No More Offline Gmail in Google Chrome
Chrome 12, the upcoming version of Google’s browser which is likely to be released today, removes a useful feature: the built-in Gears plugin. While most Google services dropped support for Gears and removed offline access, Gears is still being used in Gmail. Google no longer maintains Gears, which is now legacy software, and focuses on implementing offline support using HTML5.
But why remove Gears support without implementing the features using HTML5 first? Google says that you’ll only need to wait for a few weeks or you can still older versions of Firefox, Internet Explorer and mail client such as Thunderbird or Outlook.
“The new Gmail Offline capability is targeted for delivery as a Chrome browser web app this summer. As we move the Gmail Offline capability to a Chrome web app, we will deprecate the Google Gears-based Gmail Offline. This coincides with the version 12 release of the Google Chrome browser which no longer supports Gears. As a result, Google Gears-based Gmail Offline will no longer work with the Chrome browser as of Tuesday May 24, 2011. Google Gears-based Gmail Offline will continue to work in Internet Explorer 8 and Mozilla Firefox 3.6,” explains Google.
It’s not the best thing to do after convincing users to switch to Chrome and use Web apps, but it’s just a temporary issue. If the HTML5 offline Gmail wasn’t ready to be released, removing Gears from Chrome could have been delayed.
{ via François }
Google’s Black Navigation Bar
For some reason, the navigation bar displayed at the top of Google’s “connected accounts” page is special. The bar has a black background and grey links. Hopefully, this is just a bug and not a redesigned navigation bar.
The “connected accounts” page lets you add accounts from services like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Yelp and use them to personalize search results. This way, you can include your accounts from other social sites without adding them to your Google Profile.
{ Thanks, Herin. }
More Features in Google Maps for Mobile Browsers
One of the most underrated Google mobile Web apps is Google Maps. Most smartphones and tablets have a native app for Google Maps, so a mobile Web app doesn’t seem necessary. Unfortunately, native apps aren’t always updated frequently and there are many missing features. Google does a good job at updating Google Maps for Android, but Apple’s Maps app for iOS rarely includes new Google Maps features.
That’s probably one of the reasons why the Google Maps mobile site was updated to include most of the features from the desktop site. Another reason is that Google wants to offer “a consistent Google Maps experience wherever you use it.”
The updated Google Maps mobile site has features like local business search, Google Places, driving directions, layers, My Maps, starred locations, search suggestions. If you can’t find biking directions or information about businesses in the Maps app for the iPhone, you can go to maps.google.com in your mobile browser and use these features.
Just like the mobile YouTube site, “Google Maps for mobile browsers is platform independent – you will always get a consistent experience and the latest features without needing to install any updates, no matter what phone you use.”
I’ve tried the updated mobile interface on an iPhone 3GS, a Nexus One and an iPad 2. While all the new features are great, the site is still too slow and unresponsive to be useful. Until Google solves performance issues and mobile browsers become more powerful, people will still use the native app.
How Google Docs Killed GDrive
“In The Plex“, Steven Levy’s recently launched book about Google, has an interesting story about GDrive, an online storage service developed by Google. People first found about GDrive from a leaked Google document, back in 2006. GDrive (or Platypus) turned out to be a service used by Google employees that offered many impressive features: syncing files, viewing files on the Web, shared spaces for collaborating on a document, offline access, local IO speeds. But Google wanted to launch GDrive for everyone.
At the time [2008], Google was about to launch a project it had been developing for more than a year, a free cloud-based storage service called GDrive. But Sundar [Pichai] had concluded that it was an artifact of the style of computing that Google was about to usher out the door. He went to Bradley Horowitz, the executive in charge of the project, and said, “I don’t think we need GDrive anymore.” Horowitz asked why not. “Files are so 1990,” said Pichai. “I don’t think we need files anymore.”
Horowitz was stunned. “Not need files anymore?”
“Think about it,” said Pichai. “You just want to get information into the cloud. When people use our Google Docs, there are no more files. You just start editing in the cloud, and there’s never a file.”
When Pichai first proposed this concept to Google’s top executives at a GPS—no files!—the reaction was, he says, “skeptical.” [Linus] Upson had another characterization: “It was a withering assault.” But eventually they won people over by a logical argument—that it could be done, that it was the cloudlike thing to do, that it was the Google thing to do. That was the end of GDrive: shuttered as a relic of antiquated thinking even before Google released it. The engineers working on it went to the Chrome team.
In 2009, Google Docs started to store PDF files and one year later you could store any type of file in Google Docs. The service still doesn’t offer a way to sync files. Even if GDrive was never released, Google Docs inherits most of its features. The main difference is that you no longer have to worry about file formats because you can open and edit documents in Google Docs.
