Attendees now in Google Calendar
Domains whose admins have enabled the ‘enable pre-release features’ checkbox in the Control Panel The following new features are now available in Google Calendar for these domains: Optional attendees: When adding invitees to an event, you now have the ability to communicate the importance of a meeting for each attendee. New event page for some domains: The recently released new event page is now also available to domains that have enabled our Google Calendar Connectors API which shows data from other services. This page was previously unavailable to these domains. Domains with ‘enable pre-release features’ checkbox disabled For these domains, the following features are intended for release on December 7: – Optional attendees. – New event page for domains that have enabled in Google Calendar Connectors API.
A curious guide to browsers and the web
Twenty years ago this month, Tim Berners-Lee published his proposal for the World Wide Web. Today, the web is an explosion of pages and apps teeming with videos, photos and interactive content. These powerful new web experiences—such as “The Wilderness Downtown,” our HTML5 collaboration with the band Arcade Fire—are possible thanks to cutting-edge web technologies that bring all this content to life in the modern browser.
But how do browsers and the web actually work? What is HTML5—or HTML, for that matter? What do terms like “cookies” or “cloud computing” even mean? More practically, how can we keep ourselves safe from security threats like viruses when we’re online?
To help answer these questions, we collaborated with the wonderful illustrator Christoph Niemann to publish an online guidebook called “20 Things I Learned about Browsers and the Web.” This handy guide is for those of us who’d like to better understand the technologies we use every day.
“20 Things” is written by the Chrome team, and continues our tradition of finding new ways to help explain complex but fascinating ideas about technology. Many of the examples used to illustrate the features of the browser refer back to Chrome.
We built “20 Things” in HTML5 so that we could incorporate features that hearken back to what we love about books—feeling the heft of a book’s cover, flipping a page or even reading under the covers with a flashlight. In fact, once you’ve loaded “20 Things” in the browser, you can disconnect your laptop and continue reading, since this guidebook works offline. As such, this illustrated guidebook is best experienced in Chrome or any up-to-date, HTML5-compliant modern browser.
For things you’ve always wanted to know about the web and browsers but may have been afraid to ask, read on at www.20thingsilearned.com (or, you can use the handy shortened URL at goo.gl/20things). If you find “20 Things” informative, don’t forget to share it with your friends and family!
Posted by Min Li Chan, Product Marketing Manager, Google Chrome
Ten times more applications for Google Apps customers
As customers begin to recognize large productivity gains with Gmail, Google Docs and the rest of Google Apps, they frequently ask when they’ll be able to use services like Google Voice, Reader, Blogger and AdWords with their Google Apps accounts. We’ve steadily added new functionality to Google Apps and recently added support for third-party apps, but we’re thrilled to swing the floodgates of new functionality wide open now. Starting today, customers worldwide can access a full spectrum of services from Google—including more than 60 productivity-boosting applications that extend far beyond any traditional software suite.
Coupled with the ability for administrators to provide different sets of applications to different groups of users, the possibilities for empowering workers in new ways are remarkable. For example, you could equip your marketing team with Picasa Web Albums so they can collect and share photos from customer appreciation events, and let that team publish your company’s blog with Blogger. Services like iGoogle and Alerts, on the other hand, may be broadly useful, and could be enabled for your whole organization.
Existing customers can transition at their own pace over the next couple months to the new infrastructure supporting these applications from the administrative control panel. New customers will automatically have the new infrastructure. The additional services are not covered by the Google Apps SLA or telephone support, but we’ll be watching for feedback how we can make these new applications even more useful.
In tandem with this big improvement, we’re also simplifying the names of the versions of Google Apps. Here’s how we now refer to our line-up:
§ Google Apps is our free service geared towards families, entrepreneurs and other groups up to 50 users.
§ Google Apps for Business offers 25GB of email storage per user, a 99.9% uptime guarantee, data migration capabilities, advanced management tools, telephone support, added security features and more, all for $50 per user per year.
