combination with MeeboMe notifier but then it died as well (company was purchased by Google and the product was killed) I found some good alternatives myself so I am sharing them. Ironically, they are recommended by MeeboMe after they discontinued their service. Both are free.
Zoho Live Support - https://chat.zoho.com/
Yahoo! Pingbox - http://messenger.yahoo.com/pingbox/ (requires Yahoo! account but otherwise is great)
Too bad large companies simply kill useful products. But as far as I am concerned, Yahoo! Pinbox is even better than both Google chat badge and MeeboMe (at least for my needs) and can be customized to great extent.

I recommend ClickDesk - http://www.clickdesk.com too if you like to use Google Talk or Skype.
However, if you want to code - you can use xmpp protocol and hook it up with Pidgin notifications. Google Appengine also has notifications which I believe is what ClickDesk uses.

Related

how to write own logic without using qnamaker

I am still trying to understand Chatbots. Currently i have already made chatbot which is integrated in skype. I have Sharepoint online where user search for FAQ. If they dont find then they ask BOT which sends request to LUIS and Qnamaker.
Qnamaker then sends response back by looking it into its database. I upload FAQ from sharepoint to Qnamaker using sharepoint workflows. But i want to write my own logic and get rid of Qnamaker.
What are ways to do it? Any good tutorials? I also wanted to know how the flow happens. For example if we dont use Qnamaker then we fire queries in sharepoint based on what user asked? I dont understand how i can fire queries in sharepoint if user makes typo then we will not get anything from sharepoint. So any tips on how to implement this without using qnamaker is highly appreciated?
The FAQ bot generator is a subset of the main Microsoft bot framework. You should do some research on the Microsoft Bot Framework. The link above takes you right to the documentation overview of the bot framework and from there you can get into developing one. They have links to a few sample projects as well as a large number of code snippets within some of the article explanations. It has a full setup guide that will walk you through the initial setup so it should be easy to get a basic echo bot running, but if you are not a programmer you should stick to the FAQ generator.
I suggest you use either node.js or c# to develop the bot since these are directly supported by the framework. I am personally using c# to build my bot from the ground up. The purpose of mine is to be used within a customer facing android/ios app that will help with questions, checking the status of different things, and even paying bills.
Just remember you will need to manually set up your cloud hosting. I host mine in azure alongside a web interface I built for it (you can build the website inside your bot if you are using c#, just replace the default.htm file in the web.config with the main page of the interface).

How to develop Spotify Desktop Applications, now Libspotify is discontinued

have done my due diligence, and not found any other posts that answer this question, but as usual, if you know a similar question, point me that way!
I noticed a long time back that Libspotify has been dicontinued:
(https://developer.spotify.com/technologies/libspotify/)
So, my question is - what should we do for developing Desktop applications?
They do state: "We hope to be able to provide you with a new library for other platforms." But, this has been going on since 2015!
I have seen many projects in GitHub still using Libspotify - so what should we do? An update was promised "in the upcoming months" but I've not seen anything yet.
What should we do for developing Desktop Applications?
We at Spotify don't currently provide playback as part of our platform offering outside of our iOS and Android SDKs, and I don't have any updates on that at the moment. As mentioned on the website, we hope to be able to provide playback SDKs for more platforms in the future. We don't support any new development on libspotify.
You can use the Spotify Web API to interact with Spotify in a variety of ways, including getting information about metadata, and accessing/modifying user libraries and playlists, which may be useful. You can also use the Applescript API to control playback on macOS, which may also help.
The Spotify Web API is pretty straight forward to use. Of course it defines the protocol rather than implements it so it is OS independent.
I put together a few classes to help unwrap some of the JSON parameters simply. These were written in Swift for macOS.

Email Notifications Chrome Webstore Support

Is it possible to receive email notification for new comments on the Support page of a Chrome extension in the webstore?
On the support page of a Chrome extension I can add a new question, suggestion or bug report but I don't receive any notification about responses.
I had the same problem. I have several apps in the Chrome Web Store and I found it tedious to be constantly checking. I found an extension that claimed to have this functionality, though I found it periodically lost my list of extensions and wasn't able to actually fetch reviews consistently. You can try the extension here: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/my-extensions/igejgfmbjjjjplnnlgnbejpkpdajkblm?hl=en. It is also open source, so it could be improved.
I ended up writing some of my own scripts to periodically check and send me an email when there is a new review or support request. I made it available to use as a hosted service (currently free, though I plan on asking for a little money to defray the hosting costs as well as some coffee money). Check out the hosted service at https://www.chromebeat.com. It has a full list of the Chrome webstore apps and extensions and can send you notifications on a new support issue or review. Right now it only checks hourly and sends on the hour.
Also, when you respond to a support request, the user who reported it doesn't get any kind of notification. The best way around that I've found is to actually message that person's Google+ profile, either by adding them to a circle (e.g. App users) posting publicly and mentioning them in the post, or for some users it's possible to message directly with hangouts.
[update: Oct 2015. It's now possible to "Reply" to reviews in the web store, so that's probably the best way to respond to user reviews directly]
As far as I know, there is no such option. You will have to periodically check it.
Which makes using the built-in Feedback quite useless - you're better off using something like a public bug tracker as your "Support" link and disabling Feedback.
Existing feature request: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=295837
As of 2015-03-23, it is untriaged.
No, that has not been implemented, even approaching a decade later.
New Solution:
The two options in the current answer are no longer working, so I made a small utility app to solve this problem.
You can submit your extension's id and your email address and Webstore Watch will notify you within 1 minute of a new support request.
https://gmanicus.github.io/WebstoreWatch/
Let me know if this goes down or if you experience problems. I can't guarantee 100% reliability, but I will do my best to maintain it.

