Chrome: Race to the finish line in a flash
Google recently released a new version of our Google Chrome browser with Adobe Flash Player built in, automatically bringing you the latest and greatest updates. To celebrate, we teamed up with a few creative folks to make Chrome FastBall, a Flash-based game built for YouTube. Want to race?
Complete various games to get the shiny chrome ball to the finish line in the shortest possible time. (So far, the fastest time on the Chrome team is 1 minute, 20 seconds.)
Try your luck with Chrome FastBall, and if you haven’t taken Chrome for a test drive yet, download the newest stable release of the browser at google.com/chrome.
Update 7:20PM: All technical issues have been resolved now, so you can enjoy the game. Thanks for your patience!
Update 9:22AM: Due to the overwhelming response to the game, some things aren’t quite working as we hoped due to server-side overloading. Please forgive the maintenance work as we get the game back up again. Thanks!
Posted by Jeff Chang
YouTube: Flash and the HTML5
Mobile Google Docs Viewer
Google Docs Viewer, a service that lets you preview online PDFs, Word documents and PowerPoint presentations, is now available for iPhone and Android devices.
Google added some features that make the service more useful on a touchscreen device: pinch to zoom (only for iPhone and iPad), buttons for zoom and pagination.
Unfortunately for Google, iPhone’s built-in PDF reader and Microsoft Office viewer are much better than Google Docs Viewer because they don’t convert documents to images. Some Android phones include a document viewer based on Quickoffice, which also does a better job than Google Docs Viewer. There’s also Adobe Reader for Android, probably the best Android PDF reader you can download for free.
Google OneBox for Sunrise and Sunset
Google shows sunrise and sunset information in a special OneBox at the top of the search results. If you type [lima sunrise] or [paris sunset], Google will show the time for sunrise or sunset in that location.
Google says that this feature works for almost any location. “Whether you’re looking to find the best time for a morning jog or trying to plan that perfect moment for a wedding proposal, knowing exactly when the sun rises or sets can always be helpful. (…) Unlike the weather, sunrises and sunsets are quite predictable, and as a result, we don’t use a data source. Instead, we calculate sunrise and sunset times based on latitude, longitude and the current time. This calculation has been of interest to astronomers and mathematicians for millennia, so they’ve had time to get it just right. And for most locations, it’s accurate to within a single minute.”
You can also type [sunset] or [sunrise] and Google should show accurate information for your location. Google has similar OneBoxes for weather and time.
Google Chrome Tests Unified Menu
Google started to test an unified menu in the latest Chromium and Google Chrome dev builds. The new menu includes most of the options that were available in the page and tools menus.
If you use a recent Chromium build or Google Chrome dev channel, you can enable this feature by adding a command-line flag to the desktop shortcut: –new-wrench-menu.
To make the menu more compact, Google uses a single menu item for cut, copy, paste and another menu item that combines zoom options with full-screen.
Opera already uses an unified menu that replaces the menu bar, while Firefox 4 will include a single menu button. The unified menu takes up less space, it’s less complex and it reduces clutter.
“The general purpose of the menubar is to contain all of the things that you want your program to do but you can’t cram into the main UI. So the menubar generally ends up with a lot of stuff that isn’t used very often, if at all, and yet is reproduced on every window and takes up a significant amount of real estate. It also has the tendency to become a dumping ground for new or hardly used features. Starting with Vista, and continuing with Windows 7, the menubar has been systematically removed from Windows applications built by Microsoft and other vendors. It has been replaced with alternatives like the Windows Explorer contextual strip or the Ribbon found in Office 2007,” explains Mozilla’s wiki.
Google Search Box: A Gay Google Search Box
Each year in June, Google search results pages for gay-related queries include a multicolored bar. This time, Google added the colorful bar below the search box.
In the US, June is the “Gay & Lesbian Pride Month”. “This month is meant to recognize the impact Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender individuals have had on the world. Gay, lesbian, and bisexual groups celebrate this special time with pride parades, picnics, parties, memorials for those lost from hate crimes as well as HIV and AIDS, and other group gathering events that attract thousands upon thousands of individuals.”
Erica Baker pointed to a shirt of one the Googlers marching in the Global Pride Parades:
{ Photo licensed as Creative Commons by magic robots. Thanks, M. }
Gmail to Use More HTML5 Features
Computer World reports that many of the upcoming Gmail features will use HTML5. Adam de Boor, a Gmail engineer, said that Google’s goal is to make Gmail load in less than a second.
