Google updates Gmail for iPad, Android and iPhone

Google has adjusted the look of its email service, Gmail, for users who access their accounts via gmail.com on Android, iPhone and iPad devices.

The minor changes alter how senders are added to messages, and do not affect the native Gmail apps that most users of Android phones send email through.

The move builds on Google's decision to rewrite the code on which the web app is based so that it is easier to adjust in future.

This stage of enhancements allows users to simply type a fellow Gmail adopter's username and the programme will now automatically fill in the rest of the address. Other changes reveals the list of recipients of a message more completely, so that individual addresses are easier to remove even if they are towards the beginning of a long list. Contacts that have been entered into a Gmail field are now also clickable boxes, allowing users to inspect their details more closely.

A list of top contacts has also been added, and the app now fills the entire screen. These features are likely to be particularly relevant to iPad users, who have significantly larger screens at their disposal.

The moves mean that the official Google Mail app now has considerably fewer features than the web-based version. Google has previously said that a new release .

Google Apps updates: Enough to compete with Office 2010?

As with most effects in tech, that depends. As Sam Diaz pointed out in his coverage of the updates from the Atmosphere event Monday, “Google has been aggressively targeting its cloud-based Google Apps at the enterprise, hosting events like these to spread the word on the strength of the suite.” So has Google made its case?

In many ways, the polish and enhancements represented by these updates are just enough to provide the average user with everything they need: more reasonable control of layout, improved formula handling, better previews, and improved fidelity. The very fact that Docs (when enabled as shown in the image below) has a ruler with tab stops, margins, and indents will adequately Microsoft-ize the interface for a lot of users.

Major Update for Google Docs

Google Docs has been continuously updated since 2006, Writely and Google Spreadsheets have merged, but adding new features became increasingly difficult. Now that browsers are much better than they were four years ago and cutting-edge apps like Google Wave can run in a browser, it was time for a new beginning.

"We decided to rebuild the underlying infrastructure of Docs to give us greater flexibility, improved performance and a better platform for developing new features quickly. Today, we're pleased to announce preview versions of the new Google document and spreadsheet editors and a new standalone drawings editor, all built with an even greater focus on speed and collaboration," says Jonathan Rochelle.

The new versions of the Google Docs will be rolled out in the coming days and you'll be able to try them when you see a message at the top of the page: "New version".

Besides using a new infrastructure, the document editor and the spreadsheet editor will add many new features. The document editor has real-time editing, sidebar chat, a new commenting system, better formatting and an improved importing feature. The spreadsheet editor brings back auto-complete, adds a formula bar for editing cells and you can now drag and drop columns.

There's also an application for creating drawing collaboratively: Google Drawings. "The new standalone drawings editor lets you collaborate in real time on flow charts, designs, diagrams and other fun or business graphics. Copy these drawings into documents, spreadsheets and presentations using the web clipboard, or share and publish drawings just like other Google Docs."

Google Updates Its Image Search for Android 2.1 and iPhone 3.0+

Today google announced on its blog that they have upgraded the mobile Image Search on Android 2.1 and iPhone OS 3.0+ devices.

It’s a typically Google update, in that the revamp will provide more speed and less clutter — two things that are always welcome.

There will now be more thumbnails per screen, and a quick swipe to the left or right will have you move between pages of results.

After clicking on a thumbnail, the images will be presented fullscreen on a plain black background (try saying that 6 times quickly), with the text disappearing after a few moments.

All in all, it’s a nice, clean, fast upgrade: a win in my books.

Google Updates Platform Version Stats Yet Again, 2.1 Finally In The Lead

Once another time Google has updated their platform version chart, and this time OS Version 2.1 has something to celebrate.

If you haven’t been keeping track, Google has a chart that illustrates the breakdown of Android versions on devices currently in the wild. This is done primarily so developers will know what version to develop for, but has also been used as ammunition for Android’s detractors who like to bring up fragmentation as one of Android’s biggest flaws.

Google API Update Pushes Real-Time Feeds to Browser

Google plans to start a new revision of its Feed API this week at Google I/O, which will allow real-time feed updates to be pushed to Web browsers.

Google confirmed the update to ReadWriteWeb, who discovered a YouTube unlisted video describing the new updates.

Basically, the update is simple, yet powerful. Normally, RSS and other feed readers periodically ping the feed APIs for updates. When the feeds are displayed on a Web page, they're dynamically generated, but the feed (at least in the browser) remains static until the API calls the feed again.

