Web Clipboard Extension for Google Chrome
Google released a Chrome extension for Web Clipboard, the Google Docs feature that lets you save and quickly retrieve text from the Web. The extension could be used to paste HTML content saved in Google Docs, to save some text you need to use on another computer or to copy multiple items to the clipboard.
“Content you copy to the server clipboard is stored on Google’s servers and remains there until 30 days have passed since you last took action on (for example, copied) a given content selection,” informs a help center article.
For some reason, the Web Clipboard from Google Docs doesn’t show the items saved using the extension, but this is probably a bug. The extension doesn’t support keyboard shortcuts, there’s no contextual menu entry for copy or paste and you can’t preview the text before pasting.
I still don’t understand why Google Notebook was discontinued. It could’ve been a much better Web Clipboard.
{ via Blogoscoped Forum }
Google Apps highlights – This week
Improvements to Gmail in mobile Safari
If you’re reading this post on an iPhone or an iPad, head over to gmail.com to see how we made the Gmail experience in mobile Safari work more like a native application. First, scrolling is a whole lot more responsive to your touch gestures. A quick flick will scroll the page much faster than before. We’ve also improved the toolbar so it stays put at the top of the screen, even when you scroll down a long page. This keeps the most common actions in Gmail right at your fingertips—literally.
Chart improvements and drag-and-drop images in Google Docs
Last Tuesday we added the ability to drag and drop images to Google documents from your desktop or from folders on your computer. You can still add images through the image upload wizard, but this new method can save time, especially when you have several images to add. This week we also rolled out improvements to charts and visualizations in Google spreadsheets. You can now add annotated timelines, organizational charts, gauges, motion charts that visualize data changing over time, and other chart types more easily. The new chart editor helps you customize the design of your charts, and now you can publish dynamic charts on other web pages that automatically update when data in the source spreadsheet changes.
Automated workflow in Google Sites with Google Apps Script
Last week we introduced the ability for you to add automated workflow to Google Sites, powered by Google Apps Script. Scripts automate tasks such as sending emails, scheduling calendar events, creating and updating site pages using data from other systems, and more. For example, you can put a button on a course registration page that adds the course to the user’s calendar, sends them a confirmation email and includes their name in the course roster within the site.
Android device management
Just yesterday, we added the ability for businesses and schools using Google Apps to remotely manage security on users’ Android devices (Android 2.2 and beyond), whether those devices are user-owned or provided by the organization. This update rounds out our device management capabilities; now administrators can perform functions like remotely wiping Android, iPhone, Windows Mobile and many Nokia phones from the Google Apps control panel without needing any special hardware or software. Administrators running BlackBerry® Enterprise Server can manage their users’ BlackBerry® devices from the control panel as well.
App Tuesday: seven new additions to the Apps Marketplace
The number of third-party software applications available in the Google Apps Marketplace that seamlessly integrate with Google Apps continues on its rapid growth trajectory. This month, we added seven new applications that complement the growing set of applications offered directly by Google. We were especially pleased to see strong international representation among this new crop.
Who’s gone Google?
Google Apps is really taking off, and we’re excited to team up in the cloud with Virgin America. But they’re not the only large organization to “go Google” recently. Multnomah County in Oregon is moving 4,500 county employees to Google Apps, and the state of Wyoming is doing an even larger deployment with 10,000 state employees. Across the board, these organizations chose to switch because of substantial cost savings and tremendous productivity improvements made possible with Google Apps.
In the last few weeks alone, tens of thousands of small and mid-size businesses have switched to Google Apps, too. Several of these new customers have shared their stories with us, and we invite you to read more here: Jason’s Deli, MainStreet Advisors, Melrose Resources, American Support and Premier Guitar.
We also reached a big milestone in the education world recently: more than 10 million students, faculty and staff are actively using Google Apps at schools and universities worldwide. While we’re focused on bringing the next 10 million education users onto Google Apps, we still took some time to celebrate how far we’ve already come—with the help of the USC marching band!
I hope these updates help you and your organization get even more from Google Apps. For details and the latest news in this area, check out the Google Apps Blog.
