Google News Suggest

After showing suggestions for web search, image search and video search, Google started to autocomplete your queries in Google News. The suggestions are related to current news, so you don't have to type too many letters to find the latest stories about Opera 10, Walt Disney or Hurricane Jimena.



The interface makes it difficult to select suggestions using a keyboard, since you have to press "Enter" twice to perform a search, but this bug will probably be fixed. Another problem is that you can't disable suggestions by visiting the preferences page and selecting "Do not provide query suggestions in the search box".

Folder Sharing in Google Docs

For some reason, Google decided to release a new version of the Google Docs List API before adding the features to the interface. One of the most important new features is folder sharing.

I've used a Python library to test the new version of the Google Docs API and I've managed to share a folder. As you can see, the "play" folder from the screenshot displayed below has a new icon.


Unfortunately, the shared folder didn't show up in the collaborator's Google Docs interface, but he was able to find it by visiting this hidden section.


Sharing folders is more efficient than sharing a large number of files one by one and the best thing is that folders are treated just like documents. You can share folders as "read-only", but you can also allow collaborators to add new files and to edit documents.

For now, folder sharing is only available using the Google Docs API, but it will be added to the interface very soon.

{ via Google Data APIs Blog }

Keep the Default Notifications when You Sync iPhone's Calendar with Google Calendar

If you want to synchronize iPhone's calendar and contacts with Google Calendar and Gmail Contacts, Google recommends to use Google Sync, which "uses the Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync protocol to synchronize the data on your phone with your Google Account".

The option works well and it even supports multiple calendar, but there's an important issue: ActiveSync lets you add a single alarm and Google Calendar converts each alarm to a "pop-up notification". That means you can't receive SMS notifications or email notifications when you create events from your phone.

Fortunately, there's another way to sync iPhone's calendar with Google Calendar: CalDav. It's limited to one calendar for each account *, it doesn't support push updates, and it only works with iPhone OS 3.0, but at least you can use the default notifications from Google Calendar. If you haven't changed your default notification settings, this help page explains how to change them.


Here's an interesting comparison between ActiveSync and CalDav:

Google Sync (ActiveSync)
—————————————

Pros
-Supports Push to devices
-Supported by iPhone
-Supports multiple calendars within one account

Cons
-Can only have one ActiveSync account set up on iPhone at one time
-Can't choose calendar colour
-Not currently supported by iCal (will be in Snow Leopard)

CalDAV
—————————————

Pros
-Supported by iPhone, iCal and other clients
-Supports multiple calendars within one account (use /user on iPhone)
-Allows control over calendar color, and color syncs across accounts

Cons
-Doesn't push updates. Fetch only
-Setting up multiple accounts is a bit clumsy compared with ActiveSync, and they appear as separate services in the iPhone settings and "choose calendar" views.

* Even if it appears that the CalDav sync is limited to your main calendar, you can add multiple calendars. The process is tedious, but it can be simplified by installing a configuration utility.

iGoogle Themes Explorer

iGoogle didn't make it easy to change your themes: you had to visit a separate page, find a theme, add it and then repeat the process until you found a great theme.

Now it's easier to pick a theme: click on "Change theme from [insert current theme's name]" and you'll see a small list of themes. You can select a category, sort the themes by popularity or recency and even type a query like [puppy], [flowers] or [batman] in the search box.

Copy your site, more search options, better announcements and Start Page for all editions in Google Sites

The following updates have been made in Google Sites:
– The ability to copy an entire site.
– The "recent announcement" gadget now allows you to control how much text is shown in the post summary. You can also configure the gadget to show a thumbnail of the first photo in the post.
– More control over the search box to do things like search across multiple sites.
– The Start Page is now available in all editions of Google (previously available in Premier Edition only).

Editions included:
Standard, Premier, Education, Team and Partner Editions

Languages included:
All languages supported by Google Sites

How to access what's new:
To copy your entire site, click 'More actions', select 'Manage site', then 'General' and then 'Copy site'.

To configure the search box, click 'More actions', select 'Manage site', then 'Site layout' and then 'Configure search'.

To create a Start Page, click 'Create new page' and select the 'Start Page' template.


For more information:
http://googleappsposts.blogspot.com/2009/08/copy-your-site-more-search-options-and.html

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Translate Google Documents

Google Docs is now integrated with Google Translate so you can translate documents directly from the word processor's interface. Click on the "Tools" menu, select "Translate document" and choose the destination language. Google will translate your document and offer two options: "Replace original document with this translation" and "Copy to new document".


The problem is that in both cases there's no link between the original document and the translation. To better translate documents collaboratively, Google should integrate Google Translator Toolkit into Google Docs.

If you want to translate documents, but they're not stored in Google Docs, you can upload them to Google Translate.