Google's new Feed API allows the feeds to push updates to the browsers, with minimal code revisions (as described in the video).

Google confirmed to RWW that the new API will be officially launched this week at the Google I/O conference, which begins Wednesday in San Francisco. At that time, the http://code.google.com/apis/feed/push API link will also go live.

This week in search 5/14/10

This is one of a regular series of posts on search experience updates. Look for the label This week in search and subscribe to the series. - Ed. This week, we announced a number of new search enhancements.

Google Translate learns and speaks new languages

This week, we launched 5 new "alpha" languages on Google Translate — Armenian, Azerbaijani, Basque, Georgian and Urdu. We also extended our support for spoken translations to 29 more languages. With these launches, you can now translate text, webpages and documents between 57 languages, and hear translations spoken in 36 languages. For many search queries where you want to translate a word or a phrase, we offer a translation powered by Google Translate directly in our search results. We also recently added romanization to this feature — when translating to or from a foreign language, you can now see the translation written phonetically in roman characters

Twenty more languages in Google search get virtual keyboard

Recently, we announced that we've integrated virtual keyboards into Google Search homepages in 35 languages. Virtual keyboard lets you type directly in your local language script in an easy and consistent manner, no matter where you are or what computer you’re using. Feedback is always important to us, and we were excited to get more than three thousand votes for other languages you felt the keyboard should be launched in. Today, we're happy to announce that we are adding Virtual Keyboard to another 20 languages — making it now available in 55 languages.

For those of you who speak a language we don't yet support, we're hard at work adding the virtual keyboard into more languages listed in Google Language Tool page. You can also vote for the languages you'd like us to add next. We always appreciate your feedback as we continue our efforts to help you input text in your desired languages as easily as possible.

Example languages we added this week:

* Amharic * Bengali * Danish * Estonian * Gujarati * Kannada * Lithuanian * Latvian * Maltese * Marathi * Nepali * Norwegian * Oriya * Punjabi * Brazilian Portuguese * Romanian * Sanskrit * Tamil * Telugu * Tigrinya

Finding short answers This week, we introduced a new feature that brings the technology of Google Squared right to your search results. Squared makes it easier to highlight answers for fact-based queries, so you can get more accurate answers, faster. Now, you'll see these answers right at the top of your search results, brought to you from across the web. And, we've also made sure this feature works great on mobile browsers.

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Rich snippets go international

As part of our efforts to make search results more useful than our users around the world, we’re announcing the international availability of rich snippets. If you’ve been following our blog posts, you already know that rich snippets let users see additional facts and data from your site in search results.

For example, we recently launched rich snippets for recipes which, for certain sites, lets users see quick recipe facts as part of the snippet and makes it easier to determine if the page has what they are looking for

We’ve had a lot of questions on our blogs and forums about international support for rich snippets - and we know that many of you have already started marking up your content - so today’s announcement is very exciting for us.

In addition to adding support for rich snippets in any language, we have published documentation on how to mark up your sites for rich snippets in the following languages: simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese, Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish. (You can change the Help language by scrolling to the bottom of the help page and selecting the language you want from the drop-down menu.)

We encourage you to read the documentation to take an advantage of the different types of rich snippets currently supported: people profiles, reviews, videos, events and recipes. You can also use our testing tool (in English only, but useful to test markup in any language) and start validating your markup to make sure results show as you would expect.

Finally and as you’ve probably heard by now (several times), we’re taking a gradual approach to surface rich snippets. This means that marking up your site doesn’t guarantee that we’ll show rich snippets for your pages. We’re doing this to ensure a good experience for our users; but rest assured we’re working hard to expand coverage and include more web pages

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Google Updates, News and Downloads

Google Wave

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Yahoo Updates Desktop Search Marketing Tool

During SMX West last week, Yahoo announced an update to its Yahoo Search Marketing Desktop tool for managing PPC campaigns. If you weren’t at the show to see it yourself, this Yahoo blog post details some of the upgrades that are now available:

• Bulk editing: Easily makes mass changes to settings such as status, match types and budgets within an intuitive interface; increase or decrease multiple keyword bids; and to export your view of keywords, ads, ad groups and campaigns into Excel for use however you wish.
  
• Campaign transfer: Import your third-party campaign data in one easy step.
  
• Keyword research: Use our keyword suggestion engine to find and add new, relevant keywords to your campaigns; get URL-based keyword suggestions to increase your keyword relevance and improve your performance; that export the keyword suggestions into Excel to share this information or to add tracking URLs.
  
