Gmail added a useful little feature to its search feature today, adding details for all your contacts to your search results for quick access.

Now, when you search someone's email address, the results will not only show messages from them but some extra info about that contact. You'll see their contact photo, as well as links to email them, IM them, call them using Gmail calling, and video chat with them. If they're on Google+, you'll also see what circle they're in, and this information will stay up to date as they change it on their profile. It's a small change, but a bit quicker than opening up the contacts page and searching for them there.

The new update adds better circles integration into Gmail as well. Not everyone is seeing it yet, but it should roll out to all Gmail users by the end of the day. If it's popped up for you, let us know what you think in the comments.

Continuing to Bring People Front and Center in Gmail | Official Gmail Blog

Windows: If you manage your personal contacts, calendars, and to-do items with Apple's iCloud service, CodeTwo Sync for iCloud helps you seamlessly integrate that data with Microsoft Outlook.

Apple's own iCloud utility for Windows will add iCloud data to Outlook, but only as a secondary folder tree. CodeTwo cleans up the integration and brings all of your data together. The syncing works both ways (if you want it to), meaning that a new calendar appointment created within Outlook will automatically be pushed to your iOS devices without any extra hassle.

CodeTwo Sync for iCloud has a free 30 day trial, after which it will only sync calendars. The full version costs $10 and can be purchased from the developer's website.

CodeTwo Sync for iCloud | Via NirmalTV

We all have webapps and services that we love, but that doesn't make them perfect. If you want to do more with Gmail, remove annoying parts of Facebook, connect two webapps you love, automate tedious actions, and more, you can do all this with a few clever scripts, extensions, and services. Here are our 10 favorites.

10. Fix Your Biggest YouTube Annoyances

YouTube is a great place to find tons of video content, but it's far from perfect. You may be annoyed by automatic video plays, the player choosing the wrong resolution, the ugliness of the comments, and the multitude of intrusive ads. The easiest way to fix these problems is with a Chrome extension called YouTube Options, but users of other browsers can implement a few userscripts to get the same clever fixes as well.

9. Add a Custom Style with a Userstyle Sheet

Userstyles are simply CSS stylesheets used to override the existing code on a web site. This is great because you can use them to customize the look of just about any site. You can add custom backgrounds and images to Facebook, make Google Reader look like a desktop app, give YouTube a darker interface for more vibrant viewing, and even add a Super Mario Bros. theme to Tumblr. For help on finding great userstyles and learning how to implement them, check out our complete guide.

8. Improve Google Reader with Extensions and Userscripts

Google Reader is a great webapp on its own, but you can supercharge its capabilities and change its look with the help of some extensions and/or userscripts. You can overhaul the interface any way you want, get notifications on updated feeds, remove junk without removing any feeds, and easily subscribe to new feeds directly from your toolbar. That's just a sample. For a comprehensive look at everything you can do to supercharge Google Reader, check out our guide.

7. Manage Your Social Media Accounts Better with FellowUp

Between your Google apps and Facebook and LinkedIn, you've probably racked up quite a few contacts and calendar events. It can be hard to manage them all when they're in different places, and that's assuming you can even remember who your contacts are in the first place. FellowUp is a web and mobile app that helps you keep track of it all from pretty much anywhere. It keeps you abreast of what's on tap for the day, helps remind you of who all your contacts are in case you forget, and makes it easy to find who or what you're looking for. It's a really helpful tool if you're overwhelmed by your social media accounts. Read more about it here or just check it out.

6. Create Site-Specific Browsers (or Use a Webapp-Centric Browser)

Webapps are great, but desktop versions are often more reliable. You also may prefer a desktop app to always have a persistent window that contains the webapp you want to use. Site-Specific Browsers, or SSBs, can do this for you. OS X has an excellent option called Fluid. Windows users should check out Bubbles (although the site appears to be down at the moment) or Site Specific Browser (which is currently available). These SSBs often add additional features to your web apps. For example, Fluid adds Growl support and makes it very easy to add userscripts and styles.