Tip: Probably the best way to translate a web page, including a Google Docs document or presentation, is using the new Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer. Even if IE is not your favorite browser, you should try it because the Google Translate integration is brilliant. Unfortunately, you can't export the translation.

{ via Google Docs Blog }

Google ASCII Art

If you Google [ascii art], you'll find an ASCII representation of Google's logo next to the search box. It's a geeky Easter egg closely related to the witty use of the "did you mean" feature to help you understand recursion.


{ via Marissa Mayer }

Translate Document in Google Docs

You can now translate a document into any of the 42 languages supported by Google Docs.

Editions included:
Standard, Premier, Education, Team and Partner Editions

Languages included:
All languages supported by Google Docs

How to access what's new:
To translate a document, click 'Tools' and select 'Translate document '. After selecting your language, a new tab will open with your translated document.


For more information:
http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2009/08/google-docs-now-with-translation.html

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Google Health OneBox

Search Engine Land reports that Google added an OneBox for health-related information that's only displayed in the US. If you search for [flu], [ADHD], [autism] and other medical conditions, you'll see an excerpt from a Google Health article and links to other services: Mayo Clinic, Medline Plus, WebMD.

Most likely, some of the keywords that trigger the OneBox are displayed on this page. Google Health's articles combined information licensed from reputable sources with information from scholar papers, news articles and other web pages.

Google Search results optimized for feature phones in Arabic and Hebrew -- 40 languages now supported

Forty-language support is an important milestone for a product at Google. We are very excited that by adding support for Hebrew and Arabic, our new optimized mobile Search experience is now available in 40 languages for feature phones.

We launched in 38 left-to-right languages in July, bringing the comprehensiveness of Google's web search to mobile users around the world. Now Arabic and Hebrew speakers will also be able to benefit from universal search results on their mobile devices.

As a reminder, the new search results format provides more complete support for the universal search results you're familiar with on your computer. This means that News, Image, Blog, Video and Product Search results blend right into your results pages when available and relevant to your query. Also, many of your favorite Google Search features now appear in the first result in order to provide direct answers to your searches.



Posted by Zhen Wang, Software Engineer, Google Mobile Team

Gmail Adds a Contact Picker

Gmail is probably one of the last Google services that adds a very simple feature: a contact picker. When you compose a message, you may want to see the list of contacts so you can select some of them. But this feature wasn't available in Gmail, although you could find it in Google Docs, Google Calendar and in almost any mail client and webmail service. Some people even wondered if you can send messages to more than one address: questions like "Why can't I load multiple contacts when I go to compose?" or "How do I compose using my address book?" were very popular in Gmail's help group.

"Auto-complete is convenient and fast, and usually does the trick. But sometimes seeing your list of contacts can help you remember all the people you want to include on your email," admits Google.

The wait is over and now you can finally use the contact picker in Gmail: just click on "To" when you compose a message, select the contacts and click "Done".


Some of the cool things you can do using the contact picker:

* select contacts from one of your groups: just use the drop-down to choose from "Friends", "Family", "Coworkers" and other groups.

* easily remove the contacts you've picked by just clicking on them.


* manually add email addresses by clicking on an empty space from the picker's "to" box.

* if you've already typed some addresses in the "to" box, the contact picker will include them when it launches.

* add all the results of a search by clicking on "Select all".

* the feature also works for "cc" and "bcc".

Speed selection in Google Video

You can now select which speed to play a video in Google Video.

Editions included:
Premier and Education Editions

Languages included:
All languages supported by Google Video

How to access what's new:
To select your speed, use the speed control to watch a video at slower or greater than real time.

For more information:
http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2009/08/getting-up-to-speed-in-google-video-for.html

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Google Maps Mobile Users Send Traffic Data

If you use the mobile Google Maps application on a phone that has GPS, you're sending Google real-time traffic information. "When you choose to enable Google Maps with My Location, your phone sends anonymous bits of data back to Google describing how fast you're moving. When we combine your speed with the speed of other phones on the road, across thousands of phones moving around a city at any given time, we can get a pretty good picture of live traffic conditions," explains Google.

It's an interesting way to use GPS information on a grand scale to solve practical problems. Many other Google services collect data that help Google develop new features: GOOG-411 collects voice samples that train Google's speech recognition systems, Google queries anticipate flu activity, while query refinements improve Google's "did you mean" feature.

Google Mobile's privacy policy includes a long list of information that could be collected by some of Google's services: your phone number, your carrier, basic usage stats about your device, your location, voice samples. It's worth pointing out that iPhone's mapping application "does not support traffic crowdsourcing", so you won't improve Google's traffic data by using it (iPhone's map application is not developed by Google).

Apparently, this new source of data allowed Google to expand the traffic feature to arterial roads. "Commuters have long relied on traffic sites to help them determine their last-minute path around poor traffic on the highway. But if the traffic looks bad on the highways, you'll probably want to know how it looks on the alternate routes through arterials," explains Google LatLong.