Very simple user validation

I'm making an app and I plan to have some cloud happening with it, but I do not want to create a user data base and have the users need to remember their username and password.
Since it will be distributed through the chrome app store it's basically guaranteed that the user will have a google account. All I want to do is:
Get the user's email through the google account stuff. If I get it through there, well then their email is all the authentication I need to get that user's data.
If I end up putting the application on something other than chrome browser, I'll just have the user use their email to request a validation link, and then I'll send them a validation code for that account, they put the validation code into the application, it takes that as a verified user, so that's secure and easy as well.
EDIT: I'm looking into this. So far I have:
OAuth 2
Google API
But I have a problem that I don't know what to set as my javascript origins in the Google API and there isn't too much info on this abroad. If anyone can tell me what javascript origins I need to set for a chrome extension to access google api it would be a great help.
PS: Thanks for down vote, this is why I love resorting to stack exchange.
Hmmm, I think the only reason this was voted down is the fact that this question may be been asked somewhere on the site already (but I'll help you and give give a 1up).
So what you are wanting to use the Google OpenID. You will have to register your application with Google so they can provide OAuth2 tokens for you application. I have not done this with Google but with other services and it is pretty easy, just search around.
In terms of obtaining OAuth2 for your application in the chrome extension - this can be a pain since the extension is sandboxed and Google's example uses OAuth not OAuth2.
Here is solution I host on GitHub for this - I also use this in my extension GitHub Repositories:
https://github.com/jjNford/oauth2-chrome-extension
Hope this helps in some way. Don't get discourages with StackOverflow, it is a great resource with many great contributors.
Good luck!
I had to up vote you too as I'm tracking down a related issue so here is what I've found that may help.
According to these directions - http://code.google.com/p/google-api-javascript-client/wiki/Authentication - "In the "Authorized JavaScript Origins" box, enter the protocol and domain for your site." This should be the protocol (http:// or https://) followed by any optional subdomain followed by your domain name and no trailing slash. Nothing after the domain name.
This prevents certain kind of security attacks, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same_origin_policy.
There are some related questions here that I found that may help:
Problems with Google Picker API and selecting Google Drive items and google apis console 'Javascript origins'.
Now with all of that said, I am still trying to track down what values to put in there for one of my sites hosted as a Google Site, as none of the obvious values are working for me. So there may be some subtlety there that I have missed in this explanation.

"Hello world" as a Gmail plugin?

I am trying to find out what the tech is like to create a Gmail plugin that accesses my attachments. Just to get started, what would be "Hello world" as a Gmail plugin? What would be the steps to create it?
Yes, you can creates plugin for Gmail, and two types:
Sidebar
Contextual
Look for Gadgets in gmail. After learning how to use these, you can add them to your gmail or anybody that wants to can do the same, to do so you can have Google host it.
It's easy if you know some HTML, JavaScript, and XML.
Good Luck
Take a look at these links:
https://developers.google.com/google-apps/gmail/contextual_gadgets
https://developers.google.com/gadgets/docs/basic
You cannot create Gmail plugins.
(Unless you work for Google)
Doing some quick research it looks like Google now supports a GMail api to build gadgets and/or plugins. I haven't done it myself, however it seems like they want it to work.
https://developers.google.com/google-apps/gmail/
I think you can do that. (You will find Hello World program too)
http://code.google.com/apis/gmail/gadgets/contextual/
Last year, Google released a GMail API and it allows you to perform the actions you want, but perhaps not with the UX you're looking for embedded directly inside of GMail. You can find it here:
https://developers.google.com/gmail/api/
Depending on exactly how you need it to work, you might be able to use either Contextual Gadgets (https://developers.google.com/gmail/contextual_gadgets) or a Google Chrome Extension to do what you need.
Google has recently introduced add-ons for Gmail (probably on Oct, 24 2017). It can be developed with Google Apps Script. Google's documentation says
What Gmail add-ons can do ?
Displaying additional information for the user in the Gmail UI.
Connecting to non-Google services, to retrieve information or take other actions.
Providing an interactive interface to allow the user to control the add-on or send information to another service.
I am not pretty sure (will go deep into it in coming days) whether you can deal with attachments. But I logically feel you can do that as well, because GAS supports handling attachments.
As of now, Google is not allowing to publish new add-ons however they will allow it in future.
While a few add-ons have been made available in the G Suite
Marketplace for users to install, it is not currently possible to
publish your own add-on to the Marketplace.
How can you publish your own add-on ?
As of now (26th Oct, 2017), they consider it on request basis. If you have a cool idea, fill this form to let them know about it. You will get notified once they accept your listing.
Here is how the add-on interface looks like inside Gmail
It is not possible to create plugins for Gmail. There is no developer API as such - only access to send/retrieve emails using standard SMTP/IMAP protocols.
See http://code.google.com/apis/gmail/oauth/

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