• Find, replace and search: Find and replace text in ads, keywords, ad groups and campaigns;and in search for specific campaigns, ad groups, ads, or keywords in your account; or search for information in any of the account tabs.
  
• Account performance statistics: Retrieve status and statistics for your account’s impressions, clicks, CTR, cost, ad quality scores and other information.

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MSN preview updates My Apps

Looks like the msn.com preview has been updated, or at least with “my apps” portion of the home page. Before, there were three tabs, for Facebook, Twitter, and Windows Live, and with a separate Hotmail section, but now two new apps have been added: Weather and Bing Maps:

Clicking on each of the apps opens a live fly-out window, in this case each showing a live Bing Maps that you can interact with, including traffic information, but My Apps shows updated information for each of the apps even before opening them up.

This is a nice improvement over the first attempt at My Apps, although interestingly the Windows Live section has apparently been dropped. Here’s a screenshot from all our original post on the new (US version)

The new page already has a Bing Maps tab (although without the nice live map in the flyout) and a Weather tab, so we’re not sure why they need to be on the home page twice, but this preview is obviously still a work in progress

Google updates Google Goggles app with language translation

Google has updated their Google Goggles application, adding with a language translator tool if you're afraid of ordering something scary on the menu that you can't understand.

Google has updated their Google Goggles application to version 1.1, adding with a language translator tool if you’re afraid of ordering something scary on the menu that you can’t understand.

To take advantage of these new-found language skills, the user must point the camera with the phone towards the text, snap the photo and hope that Google Goggles can read it.

Initially, supported languages are English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish. It looks like Google is trying to get all of the Latin-based languages out of the way first, but Chinese, Hindi and Arabic support should be available very soon.

Google Goggles v1.1 is supported by devices using Android 1.6 and higher, and owners can head to the Android Market for the download or scan the bar code from the Google Mobile’s official blog.

Yahoo Updates Toolbar and Bookmarks

Yahoo is releasing a new version of its toolbar with a powerful new bookmarking feature that integrates seamlessly with Yahoo web search, and features a "radical" new user interface.

The new Yahoo toolbar has an improved search function that uses an auto-complete feature to make suggestions as you type. Yahoo has also made it easier to create your own custom buttons on the toolbar. If you want to create a button that takes you to a particular site, enter its URL and Yahoo will automatically search for the site's favicon logo and use it for the button, if one is available.

The new toolbar goes beyond simply saving the title and URL of a web page, which is what most bookmarking tools do. Instead, the new Yahoo bookmarks service stores a thumbnail image of a page, and optionally save the full text of a web page.

Adding a thumbnail image to a bookmark helps recall—it's easier for people to remember an image of a page than it is to recall what a page is about from a simple title and URL, in most cases.

Yahoo has also made it easier to organize your bookmarks with this new version. "If you have a huge list of bookmarks, the new version of Yahoo bookmarks allows you to organize those in a very convenient fashion," said Tomi Poutanen, Yahoo's director of product management for social search.

The bookmarking feature uses folders as an organizing scheme. You can save a bookmarked page directly into an existing folder, or create a new one on the fly as you're saving a bookmark. You can also manage your bookmarks later and create as many new folders as you like.

You can also add tags to your bookmarks, again either when you initially save one or later. If you check the "use tags" box as you're saving a bookmark, Yahoo will suggest tags to associate with a page, but I found these suggestions ranged from unhelpful to downright worthless as meaningful tags for most of the pages I bookmarked.

Alternately, you can save pages without worrying about categorization or tagging. By default, bookmarks not saved into a folder are placed in an "uncategorized" folder. To organize bookmarks, you can simply drag the thumbnail image of a page into a folder, or mark selected pages and move them all with a single command. There are also folders that display recently saved bookmarks and frequently used bookmarks.

You can edit bookmarks, adding additional information such as tags, a description, or comment.

Google Chrome beta update integrates Flash Player plug-in

Google has announced the availability of version 5.0.375.29 of Chrome for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, the latest betas of its WebKit-based browser in each platform. According to the developers, the latest Chrome betas incorporate the "most significant speed and the performance increases to date" over the previous beta channel releases and includes a number of new features.

Based on its own V8 and SunSpider JavaScript engine benchmarks, Google says that the 5.0.375.29 betas have improved by up to 30% and 35%, adding that they are more than upto two or three times faster than the very first Chrome beta. New HTML5 features added to the betas includes support for geolocation APIs, application caching, web sockets and file drag-and-drop capabilities.

