Yahoo Update: Flickr iOS Application with Hashtag Support

Yahoo above the weekend updated its Flickr for iOS application with hashtag sustain. Users can now add a hashtag to a photo's title or clarification, and also run a search to find all photos tagged with that term. The adding comes amidst rumors that Facebook is preparation to add hashtag support to its own social network.

The hashtag one or more words strung together with no spaces after a pound sign gained in reputation in 2009, when Twitter began hyperlinking them to search results. Hashtags, which are often used to illuminate or add circumstance to a post (i.e. #sarcasm, #Samsung, #iPhone), have extensive outside Twitter to sites like Google+ and even Facebook-owned Instagram.

To celebrate it’s sustained for hashtags, Flickr launched a new weekly photo dispute called #FlickrFriday that will enable mobile photographers to get some disrepute for their shots. The photo-based social network will issue a new weekly argument every Friday, and then users will have all weekend to take a photo based on the premise and tag it with #FlickrFriday.

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.