Alternatively, OS X users can check out Robin, which is an app that collects your favorite apps into one interface. You can switch between them with big app tabs and the interface keeps things super simple.

5. Keep Your Webapps In Sync With Your Desktop Using Social Folders

Social Folders is a handy web service that keeps your webapps in sync with your desktop. You can kind of think of it like Dropbox for Facebook, Flickr, Google Docs, SoundCloud, YouTube, Twitter, and more. You just drop want you want to upload to that web service into its respective folder and Social Folders takes care of the rest. If you add something to any of your synchronized webapps via the web (or anywhere else), Social Folders will download it to your computer(s). It's not only a great way to upload files to various services, but it provides a backup on your computer as well. The service is free for 1,000 file transfers per month, and you can gain more free transfers by referring friends to the service. Alternatively, you can just get unlimited transfers by paying $2 per month or $10 per year. Check it out here.

4. Clean Up and Improve Gmail with Gmelius and Minimalist for Everything

Google's latest design upgrades definitely look nice, but they're not necessarily is utilitarian, or even as simple, as they could be. You can't fit as much on screen as you once could and, as always, ads get in the way. The solution comes in two forms: Gmelius and Minimalist for Everything. Both are extensions that boost Gmail's capabilities, hide ads, and remove interface elements you don't want cluttering up your window. Gmelius works cross-browser—for Chrome, Firefox, and Opera—but Minimalist for everything is Chrome-only.

3. Power Up Your Dropbox or Google Drive with Wappwolf

Your Dropbox and Google Drive pretty much just sit there and sync stuff for you. That's awesome on its own, but there is so much more you can do with a cool webapp called Wappwolf. It can watch any folder in your GDrive/Dropbox and perform an action when it finds what it's looking for. It can convert books and send them to your Kindle, downsize images and upload them to your favorite image sharing sites, batch-convert audio files to various formats, and even sign PDF documents. Sign up at Wappwolf.com and read our guide to get started.

2. Make Facebook Infinitely Better with One Browser Extension

Nowadays, Facebook can't make an update without several groups and petitions cropping up, asking them to change things back to the old ways. Whether you find these complaints legitimate or not, you don't have to beg to make Facebook bend to your desires. All you need is Social Fixer, a browser extension and userscript that works with pretty much any web browser you've got. It'll help you get rid of annoying interface elements you don't like, make your second inbox bigger (you probably didn't even know you had two), filter out posts you don't want to see without unfriending anybody, and a whole lot more. To get started, check out our complete guide.

1. Supercharge Almost Any Webapp With ifttt

If This Then That, or ifttt for short, is an incredible service that can create new functionality from your webapps and even connect them together. For example, you can automatically take articles starred in Google Reader and send them to your Instapaper account, download photos you were tagged in on Facebook to your Dropbox, or even automate your job search. These are just a few of many great examples. We've detailed many more here, and you can sign up for the service for free by visiting ifttt.com.

Gmail is amazing. It's chock full of more shortcuts, settings, and features than you could shake a stick at. Even if you consider yourself a Gmail ninja, though, there are quite a few tricks you might not know about (and some that Google didn't even intend). Here are our top 10 clever tricks built right into Gmail.

10. Host Files in Your Email Inbox for Easy Access

These days, most of us have an account with a service like Dropbox for quick access to any files we want to store in the cloud. However, if you don't use Dropbox (or if you just want a file or two even closer at hand), you can just attach them to a draft in Gmail and leave them there. That way, they're only a few clicks away, and you don't even need to open up a new tab to get them.

9. Keep Track of Your Home IP Address

There are a lot of services that require you to know the IP address of one of your computers, like remote control, streaming your media, and more. The problem is, that IP can change from time to time, leaving you without a connection. While you could always set up DynDNS or Hamachi to ensure easy access, you can also just check Gmail's account activity. As long as you've accessed Gmail recently from home (and who hasn't?), it'll show you the last used IP address of your home computer so you can always connect to it.