For now, Google Maps provides live traffic data for a small number of countries (US, UK, France, China), but crowdsourcing could expand its availability.

The bright side of sitting in traffic: Crowdsourcing road congestion data

This post is the latest in an ongoing series about how we harness the data we collect to improve our products and services for our users. It is cross-posted from the Official Google Blog. - Ed.

What if you could do a little something to improve the world during your daily drive to work? Here are a few ideas: tell everybody in the city when you're stuck in slow-moving traffic; warn the drivers on the freeway behind you that they should consider an alternate route; tell the people still at home that they should spend another ten minutes reading the morning news before they leave for work; tell your city government that they might want to change the timing of that traffic light at the highway on-ramp. Of course, you can't just get on the phone and call everybody, and your one traffic report from your one spot on the road might not help much anyway. But if everybody on the road, all at once, could tell the world how fast their car is moving, and we could make it easy for anybody to check that information on their computer or cell phone, well — then we'd be getting somewhere.

If you use Google Maps for mobile with GPS enabled on your phone, that's exactly what you can do. When you choose to enable Google Maps with My Location, your phone sends anonymous bits of data back to Google describing how fast you're moving. When we combine your speed with the speed of other phones on the road, across thousands of phones moving around a city at any given time, we can get a pretty good picture of live traffic conditions. We continuously combine this data and send it back to you for free in the Google Maps traffic layers. It takes almost zero effort on your part — just turn on Google Maps for mobile before starting your car — and the more people that participate, the better the resulting traffic reports get for everybody.

This week we're expanding our traffic layer to cover all U.S. highways and arterials when data is available. We're able to do this thanks in no small part to the data contributed by our users. This is exactly the kind of technology that we love at Google because it's so easy for a single person to help out, but can be incredibly powerful when a lot of people use it together. Imagine if you knew the exact traffic speed on every road in the city — every intersection, backstreet and freeway on-ramp — and how that would affect the way you drive, help the environment and impact the way our government makes road planning decisions. This idea, which we geeks call "crowdsourcing," isn't new. Ever since GPS location started coming to mainstream devices, people have been thinking of ways to use it to figure out how fast the traffic is moving. But for us to really make it work, we had to solve problems of scale (because you can't get useful traffic results until you have a LOT of devices reporting their speeds) and privacy (because we don't want anybody to be able to analyze Google's traffic data to see the movement of a particular phone, even when that phone is completely anonymous).

We achieve scale by making Google Maps for mobile easy to install and use, and by making it easy for people to provide information about their own vehicle speed. There's no extra device to plug into your car and no extra software to buy. Google Maps is free and works with most cell phones, and the number of cell phones with GPS is rising every day. Some phones, such as the T-Mobile myTouch 3G and the Palm Pre, come with Google Maps and traffic crowdsourcing pre-installed (the iPhone Maps application, however, does not support traffic crowdsourcing). Google is fortunate to have a lot of people using our products, and that scale helps make our products better.

We understand that many people would be concerned about telling the world how fast their car was moving if they also had to tell the world where they were going, so we built privacy protections in from the start. We only use anonymous speed and location information to calculate traffic conditions, and only do so when you have chosen to enable location services on your phone. We use our scale to provide further privacy protection: When a lot of people are reporting data from the same area, we combine their data together to make it hard to tell one phone from another. Even though the vehicle carrying a phone is anonymous, we don't want anybody to be able to find out where that anonymous vehicle came from or where it went — so we find the start and end points of every trip and permanently delete that data so that even Google ceases to have access to it. We take the privacy concerns related to user location data seriously, and have worked hard to protect the privacy of users who share this data — but we still understand that not everybody will want to participate. If you'd like to stop your phone from sending anonymous location data back to Google, you can find opt-out instructions here.

We've already been able to provide useful traffic information with the help of our existing mobile users, but we hope that is just the start. As GPS-enabled phones and data plans get less expensive, more people will be able to participate. Crowdsourcing traffic gives us a way to harness bits of location data from our users and give it back to them in a form they can use to make impactful decisions that affect their free time, their pocketbooks and the environment. The more people use it, the better it will get. So next time you're sitting in morning traffic, turn on Google Maps for mobile and let someone else know they can hit the snooze button one more time. Tomorrow morning, they might do the same for you.

Posted by Dave Barth, Product Manager for Google Maps.

New Languages in Google Translate

Google's machine translation service added new languages: Afrikaans, Belarusian, Icelandic, Irish, Macedonian, Malay, Swahili, Welsh, Yiddish. Some of these languages have a small number of speakers: for example, according to Wikipedia, only 320,000 people speak Icelandic.