Posted by Jeremy Milo,
This week in Google Search 10/29/10
Google Place Search
This week we introduced Place Search, a new kind of search result that organizes the world’s information around places. Whether you’re looking for a park, a great restaurant or a local plumber, you’ll find what you’re looking for more quickly and easily. We’ve clustered search results around specific locations so you can make comparisons and right the best sites. You should already be seeing place results automatically for many local searches. If you don’t see Place Search results at first, you can always click Places in the left-hand panel of the results page.
New product search refinements
People often come to Google to do product research, so in the past couple weeks we’ve expanded Google Product Search to France and Japan. Our goal is to help you find the product information and sites you’re looking for as quickly as possible, so in May we made it easier to find relevant brands for popular product searches. Now we’re providing additional refinements for popular stores and product types. For example, search for [chocolate] and now you’ll find links for related searches for brands (Godiva, Lindt, etc.) and types (dark, hot, etc.). These refinements are unpaid and ranked algorithmically to show the most relevant searches you may be interested in.
Other example searches: [running shoes], [blenders], [binoculars]
Real-time results in Social Search
This week we’ve added real-time to Social Search, so you’ll find the freshest tweets and other updates from your friends right on Google. Here in the Bay Area, everyone has been excited about watching the Giants in this year’s World Series. With our improvements to Social Search, now when you search for information about the game on Google you can see right on the results page if your friends are watching. Just look for the heading “Results from people in your social circle” to check it out.
Social Search is currently available in the U.S. For more information about Social Search, check out our blog post and help center article.
This week in searches—Halloween edition
Still don’t have a costume? You’re not alone—searches for “costume ideas” continue to spike on Google. Check out this week’s special Halloween edition of the Google Beat to find out what costumes, candy and scary movies people are searching for this year.
Happy Halloween!
Posted by Mike Cassidy
YouTube’s Playlist Bar Strikes Back
YouTube’s playlist bar that shows up at the bottom of the page when you open a playlist or you click on a video from your subscriptions has a new use: displaying the list of liked videos after clicking on the “like” button. It’s also used to display the videos from a playlist after adding a new video to the playlist. Unfortunately, this isn’t very useful, the bar is annoying and it can slow down your browser. If you have hundreds of liked videos, adding all of them to the bar takes a while and the browser is no longer responsive.
Many YouTube users complain about this new feature: “Starting today, whenever I like a video, a bar pops up at the bottom of the page to tell me it was added to liked videos (a reminder that I don’t need) – and then that bar freezes my browser and I can only close it with ctrl+alt+delete.”
YouTube should fix the bugs and add an option to disable the bar. You can report this problem by clicking on “report a bug” at the bottom of the page.
{ Thanks, Sterling. }
IE8 innerHTML removes attribute quotes
Filed under: Browser Compatibility, Browsers, Featured, JavaScript
When you get the innerHTML of a DOM node in IE, if there are no spaces in an attribute value, IE will remove the quotes around it.
So to over come this problem you can use the below function to replace it with Quotes again.
function iereplaceInnerHTML(obj, convertToLowerCase) {
var zz = obj.innerHTML
,z = zz.match(/<\/?\w+((\s+\w+(\s*=\s*(?:".*?"|'.*?'|[^'">\s]+))?)+\s*|\s*)\/?>/g);
if (z){
for (var i=0;i]/g;
z[i] = z[i]
.replace(/(])/g
, replacer = function(){
var args = Array.prototype.slice.call(arguments);
return '="'+(convertToLowerCase ? args[2].toLowerCase() : args[2])+'"'+args[3];
};
z[i] = z[i].replace(y[j],y[j].replace(replaceRE,replacer));
j++;
}
}
zz = zz.replace(zSaved,z[i]);
}
}
zz = zz.replace("colSpan=","colspan=");
return zz;
}
Usage :
iereplaceInnerHTML(document.getElementById('test'),'');
A New Interface for Google Local Search
Google Maps was the only specialized search engine from Google’s sidebar that didn’t have a consistent interface for search results. When you clicked on “Maps” in the sidebar, you were sent to Google Maps, a service that has a completely different interface.