{ Thanks, Kristian. }
Google Business Profiles?
The source code of the Google Profiles page includes a broken link that has a revealing anchor text: “business profiles”. The link sends you to a page that doesn’t exist: http://www.google.com/_/managepages, but this feature could add Google Profiles to Google Apps and allow users to create multiple profile pages.
Another interesting thing is that Google has a new subdomain: https://plusone.google.com, which redirects to Google Profiles. There’s already a Web page about the +1 button, so it’s not clear why Google has a new address for Google +1. Maybe profiles will be a feature of Google +1.
{ Thanks, Florian. }
Playlists in YouTube’s Drop Down Menu
YouTube’s drop down menu at the top of the page now includes a list of all your playlists and makes it easier to access your favorite videos, your liked videos and the videos added to the “Watch later” playlist.
“You will now see a different set up when you click on your username in the upper right hand corner of any page. In addition to showing the same links to access your Account, My Videos, etc. you will be able to click on thumbnails to automatically load your playlists, Liked, Favorites, and Watch Later lists. The songs in your playlists will be accessible in the strip across the bottom of your screen — so you can easily navigate to different videos in the playlist you are watching,” explained a Google employee.
Another way to access your playlists is to expand the small bar displayed at the bottom of the page, click “Options” and select “Load a different playlist”.
{ Thanks, Andrew. }
Now Google’s Define Operator, No Longer Useful
Last month, Google added a new search options in the sidebar: dictionary. It’s a new interface for Google Dictionary that combines definitions from a reputable dictionary with definitions from the Web, usage examples and other useful information.
At the same time, some users reported that Google’s define: operator no longer works. The operator was useful to find definitions obtained from Web pages, so you could type [define:iffy] and find a list of definitions. Now the operator is no longer broken, but it only shows the definition from Google Dictionary and links to the dictionary page. You could type [define iffy] and get similar results.
Maybe Google should send users to the dictionary page when they use the define: operator. It’s an advanced feature that’s not used by many people, but it’s very useful.
Here’s how it looked:
{ Thanks, Henry. }
More Google News Settings
Barry Schwartz spotted some new options that let you personalize Google News. If you go to the Google News settings page, you can tweak Google News to show fewer press releases, more blog posts or even hide all the blog posts and press releases. “The neat part of the control of how you see blog and press release results is that there is a lever. You can pick from None to Fewer to Normal to More. Everyone by default is set to normal,” says Barry Schwartz.
You can also disable the automatic refresh of the Google News homepage. By default, Google reloads the page every 15 minutes.
I tried to hide all the blog posts and press releases, but this only worked for search results. Google News sections still included blog posts and press releases:
New Interface for Google News: No Clusters, No Clutter
Google News has a redesigned interface that tries to remove the visual clutter and make multimedia content more discoverable. All Google News clusters are collapsed by default, except for the top news story. Clusters include more links, a special section for images and videos, but you have to manually expand them.
“The newly expandable stories on Google News in the U.S., released today, give you greater story diversity with less clutter. Now you can easily see more content, see less of what you don’t use and have a more streamlined experience,” explains Google.
By default, Google uses the single column view, but you can switch to the two column view with the added benefit of going back to the old interface. Here’s the new interface:
… and the classic interface:
The redesigned UI shows a single news article instead of a group of related articles. Although the cluster is still available, it’s strange to see that Google hides one of the main features of Google News: grouping articles about the same topic. As Krishna Bharat, the founder of Google News, has recently said, the service “groups news articles by story, thus providing visual structure and giving users access to diverse perspectives from around the world in one place”.
Power users can try Google’s keyboard shortcuts (j/k for navigating to the next/previous story, o/u for expanding/collapsing a story), but most users will rarely expand stories and only click the main news article.
New Google Tasks API
Just when you thought that Google Tasks was abandoned, Google releases an API for Google Tasks. “The Google Tasks API provides developers with a powerful set of API endpoints for searching, reading, and updating Google Tasks content and metadata.” Developers will be able to create applications for mobile devices, software that integrates Google Tasks with Outlook and other apps using an official API and a proper authentication mechanism.
Google Tasks has a lot to improve before becoming as powerful as Remember the Milk and it’s surprising that the missing features aren’t added faster. In January, Google listed some of the most common feature requests: repeating tasks, notifications, task sharing, tasks API, synchronization, visual distinction for overdue tasks. The Tasks API is the first feature that’s now available.
{ via Kristian. }
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