Swahili is a language spoken in Eastern Africa, Afrikaans is spoken in South Africa and Namibia, Yiddish has 3 million speakers in the Orthodox Jewish communities, Malay is an official language in Brunei, Malaysia, and Singapore. Welsh is spoken in Wales, England and Argentina, Irish is spoken by a small minority of the Irish population, Macedonian has less than 3 million speakers and many enemies, while Belarusian has 9 million speakers.


The number of languages supported by Google Translate is 51, which is impressive, but there are still many popular languages that aren't supported. At least not yet.

{ via John Mueller }

Interesting Reads in Google News

"Interesting Reads" is a new Google News section that includes opinionated, thought-provoking articles from news sites. Some titles: "The Daughter Deficit", "America's Food Crisis and How to Fix It", "7 Reasons to Avoid Windows 7".

It's not exactly Arts & Letters Daily, but it's an interesting departure from Google's goal of aggregating and clustering news stories.


Update: The feature has been launched and the section has been renamed to "spotlight". "The Spotlight section of Google News is updated periodically with news and in-depth pieces of lasting value. These stories, which are automatically selected by our computer algorithms, include investigative journalism, opinion pieces, special-interest articles, and other stories of enduring appeal. To access the stories in this section, just click Spotlight on the left side of the page," explains Google.

Clicking on a YouTube Video

What happens when you click on a YouTube video? Well, it depends. If the video is embedded in a web page and it's already playing, a click on the video will open a new tab and send you to YouTube's page. Until now, this behavior was annoying because the video started to play from the beginning and you had to pause it or pick up from where you left off. Now YouTube's player is smarter: it pauses the video and opens a YouTube page that continues to play the video seamlessly.

You can try the new feature using the video embedded below. You'll notice that YouTube uses a URL format that lets you link to certain sequence from a video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Umj1lvgoI68#t=1m15s

(where 1m15s is the start time)



Another change is that YouTube's watch page lets you pause videos by just clicking on the player.

Google Apps Connector for BlackBerry® Enterprise Server

Google Apps Connector for BlackBerry® Enterprise Server allows users to access Gmail, Google Calendar and Contacts using built-in BlackBerry® applications. Google Apps Connector installs on BlackBerry® Enterprise Server, connecting it to the Google Apps servers and synchronizes email, calendar and contacts for BlackBerry® users.

Editions included:
Premier and Education Editions

Languages included:
US English

How to access what's new:
Click here to get started with Google Apps Connector for BlackBerry® Enterprise Server.

Learn how to upgrade to Google Apps Premier Edition to use this feature.

For more information:
http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2009/08/google-apps-connector-for-blackberry.html


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Tip: Connect with other Google Apps admins in the Google Apps admin community.

YouTube Mobile App Expands to Five New Languages

We're happy to announce that the YouTube Mobile Application for Windows Mobile and Symbian S60 devices is now available in five new languages. We now support users with localized content in Brazilian Portuguese, Polish, Russian, Swedish, and Czech. This brings the total number of languages the app supports to 12.

YouTube's Mobile Application makes it easy to quickly load and watch high-quality YouTube videos on your mobile phone, even in weak coverage areas. To get the update or to try the app for the first time, simply visit m.youtube.com/app in your phone's browser.

We'd love to get your feedback, so visit our forum if you have questions or want to chat about YouTube mobile.

Posted by Robin Norvell, Mobile Consumer Operations

Email task list in Gmail

You can now email a task list from Gmail.

Editions included:
Standard, Premier, Education and Partner Editions

Languages included:
All languages supported by Gmail

How to access what's new:
To email a task list, click 'Actions' and select 'Email task list'.

For more information:
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/08/email-task-list.html

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Google Sitelinks for Wikipedia

Google started to show some special sitelinks for Wikipedia articles. As you probably know, sitelinks are links to popular sections of a site that help you navigate directly from Google's search results pages. Initially, Google displayed sitelinks only for the top search results and only if the query was navigational, but now you can find sitelinks for other results: for example, you'll see sitelinks next to results from IMDb.

The sitelinks for Wikipedia results are special because Google doesn't send you to a different page, but to a section of the article. This is especially useful for long articles that include a lot of information.


It's the first time when Google indexes URLs that include anchors and sends you directly to a section from a page. The feature has already been available at Yahoo Search and Live Search.

{ Spotted by Milivella. }

Google Apps Connector for BlackBerry Enterprise Server now available

If you have a corporate BlackBerry smartphone, you might be interested to know that the Google Apps team has just made the Google Apps Connector for BlackBerry Enterprise Server available for download. This connector makes it possible to use Google Apps email, calendar, and contacts with corporate BlackBerry phones' built-in applications.

If you manage IT for your organization, you'll want to read the Enterprise team's blog post that details the Google Apps Connector.

If you don't manage IT but you want your company to adopt Google Apps and the Connector for BlackBerry Enterprise Server, tell your IT team that it's time to "Go Google".