Bookmark sync, which allows users – via their Google Account – to synchronise their bookmarks across all of their computers, can now also sync browser preferences, such as themes, homepage and start-up settings. Other changes include the ability to install and to use extensions while in incognito mode and initial integration of the Adobe Flash Player plug-in for Chrome. The developers note that, for security and stability reasons, the Flash Player plug-in will automatically be kept up to date with the latest security and feature updates via Chrome's auto-update mechanism.

As with all the development releases, used in production environments and on mission critical systems is not advised. Users testing the release are encouraged to provide feedback and report any bugs that they encounter. All beta users are advised to upgrade to the latest release.

More details about the release can be found in the release notes and announcement blog post on the Google Chrome Blog. Chrome 5.0.375.29 is available to download for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

5 Best Looking Super Heroes Themes For Google Chrome

We at ChromePlugins.org always try to get some these things which are not easily known about the Google Chrome browser. As you might be aware that there are quite a few themes that are available which can be dowloaded from the Official Google Chrome Themes Gallery, but there are also a lot more themes (and better looking themes) outside the official gallery as well.

We are listing some of the best super heroes based themes for the Chrome browser. Many of these themes were actually requested by users here.

Night Spidey – Spider Man Theme

Iron Man Theme

Superman Returns Theme

Wolverine X-Men Theme

Hulk – Incredible Chrome Theme

Google Chrome update: Speed, performance and a deeper push into browser computing

A new beta version of the Google Chrome browser released today is boasting some pretty impressive speed boosts, with improvements of 30 percent and 35 percent on the V8 and Sun Spider benchmarks over the previous version. In a post on the Google Chrome blog, the company said Chrome’s performance has improved by as much as 213 percent and 305 percent on the two benchmarks since the browser’s first beta.

But it’s not just the speed and performance that the company is bragging about. The new betas - which are available to download for PC, Mac and Linux - includes new feature, such as browser settings synchronization that allows users to “sign-in” and keep their themes, homepage and start up preferences in sync with other computers.

The sync feature, though sort of hidden in the browser’s drop-down menus, is an important feature because it takes us - and Google - one step closer towards a browser-based computing experience, such as the one that Google is building with its Chrome OS. In addition, Chrome extensions can now be installed and used in the browser’s incognito mode.

It also includes “the goodness of some new HTML5 features, namely Geolocation APIs, App Cache, web sockets, and file drag-and-drop capabilities.” Finally, the browser also has support for Adobe’s Flash Player plug-in. Google explains:

This is the first Chrome beta that features initial integration of the Adobe Flash Player plug-in with Chrome, so that you can browse a rich, dynamic web with added security and stability — you’ll automatically receive security and feature updates for Flash Player with Chrome’s auto-update mechanism.

Google provides more useful ‘apps’

BY NOW, most know that Google is about far more than search.

Gmail, Google maps, and Blogger are used widely. But those “applications” are just a hint of what this Internet behemoth offers under the hood of its famous search engine. Here’s a rundown of some useful Google gems that you may not know about – but probably should:

l Mobile Smart phone's are what’s hot in technology today, and that fact isn’t lost on Google.

The company has exported some of its best applications to the mobile market. It’s just that finding them isn’t always easy, and many people still use a Smart phone, often clunky, built- in browser to access the web and perform searches.

Google Mobile changes that. Just point your phone’s browser to http://m.google.com, and download the Google Mobile “applications”. Once installed, this handy Smart phone “applications” works with the speed of most other Smart phone applications and the simplicity that Google is known for.

With Mobile, you can conduct speedy web searches either by typing or by voice, and you can also use its handy links above the search box to access your Gmail, maps, news, and reader “applications” as well. If you use Google on your notebook or PC, it’s likely that Mobile will quickly become a frequently used “applications” on your Smart phone as well.

Google acquires Toronto startup

Google is the proud new owner of a Canadian 3D touch screen desktop program.

The technology giant acquired Bump Top, a Toronto-based start up that created a touch screen desktop program that makes icons function more like real-world objects.

For example, you can move your folders and icons around your screen with your fingers, scrunch folders into piles, flick through files like you would a photo album, or even crop pictures by drawing lines through them with your fingertips. It works on Mac OS or Windows 7 with a touch screen-enabled monitor.

Bump Top was operating out of Toronto-based venture capital firm Extreme VP, and the software was developed at the University of Toronto's Dynamic Graphics Project.