§ Google Apps for Government is FISMA certified and designed with local, state and federal agencies in mind.
§ Google Apps for Education offers many benefits of Google Apps for Business, but at no cost to schools, universities and qualifying non-profits.
The team has worked hard to unlock all of this new functionality for our customers, and we think many of these new applications will become indispensable within your organization. To help get you started, each day the Google Enterprise Blog will profile how your organization could put a different application to use. The first post tomorrow will focus on Google Reader, so visit the Enterprise Blog to follow the series.
Posted by Derek Parham, Lead Software Engineer, Google Apps
Mobile browser editing, editing on the iPad, and more new features now in Google Docs
The following new features are now available in Google Docs:
Mobile editing: Log in to your Google Docs on a browser on a supported device, and select the document you want to edit. Then, when you’re viewing it, press the ‘Edit’ button to switch to the mobile editor. If you use an Android device with voice input, you can also use this to add text to your document.
Text replacements: We have added the ability to substitute text automatically and being able to manage the replacements.
LaTeX shortcuts in equations: LaTeX is a document markup language that’s often used by academics to quickly type out complex formulas. In Google Docs, when you’re inside an equation you can type ‘\sqrt’ followed by a space or a parenthesis to automatically convert the text into a square root sign √. Other examples of useful shortcuts are ‘\frac’ for a fraction and shorthands like ‘\epsilon’ for Greek symbols. Full list of equation shortcuts here.
Mobile editing: Over the next few days, we’re rolling this out to English-language users around the world on Android with Froyo (version 2.2) and on iOS devices (version 3.0+) including the iPad. We’ll be adding support for other languages soon.
Text replacements: You can right click on a misspelled word, go down to the ‘AutoCorrect’ option, and choose a way of automatically fixing this spelling mistake in the future.
Google Maps Will Now No Longer Support Mapplets
Three years ago, Google introduced mapplets, a special flavor of gadgets that added new features to Google Maps. “Mapplets are Google Gadgets that are made especially so that they can be loaded by a user on maps.google.com, and have access to the main shared map. Users can load multiple Mapplets simultaneously for a quick and easy way to mashup content from multiple sources.”
In May, Google announced the deprecation of mapplets, but only developers cared about that. Users could still go to the “My Maps” section from Google Maps and add a mapplet from the directory. Unfortunately, Google Geo Developers Blog informs us that the directory will be closed and all the links to mapplets will be removed.
As part of the deprecation plan for Mapplets we will shortly be switching from rendering Mapplets within Google Maps, to rendering them on a dedicated Mapplets page. (…) Bookmarks for existing Mapplets will continue to work. They will be automatically redirected to the new Mapplets page for the relevant Mapplet. (…) However because the Mapplets page is not part of the Google Maps application, Mapplets will no longer have access to Google Maps user profiles. (…) The above changes will be made on or shortly after Wednesday December 8th 2010.
Google Maps Directory includes 1550 mapplets that show crime information, weather data, information about population density, earthquakes, airports, hotels, golf courses and much more.
If you’ve added one or more mapplets to the “My Maps” section from Google Maps and you want to use them even after the links are removed, find them in the Google Maps Directory, convert their URLs and bookmark them. For example, replace:
http://maps.google.com/gadgets/directory?synd=mpl&url=http://www.google.com/mapfiles/mapplets/distance/distance.xml
with:
http://maps.google.com/maps/mapplets?moduleurl=http://www.google.com/mapfiles/mapplets/distance/distance.xml
Google Chrome and Multiple Profiles
Google Chrome has always supported multiple profiles, but you had to use a command-line flag (–user-data-dir=”c:\path\to\the\profile”) to associate a profile with a folder where the browser will save its state.
At some point, Google added an option that allowed you to open a new window and use a separate profile, but it was quickly removed. According to a design document from Chromium’s site, this feature be available again.