Posted by Joyce Sohn, Google Apps Marketing Manager

Google Listen, a Podcast Manager for Android

As you probably noticed, Google releases many interesting services as Android applications and some of them are part of Google Labs: an application that records GPS tracks, a star map, a directory of points of interest. The latest release is an application titled Google Listen, a player for podcasts.

"Listen from Google Labs brings podcasts and web audio to your Android-powered device. It lets you search, subscribe, download and stream. By subscribing to programs and search terms it will create a personalized audio-magazine loaded with fresh shows and news stories whenever you listen."


The application lets you search thousands of podcasts, so it will be interesting to see if the podcast search engine will have a web interface. For now, Google Listen is an experiment and Google still has work to do to improve "networking, sdcard management, download storage, subscription updates, search quality, indexing more web audio, additional languages, and user experience".

And speaking of Google's Android apps, Anil Dash made an interesting point last month: "Google's recent development work on applications for mobile devices has often been delivered exclusively as applications for their own Android platform instead of as iPhone applications, despite the fact that iPhones are roughly forty times more popular in the marketplace."

Edit Albums Collaboratively in Picasa Web

As Picasa Web Albums gets closer to Google Docs (and the upcoming Google Drive), it's natural to add the most useful feature available in Google Docs: collaborative editing. Now you can create photo albums and add collaborators that upload photos, videos or edit captions.


To add collaborators, visit one of your albums, click "Share" and make sure that the option "Let people I share with contribute photos" is enabled.

"Contributors will need to sign in to their Google Account to add photos or videos. Their content will be attributed to them, and they can make edits such as adding captions to, rotating, or even deleting the pictures that they've uploaded. Of course as the owner of the album, you have complete control over who can contribute content. You also have the ability to edit this content as if it were your own. You can manage collaborative access for contributors on the 'Shared with' list by just toggling the 'plus' icon Add Contributors next to their name. A green icon means that user can contribute," explains Google.

"A limitation worth noting: contributors won't be able to upload to collaborative albums from the Picasa software," mentions the Google Photos blog.

"Knowledge speaks but wisdom listens."

Today we're pleased to announce a new Google Labs application for Android-powered devices in the US called, Listen. Listen quickly finds podcasts and web audio relevant to your searches, lets you stream over-the-air or download for later, and subscribe to fresh content from your favorite feeds and searches. In short, Listen helps organize the world of audio information and makes it easily accessible anytime, anywhere. And if you agree with the Jimi Hendrix quote that is the title of this post, then Listen may actually make you wiser, too.

Listen lets you stay informed even while engaged in other activities. Our colleagues use Listen as a personal audio-magazine while exercising, commuting, gardening, cleaning, dressing, cooking, and more*.



It's simple to get started. Just go to Android Market on your Android-powered device and search for "Listen". Install the application and search for anything you would like to listen to. For inspiration, try hitting "Popular searches" from the home screen. This will show some of the fastest-rising audio searches that people are making now. Tapping one of the results reveals content that you can play, queue for later, or subscribe to.

So search for, subscribe to, sit back and listen to thousands of podcasts from your phone. Remember that this is a Labs launch, so we are particularly eager to get your thoughts and feedback below. For more information, take a look at our Google Labs page.

Posted by Bill Schilit and Sam Roweis, Research Scientists

*driving, shopping, eating, farming, laundering, shaving, vacuuming or hoovering, traveling, waiting, toileting, mowing, remodeling, grooming, collecting, raking, swimming, refinishing, painting, sewing, hiking, walking, resting, jogging, loafing, pet sitting, ice fishing, packing, paving, digging, sweeping, recuperating, cementing, guarding, waking, darning, watering, watching, inspecting, moving, envelope stuffing, constructing, mending, baking, scrap booking, jack hammering, mopping, maple sugaring, patrolling, demolishing, horse grooming, ironing, biking, dog walking, ranching, restocking, fishing, sanding, polishing, and mailing.

New Image Search Results for Feature Phones

Earlier this year, we launched new Image Search results for iPhone and Android-powered devices. Since then, we've rolled out the new format to iPhone and Android in 28 countries. Now, the new Image Search results pages are also available for most other phones in 38 languages.

The image results are tightly packed, making optimal use of the screen space on your phone and allowing you to scan eight to fourteen images on a single results page. Clicking an image leads to a details page, which not only shows a larger thumbnail, but also lets you either visit the web page hosting the image or view the image itself in full size. Moreover you can navigate the search results using "next" and "previous" links. These features are designed to make browsing and searching for images on your phone easier and faster.

How to use Image Search:
1. Go to google.com and click on “Images.”
2. Do a search query. The results page shows related images, clicking on an image loads the details page.

3. The image details page shows a larger thumbnail and links to the original website and image. You could also navigate to other results using "Next Image" link.