Google experiments with adding a “Places” option to the menu. The main difference is that local search results are displayed inside the regular Google search interface and users no longer have to visit Google Maps
In 2005, Google merged two distinct services: Google Maps and Google Local. “Google announced the official launch of Google Local, merging the technologies behind Google Local and Google Maps. No longer in beta in the U.S. and Canada, users can visit http://maps.google.com/maps to find local search and mapping information in one place,” informed Google at that time. Google Local was renamed as Google Maps after a few months. Since then, Google launched a mobile interface for local search results, a large OneBox for local results, place pages for businesses and now a separate desktop interface for local search. Back to the roots.
Google Traffic Stats
Arbor Networks Security Blog has an interesting post about Google’s Internet traffic:
Google now represents an average 6.4% of all Internet traffic around the world. This number grows even larger (to as much as 8-12%) if I include estimates of traffic offloaded by the increasingly common Google Global Cache (GGC) deployments and error in our data due to the extremely high degree of Google edge peering with consumer networks. (…) A quick analysis of the data also shows Google now has direct peering (i.e. not transit) with more than 70% of all providers around the world (an increase of 5-10% from last year).
Arbor Networks uses data from more than 110 ISPs distributed across 17 countries. In 2007, Google only represented about 1% of all Internet traffic, but YouTube’s growth managed to dramatically increase the percentage. Today, people are watching 2 billion videos a day, 20 times more videos than 4 years ago. According to Craig Labovitz, the overall Internet traffic grows about 45% each year.
FeedBurner Tests Real Time Stats
Ever since Google acquired FeedBurner, the feed management service hasn’t improved significantly. After a painful process of migration to Google’s infrastructure and the launch of AdSense for Feeds, FeedBurner started to stagnate.
The good news is that there are still people who work on improving FeedBurner. Their latest project is a new FeedBurner interface that offers real time stats.
“The real story is what’s new under the hood: the new interface provides real time stats for clicks, views, and podcast downloads, which means you can start seeing what content is drawing traffic from feed readers, Twitter, and other syndicated sources as it happens. Additionally, if you use the FeedBurner Socialize service, and your platform uses PubSubHubbub or you ping us when you post, you can for the first time get stats on how much traffic your feed items are receiving from Twitter, as well as feed reading platforms like Google Reader in one place. Again, all within seconds of posting your content.”
The new interface is inspired by Webmaster Toosl and it doesn’t include all the features from the old FeedBurner. It’s all about stats and it’s really fast. FeedBurner’s real time stats will convince many people to visit the site more often and see how many Twitter users read their posts.
Google Suggest Venn Diagrams
Google Suggest Venn Diagram Generator is a visualization tool for popular Google searches. Enter an incomplete query, replace one of the keywords with “X”, add three options for “X” and the tool will find the overlapping suggestions.
For example, if you enter “How can I get my X to”, where “X” is: “wife”, “cat”, “dog”, you’ll find overlapping suggestions like: “How can I get my {wife, cat, dog} to lose weight”, “How can I get my {cat, dog} to gain weight”.
Hacker News readers came up with a lot of funny examples:
* Why is {America, Canada, Europe} so …
* My {friend, wife, husband} is addicted to …
* Why are {Chinese, Korean, Japanese} so …
* Why is {C, PHP, Java} so …
You should keep in mind that Google’s suggestions are determined algorithmically based on the popularity of the search terms, so you’ll find many stereotypes.
YouTube’s HTML5 Player Trial
YouTube might default to the the HTML5 player even if you haven’t enabled the experimental feature. If you’re using a supported browser (the latest versions of Chrome, Safari, Opera, IE9 beta, Firefox 4 beta), YouTube could test the new player.
“You are in a trial for HTML5 video on YouTube. Some users of supported browsers are automatically entered in to the trial. If you wish to leave the trial, use the link at the bottom. HTML5 is a new browser technology that allows us to show videos without the Flash plugin,” explains YouTube.
If you right-click on the video, you’ll see a menu that offers two options: “save video as” and “about HTML5″. You might assume that “save video as” lets you download the video, but it actually sends you to this video.
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