"We're excited to announce that we've been acquired by Google!," reads a post on Bump Top.com, signed The Bumps. "Thanks again for all your support over the years. Despite our change in strategy, we remain as passionate as ever about helping shape the future of computing!" That means the program will no longer be available for purchase, and no further updates are planned. However, it's available to download for free for the rest of the week.

Neither company has released details of the deal, but the Globe and Mail estimates Google purchased Bump Top for between $30-45 million.

Google updates Gmail for iPad, Android and iPhone

Gmail is now easier to access on a mobile device. The minor changes alter how senders are added to messages, and do not affect the native Gmail apps that most users of Android phones send email through. The move builds on Google's decision to rewrite the code on which the web application is based so that it is easier to adjust in future. This stage of enhancements allows users to simply type a fellow Gmail adopter's user name and the programmer will now automatically fill in the rest of the address. Other changes reveals the list of recipients of a message more completely, so that individual addresses are easier to remove even if they are towards the beginning of a long list.

Contacts that have been entered into a Gmail field are now also click able boxes, allowing users to inspect their details more closely. A list of top contacts has also been added, and the app now fills the entire screen. These features are likely to be particularly relevant to IPad users, who have significantly larger screens at their disposal. The moves mean that the official Google Mail app now has considerably fewer features than the web-based version. Google has previously said that a new release, however, is in production.

Google gives Adwords more traffic data with Keyword tool update

Recent updates by Google to the Keyword Tool should mean that choosing which keywords to run in an Ad Words PPC campaign should be simpler than before.

Announced on the Inside Ad Words blog this Thursday by crew member Katrina Kermit, the newly updated Keyword tool claims to offer a “new, streamlined way for you to identify additional keywords and add them to your account.”

The new Keyword Tool combines two other tools previously available, the “search based keyword tool” as well as the old Keyword Tool. Formerly the “search based” tool provided insights based on search traffic relevant to a sites landing page, whilst the old Keyword Tool only generated possible keywords based on the content of the URL, words or phrases entered into it.

Now the updated tool allows users to search by words, phrases, and websites or in some cases, categories to see both types of information in a central location. Currently in the beta launch phase, Google says that it will roll it out over the next few months. Although users will still be able to switch back and forth during this transition period, the company says that the new tool will provide “more relevant traffic estimates”.

Google buys Canadian tech startup

Google Inc. (GOOG-Q512.95-17.65-3.33%) has snatched one of Canada's hottest tech start ups.

The search engine company has acquired Bump Top, a Toronto-based firm specializing in software that turns a computer desktop into a 3D environment. The parties involved in the sale did not disclose the purchase price, but it is believed to be between $30-million and $45-million.

Bump Top – a start up that operated out of Extreme VP, a Toronto-based venture capital firm – creates software designed for touch screens, especially next-generation screens that allow a user to operate the device using more than one finger at once. For example, Bump Top's software lets users drag items on their desktop into piles, rotate photos and perform other operations using their fingers.

The Bump Top purchase highlights Google's effort to update many of its services for the mobile market. Products such as Apple's i Phone and i Pad have made touch screens, rather than keyboards, the norm for operating many hand held devices, and most of the smart phones powered by Google's Android operating system rely primarily on touch screens.

Google Opens Cheque Books- Buys Out Bump Technologies’ 3D Software

After the slump, IT giant has finally kick started its acquisition spree by buying out Bump Technologies.

Reports claim that Google has bought the Canadian venture, Bump Technologies for an undisclosed amount. Bump Technologies boasts of Bump Top software that gives a 3D effect to the desktops. The software is compatible with both Windows and Mac systems.

The founders of the software are confident that the usage of this software would completely redefine that way people use their desktops.

The phenomenal Bump Top software makes the desktops 'come alive'. It has features that allow the users to stack up files in heap. To add to the list the software enables its users to attach notes and photos on the walls.

Bump Top's Windows edition launched in October allows users to zoom in on the desktop. It has finger swiping features as well that make the desktop experience extremely hi-tech.

Following the acquisition, updates of the software are not available.

Google tightens cloud security for Apps users

Google has released a new tool that allows administrators at firms using Google Apps to remotely reset cookies to ensure that sensitive data cannot be accessed if a device is lost or stolen.

Google Apps software engineer Will Smith said in a blog post that the feature offers improved cloud security for organizations concerned that more information is being stored in the cloud than ever before.

The ability to access your data from virtually anywhere enables higher productivity but, like traditional systems that don't run in the cloud, security concerns can arise if a user loses a computer or mobile device that can access sensitive information," he said.