Posted by Varun Sharma and Jignashu Parikh, Software Engineers, Google Mobile Team

Import Messages and Contacts from Old Accounts to Gmail

In May, Gmail launched a feature that lets you import messages and contacts from other mail services like Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL. Google promised that the feature will be rolled out to all accounts, but it was only enabled in new accounts. The good news is that the feature is now available in all accounts and you can find it if you go to the "Accounts and import" tab from the settings page.

You may wonder if it's a good idea to use this service powered by TrueSwitch instead of Gmail's mail fetcher. Here are some differences between the two service:

* Mail importing saves to your Gmail account the existing messages from other accounts and continues to check for new messages only for 30 days. Gmail's mail fetcher downloads the existing messages and checks for new messages indefinitely.

* Mail importing saves to your account messages and contacts, while Gmail's mail fetcher doesn't import contacts (you can manually import contacts).

* Mail importing works for mail services that don't support POP3 (for example: the US version of Yahoo Mail), but the mail fetcher requires POP3. Mail importing supports a small number of popular mail services.

"Copying mail over usually takes a couple days, occasionally up to a week — but eventually it all arrives. And once it's done, you can forget your old account and enjoy having everything in one place," says Google, but I disagree. You'll import the old messages to your account, but after 30 days the service will no longer fetch new messages.

Google Apps Script available from Google Docs

You can now use Google Apps Script from within Google Spreadsheets to automate tasks across Google products and customize and extend Google Spreadsheets.

Editions included:
Premier and Education Editions

Languages included:
All languages supported by Google Docs

How to access what's new:
To create a new Google Apps Script, select 'Tools' and choose 'Scripts' from the menu bar in Google Spreadsheets.

For more information:
http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2009/08/launched-google-apps-script.html

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Google Groups Integrates with Google's Web Apps

Google Groups is one of the services that would benefit a lot from an integration with Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites and other Google apps. It makes sense to create a document and to collaborate with other group members or to create a calendar and share it with your group.

Google blog announced that the integration is already available. "As an example, imagine you're organizing a local intramural softball team tournament. You use Google Docs to keep track of the rosters for each team as well as each team's performance. You want all the players, but only the players, to have editing access. You already have a Google Group set up with the tournament participants, so you simply share the spreadsheet with the group itself, granting the group members permission to edit."

To share a document, a calendar or a site, use the group's email address (groupname@googlegroups.com) in the sharing dialog.


And if you want to unsubscribe from a group, Gmail makes it easier by adding an "unsubscribe" option when you click on "show options".

Filter Images by Aspect Ratio in Google Images

As promised, Google Images added the option to restrict the results by aspect ratio. If you go to the advanced search page, you'll be able to choose one of the four types of images: tall, square, wide and panoramic.


This is one of the last missing features from Google Images Search that were available in Microsoft's Bing. Google Images has improved a lot lately by adding advanced options that help you refine the results (Creative Commons search, searching by size) and options that require image analysis (finding similar images, searching by color, detecting faces).

Sync Google Chrome Bookmarks

The most recent Google Chrome dev build added a feature that lets you synchronize your bookmarks with a Google account. Because of a technical issue with Google's new sync technology and because Google Chrome uses folders instead of labels, bookmarks will not be displayed in Google Bookmarks, but in Google Docs.



How to try the new feature? Make sure you use Google Chrome's dev channel, which includes a buggier and less polished version of Google Chrome. Then create a desktop shortcut for the browser, right-click on the shortcut, select "Properties" and edit the "Target" field by appending:

--enable-sync

(make sure to add a space before pasting the flag). You should see something like this if you're using Windows Vista:

C:\Users\Ionut\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe --enable-sync

Restart the browser and you should find a new option in the Tools menu: "Sync my bookmarks". Enter your credentials and the sync process should start immediately. You'll be able to access your bookmarks in a weird location: a read-only folder in Google Docs (things will look less weird when Google Docs is transformed into Google Drive, a general-purpose online storage service). Install Google Chrome's dev build on a different computer and you'll be able to access your bookmarks, edit them and all the changes will be saved online.

Google will release a sync API so that developers can add similar features for other services. "To make this sync infrastructure scale to millions of users, we decided to leverage existing XMPP-based Google Talk servers to give us "push" semantics, rather than only depending on periodically polling for updates. This means when a change occurs on one Google Chrome client, a part of the infrastructure effectively sends a tiny XMPP message, like a chat message, to other actively connected clients telling them to sync," explains a Chromium document.

Tip: import the bookmarks from Google Bookmarks by clicking on the Tools menu, selecting "Import bookmarks and settings" and choosing "Google Toolbar" from the list.

Update: The file that implements the syncing algorithms (syncapi.dll) includes many references to GDrive, so it's likely that Google will use the same technology to synchronize all the files stored in Google Drive.


{ Thanks, Pascal. }

Sharing with Groups in Google Docs

You can now allow a group to edit or view individual documents, spreadsheets, presentations or files.