8. Strip Your Emails of Annoying Text Formatting

If you've ever copied and pasted text into Gmail, you know how annoying it is that it keeps the text's original formatting. If you want to turn that huge, poorly-chosen font into Gmail's default, you don't need to resort to pasting it in Notepad first—you can just click Gmail's "Remove Formatting" button (yeah, I didn't know that's what that button did either). I'll instantly remove the properties of all your email's text, no hassle required.

7. Restore Your Contacts List if You Mess It Up

You may not know this, but Gmail automatically backs up your contact list regularly, so if you ever mess it up—lose a contact, accidentally sync an older set of contacts, or even delete your entire address book by accident, you can restore it to exactly the way it was at any point in time. Just head to your contact list in Gmail, click the "More" button, and choose "Restore Contacts".

6. Copy and Paste Image Directly Into Messages

If you share a lot of photos, you don't actually have to click that "Insert Image" button whenever you want to embed a picture in an email. In both Firefox and Chrome, you can just drag images right into messages and drop them there to insert them. You can also copy and paste images from the web, which is particularly handy if you don't want to download an image to your desktop first.

5. Sort Gmail Messages by Size and Get Rid of Data Hogs

If you've started to run out of space in your Gmail account, you have a choice: buy more space (lame) or see if you have any messages and attachments that you can delete to free some up (preferable). This cool Google Docs script will grab your largest messages and sort them by size, so you can see which ones are taking up the most space. It isn't exactly "built in" to Gmail, but you never have to leave Google Apps or give someone else access to your account to make it work!

4. Set Up Gmail on iOS Like It was Meant to Be

Some of you more experienced Gmail users may know this "trick" already, but it's surprising how many people are still syncing their iPhone with their computer to get their contacts, when you can sync everything over the air. Check out these instructions to see how to set up Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Contacts on iOS and get everything syncing over the air. After setting it up, your contacts and calendar should always be up to date whether or not you've synced, and your email notifications should come in instantly. Of course, Android users need not worry—Android does all this out of the box.

3. Access Gmail When It's Down

Google's usually pretty good about not having downtime, but every once in a while, Gmail becomes inaccessible and everyone panics. Luckily, even when it's down, there is a multitude of ways to still get your messages—and usually it's as simple as accessing the HTML interface or viewing it through a mail client like Thunderbird. Brush up on these tricks so you know exactly what to do the next time Gmail decides to take a day off.

2. Set Gmail As Your Default Mail Client

Back in the day, it took a desktop app, hacky workaround, or other annoying method to set Gmail as your default mail client, but now these features are built right into Chrome and Firefox. For Chrome, Gmail should have asked you when this feature first went live, but if you said "no" at the time, you can go to chrome://settings/handlers and change the Gmail setting to apply it. In Firefox, you can find a similar setting in Options > Applications. Note that, while these don't require any external apps, they'll only work inside the browser—so if you click a link in another app, it won't automatically send you to Gmail unless you install something like Google's Gmail Notifier.

1. Add a Snooze Button to Gmail

This one requires a bit more work, but again, you never have to install any extension or sign up for a service to get it working—you just need a simple Google Apps script. Once you set it up, it'll let you "snooze" an email for a certain number of days. When that number of days passes, the email will be marked as new again, reminding you to act on that email now (just like a snooze alarm on your phone). Check out our full guide on how to set it up.

Some of these are lesser known Gmail features and some of them are actually MacGyver-caliber tricks, but they're all useful things you can do with Gmail that you might not have thought of—and none of them require any extra extensions or apps. For more awesome Gmail tips, check out our guide to mastering the new Gmail as well as our top 10 Gmail Labs (not to mention 10 other labs you should enable). And, if you have your own clever uses for Gmail, be sure to share them in the comments below.