“If the browser supports CSS3, Gmail will render the pages using these specifications, rather than its traditional approach of using the Document Object Model (DOM). The company has found that using CSS3 can speed the rendering time by 12 percent. (…) Gmail will also make use of HTML5′s database standards. Now, the e-mail service uses Google Gears to store mail for offline reading, but over time that will migrate to the HTML5 standards.”
Another feature that will be added to Gmail allows users to drag attachments to the desktop. This feature is not part of HTML5, but Google says that it will encourage other browsers to use it. Right now, you can drag and drop files from the desktop to Gmail, but only if you use Firefox 3.6 or Chrome.
Adam de Boor revealed how many lines of code are in Gmail: 443,000 lines of JavaScript code written by hand.
Gmail has added many features that used to be available only in desktop mail clients: fetching email from other accounts, threading, powerful spam filters, reading messages offline. Now it’s time to better integrate Gmail with the browser or the operating system and to add notifications, a simplified way to handle attachments and a better performance.
{ spotted by George }
Google Docs: Now View files from the Docs list in your mobile browser with the Google Docs Viewer
You can now view PDFs, .ppt, .doc and .docx files you’ve uploaded to your documents list directly in your mobile browser, without the need to download. This release is for Android, iPhone and iPad devices.
Access your Google Docs list in the mobile browser on your device by signing into Google Docs. Select a file to view and then view the file using Google Docs viewer without any download.
Supported file types: pdf, .ppt, .doc and .docx
Google update on China
Google currently automatically redirect everyone using Google.cn to Google.com.hk, our Hong Kong search engine. This redirect, which offers unfiltered search in simplified Chinese, has been working well for our users and for Google. However, it’s clear from conversations Google have had with Chinese government officials that they find the redirect unacceptable—and that if it continue redirecting users its Internet Content Provider license will not be renewed (it’s up for renewal on June 30). Without an ICP license, it can’t operate a commercial website like Google.cn—so Google would effectively go dark in China.
That’s a prospect dreaded by many of its Chinese users, who have been vocal about their desire to keep Google.cn alive. They have therefore been looking at possible alternatives, and instead of automatically redirecting all our users, They have started taking a small percentage of them to a landing page on Google.cn that links to Google.com.hk—where users can conduct web search or continue to use Google.cn services like music and text translate, which can provide locally without filtering. This approach ensures they stay true to our commitment not to censor our results on Google.cn and gives users access to all of our services from one page.
Over the next few days they’ll end the redirect entirely, taking all Chinese users to new landing page—and today they re-submitted ICP license renewal application based on this approach.
Google Search: This week in search 6/27/10
Speed is a common theme at Google—the notion of speed is baked into all of our products, from Google Chrome to web search. Often, we also simply develop features that help deliver answers fast. Whether by displaying the exact content you’re looking for at the top of your search results page or by optimizing the way you search, many of these speed enhancements save you keystrokes—and time.
This week, we released two new features:
Sunrise and Sunset Search feature
Whether you’re looking to find the best time for a morning jog or trying to plan that perfect moment for a wedding proposal, knowing exactly when the sun rises or sets can always be helpful. This week, we were happy to launch a Sunrise and Sunset feature for search. It gives the precise times of sunsets and sunrises for any location around the world. Unlike the weather, sunrises and sunsets are quite predictable, and as a result, we don’t use a data source. Instead, we calculate sunrise and sunset times based on latitude, longitude and the current time. This calculation has been of interest to astronomers and mathematicians for millennia, so they’ve had time to get it just right. And for most locations, it’s accurate to within a single minute.
Example searches: [sunrise port jefferson ny] or [sunset cancun]
Google Search by Voice expanded to more languages
Google Search by Voice enables people to search the web faster than ever before—getting you answers with fewer keystrokes. This service was originally launched in English, and was offered in the U.S., U.K., India, Australia and New Zealand. We later introduced Japanese and Mandarin to expand the number of possible users. Just a week ago, we launched the service in French, Italian, German and Spanish. Given that local dialects are a factor in the performance of speech recognition, we first launched our service in the four countries most closely associated with these languages: France, Germany, Italy and Spain. This week we followed with Korean and the launch in Taiwan of Traditional Mandarin.
To get started with Google Search by Voice, visit the Google mobile page in your country’s domain (for example, in France go to m.google.fr) and download the application for your phone’s operating system in your locale. You’ll find this available for iPhone, Android and Blackberry phones. Ultimately, our goal is to bring Google Search by voice to speakers of all languages, so stay tuned for more announcements here.
We’ll see you back here next week for more new announcements.
Posted by Johanna Wright
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