Editions included:
Standard, Premier, Education, Team and Partner Editions

Languages included:
All languages supported by Google Docs

How to access what's new:
To share a Google Doc with a group, select 'Share', choose 'Invite people...' and enter group email address.

For more information:
http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2009/08/sharing-with-groups.html

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A Simple Way to Specify Image Licenses

Google has recently added a Creative Commons filter in Google Image Search, but it didn't explain how to specify the license so that your images are properly identified.

The trick is to enclose the image and the license's link in a div tag and to use RDFa's about attribute to specify the resource. For example:

<div about="image.jpg">
<img src="image.jpg" alt="" />
<a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/">Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 3.0</a>
</div>

Email as attachment and updates to image export and functions in Google Docs

The following updates have been made to Google Spreadsheets:
– The ability to email a spreadsheet as an attachment
– The ability to export images as part of an .xls file
– Improvements to functions including the ability to use =sum() and =sumproduct() as part of the function goal cell

Editions included:
Standard, Premier, Education, Team and Partner Editions

Languages included:
All languages supported by Google Docs

How to access what's new:
To email a spreadsheet as an attachment, click 'Share' and select 'Email as an attachment...'.

For more information:
http://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=58225
http://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139704
http://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=40609


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Support for Hebrew and Arabic in Google Sites

Google Sites now supports Hebrew and Arabic.

Editions included:
Standard, Premier, Education, Team and Partner Editions

Languages included:
Hebrew and Arabic

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Snap to grid in Google Docs presentations

Snap to grid in Google Docs presentations allows you to easily auto-align text, images, shapes, and tables within your slides.

Editions included:
Standard, Premier, Education, Team and Partner Editions

Languages included:
All languages supported by Google Docs

How to access what's new:
Snap to grid is enabled by default. To disable or re-enable snap to grid select 'Arrange' and select/unselect 'Snap to grid'.

For more information:
http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2009/08/getting-your-ducks-in-row-with-snap-to.html

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The Iterative Web App: Outbox for Emails in Limbo

On April 7th, we announced a new version of Gmail for mobile for iPhone and Android-powered devices. Among the improvements was a complete redesign of the web application's underlying code which allows us to more rapidly develop and release new features that users have been asking for, as explained in our first post. We'd like to introduce The Iterative Webapp, a series where we will continue to release features for Gmail for mobile. Today: Outbox.

With the web-browser-based Gmail for mobile we launched in April for iPhone and Android-powered devices, you can compose mail even when you're offline. That means you can write an email when there's no wireless connection, like in a subway or an airplane. And when you hit send, the message will be sent when the phone's network connectivity gets re-established. But what if you'd like to view the message that you just "sent" while still offline? Where can you find those 'sent but not actually sent' emails? Before today, the answer was "nowhere."

To solve this problem, we're now introducing a new feature, called Outbox. Outbox is a new label that appears in the menu when you have queued messages stuck on your phone and presents a read-only view of the subject of those messages. So if you want to make sure the previous message was sent before writing a follow-up mail, you can go ahead and find it in Outbox. Please note that you can read only the subject, not the body, of messages in Outbox.

To try out Gmail for mobile, visit gmail.com in your mobile browser. This version of Gmail for mobile supports iPhone/iPod touch OS 2.2.1 or above, as well as all Android-powered devices, and is available for US English only. To make it easy to access your Gmail account, try creating a home screen link.

Posted by Heaven Kim, Product Marketing Manager, Google Mobile

Google Reader's "Send to" Feature

Google Reader added a new feature that lets you share posts in other services: Twitter, Facebook, Digg. The feature is opt-in, so you need to go to the settings page, click on the "Send to" tab and pick your favorite services.


After selecting an item, use the keyboard shortcut Shift+T to quickly open the "send to" menu. Google Reader opens a new tab when you choose one of the "send to" options and most of the necessary information it's already pre-filled.


If your favorite service is not included in Google Reader's list, you can add it from the settings page by clicking on "Create a custom link". Here's how to add a "send to" option for Google Bookmarks.

Name: Google Bookmarks
URL: http://www.google.com/bookmarks/mark?op=edit&output=popup&bkmk=${url}&title=${title}
Icon URL: http://www.google.com/favicon.ico

And here's how to use AddToAny, a service that lets you select between many social sites.

Name: Add to Any
URL: http://www.addtoany.com/share_save?linkurl=${url}&linkname=${title}
Icon URL: http://www.addtoany.com/favicon.ico

Google Reader added two other options: you can now subscribe to sites added to your contacts' profiles and mark as read items older than a day, a week or two weeks. The second option is useful if you have a lot of unread items and you only want to read the recent news. As you probably know, Google Reader automatically marks as read the items that are older than a month and this can't be changed.