“The multiple profiles feature will allow the user to associate a profile with a specific set of browser windows, rather than with an entire running instance of Chrome. Allowing different windows to run as different Chrome identities means that a user can have different open windows associated with different Google accounts, and correspondingly different sets of preferences, apps, bookmarks, and so on — all those elements which are bound to a specific user’s identity.”
Users will be able to associate a profile with a Google account and log in at the browser level. This is a great feature for Chrome OS, but it will also work in Google Chrome.
Google will associate each Chrome window with an identity. “On Windows (and Linux), this is accomplished with a colored and labeled menu-enabled tag at the top of the browser frame, next to the window controls. On Mac OS X, the window frame is too small to accommodate a tag; instead, we add an item to the menu bar, with a special colored background, in the same way the Windows tab is specially colored.”
{ spotted by François and David.}
Photovisi.com collages online
Filed under: Featured, TheUnical Promotions, TheUnical Technologies Partners
At Photovisi.com we they developed a free and easy way for people to make photo collages online. They offer several creative templates and options, and they think readers of TheUnical would be interested in trying it out.
The process is easy. First, the visitor chooses one of the many templates. Next, they add their own photos to make it unique, with options to edit images however they like. Finally, once the collage is done, it can be downloaded and shared with the world.
Gmail’s Web Clips, Now With More Ads
I’ve never been a fan of Gmail’s Web Clips, but I didn’t disable this feature because it helped me keep up with news from popular sites without subscribing to them in Google Reader. The most annoying thing about Web Clips is that it mixes news headlines with contextual ads, but that still didn’t make me disable this feature.
Gmail has recently started to only show ads in the Web Clips box if you don’t click on the navigation arrows. If you only read your messages and don’t interact with the Web Clips box, Gmail no longer shows headlines. Some of the ads are useful, but showing ads was just a way to monetize the box, not the main purpose of this feature.
Gmail’s help center article explains that “Web Clips show you news headlines, blog posts, RSS and Atom feeds, and relevant sponsored links, right at the top of your inbox. Each clip displays the source from which it was received, how long ago the clip was published, and a link to access the entire story or page containing the clip. From your inbox, you can scroll through clips you’ve already seen by clicking the left arrow or see new clips by clicking the right arrow.”
You can disable Web Clips from the settings page, but it’s too bad that the feature is a lot less useful.
7 Google Search Annoyances
Here are some of the most annoying Google Search bugs I’ve found recently:
1. Google’s keyboard shortcuts are useful if you want to select a search result, but Google doesn’t remember the page you selected when you go back to the search results page.
2. To add insult to injury, Google doesn’t scroll to the search result you’ve clicked on after visiting the page and returning to the Google SERP.
3. Let’s say that a search result snippet includes a useful information and you want to copy it. If you double click on a word from the snippet, you’ll trigger Google’s instant previews.
4. If your query includes quotes, Google’s suggestions aren’t useful because they ignore your quotes.
5. Google shows too many results from a single domain. If your query includes keywords associated with a site, Google may show up to 7 results from a domain. Google also lets you see other results from the same domain, but there are many duplicates.
6. If you restrict the results to visited pages and perform the same search using Google Web History, you’ll get different results.
7. Sometimes personalization goes too far and replaces the top search result for a navigational query.
Did you find other annoyances?
Google’s Thanksgiving Doodle
Google’s doodles were special because they linked to search results pages, instead of linking to handpicked pages. Some doodles promoted Google services, so they sent users to special landing pages, but all the other doodles linked to regular results pages. That’s not the case for Google’s Thanksgiving doodle, which promotes a Google page with Thanksgiving recipes from Ina Garten.
“This Thanksgiving holiday, we are grateful for many things: family, friends, and of course, food. Just in time for the big day, beloved cookbook author and TV chef Ina Garten offers everyone six simple yet delicious recipes to make one of the year’s biggest dinner parties as easy as, well, pumpkin pie. Happy Thanksgiving, and Happy Cooking!”
Barry Schwartz notes that “it is uncommon for Google to offer pre-holiday logos” and that “the logo promotes a person without that person celebrating a birthday or anniversary”.
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