More In-Your-Face Google Ads

Barry Schwartz mentioned last week that Google tests a new position for search ads. The ads stay closer to the organic results and they're no longer next to the scrollbar. The experiment was probably successful and the change should be visible to everyone.



Google also started to show related searches below the ads and the suggestions are commercially-oriented. It's a good way to show more relevant ads and to determine the user's intention.

Some of the ads display product listings from Google Base and Google shows a thumbnail next to the list of products.


Update. Daniel Dulitz, from Google, has an interesting comment: "It would be easy to just increase revenue. What is hard is to make ads appropriately visible when you want to see them without being in your face when you don't want to see them. People are smart -- users ignore banner ads because they've proven useless over time -- so if you just make ads more visible, without regard to their utility, it's doubly self-defeating. Very tricky business."

From iPhone to G1 and Back

Andre Torrez switched to HTC Dream (also known as T-Mobile G1) after using Apple's iPhone for two years. "I've gone from absolutely loving Apple as gatekeeper to my device's software to just flat out hating it. The past few months have been a parade of sad stories of developers getting bit by app store policies, or us, the users, losing out on software that would have been great to have. Google Voice, for example, has been something I've been eagerly waiting for every since I was invited to use the service."

Switching to an Android phone wasn't a pleasant experience for Andre, who found Android apps less polished, the virtual keyboard was disappointing, while the hardware was slow.

The bright side of switching from the iPhone to an Android phone was that applications could run in the background. For example, Andre found a very useful open source application called Astrid that lets you manage your tasks.

Astrid has a feature that is not even possible on the iPhone. Using a Locale plugin, you can assign tags to task items that trigger alarms when you are in certain situations. For example, you can have a task to "buy batteries" and assign it a tag of "store". Then in Locale you connect the tag "store" with a situation in which you are near your local hardware store. Or simply maintain "home" and "work" task lists with reminders.

Here's a real example I am now using this for: I have a task called "buy muni pass" which is only available a few days before the end of the month and only from certain retailers. I walk by a place that sells them, but I always forget to buy them during the window and I usually remember when I'm nowhere near the store.

Sometimes you have to choose between a great user experience with many limitations and a less polished interface that's more open to the future. Google should invest more on improving Android's interface and on making it easier to develop great looking apps. One of the reasons why Windows Mobile isn't very popular is that Microsoft couldn't develop a compelling interface that encouraged people to use the product.

Unlike other smart phones, the iPhone made it easier to search Google, to browse the Web and to upload videos. "The iPhone OS has only 8% of global smartphone market share, but generates 43% of mobile Web requests and 65% of [web] usage", according to an AdMob report from May 2009.

Update: Andre switched back to the iPhone: "I give up. I thought it'd be fun to see what life was like on a different platform but I think I've seen more than enough on this hardware. The device is definitely too slow to get anything done and I have found myself not going to the phone when in a situation where I used to check my mail and catch up on Twitter. I stood in line at the ATM and just didn't bother."

{ via John Gruber }

On Google File System

Google File System is "a scalable distributed file system for large distributed data-intensive applications" created by Google. Initially used to store Google's search indexes and the crawling data, GFS is now mostly used to store user generated content.

ACM has an interesting interview with Sean Quinlan, who was a GFS tech lead and is now a principal engineer at Google.

Although organizations don't make a habit of exchanging file-system statistics, it's safe to assume that GFS is the largest file system in operation (in fact, that was probably true even before Google's acquisition of YouTube). Hence, even though the original architects of GFS felt they had provided adequately for at least a couple of orders of magnitude of growth, Google quickly zoomed right past that.

One thing that helped tremendously was that Google built not only the file system but also all of the applications running on top of it. While adjustments were continually made in GFS to make it more accommodating to all the new use cases, the applications themselves were also developed with the various strengths and weaknesses of GFS in mind. "Because we built everything, we were free to cheat whenever we wanted to," Gobioff neatly summarized. "We could push problems back and forth between the application space and the file-system space, and then work out accommodations between the two."

The guys who built Gmail went to a multihomed model, so if one instance of your Gmail account got stuck, you would basically just get moved to another data center. Actually, that capability was needed anyway just to ensure availability. Still, part of the motivation was that they wanted to hide the GFS problems.

{ Thanks, Daniel. }

Mail Delegation in Gmail

You can now allow others (i.e. administrative assistants) in your domain access to your email.

Editions included:
Premier Edition

Languages included:
US English

How to access what's new:
Administrators must first enable mail delegation by checking the 'Mail Delegation' checkbox under 'Email Settings' in the administrator control panel.

To enter a delegate, users can select the 'Accounts' tab under 'Settings' in Gmail and click 'Add another account' to enter their delegate's email address.

Once the delegate is signed into their own own Gmail account, they can then access their manager's account from the account selection menu at the top of Gmail.

For more information:
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&ctx=mail&answer=138350

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