Evnp.com | Technical Journals: 06/01/2007 - 07/01/2007

Google Pack homepage redesign

Google recently changed the Google Pack's homepage where you can get a bundle of free software collected by Google. The new homepage comes with check-boxes placed near by each software. With these check-boxes, it's easier to know what included in the bundle, and to immediately remove stuff you don't like.

"Google forgot to make the program titles be connected to their respective check-box though, meaning you cannot click on them to toggle the selection – a minor but incredibly popular bug", said by Philipp Lenssen.

Screen-captured of the new homepage

It seem that, Google Pack homepage automatically check your OS. So if you are not using either Windows XP or Vista, a "warning" message will display instead of the list of software as normal.

With the Google Pack homepage change in a better way, it not only give users another opportunity to have what they (only) want, but also make their bundle of software become more and more popular.

Blogger in draft updates: Polls & Enclosures

Today, Blogger team just added 2 more features which are Polls and Enclosure Link to Blogger in Draft. With the 2 new features, you're now able to add polls widget to your blog and turn your blog into podcast.

Polls feature (only) allows Blogger users to add polls widget to the sidebar as a page element, but if you want to add polls inside blog posts it will need a bit of work. Here're some cool things in Poll:

You can add as many choices you want.
The largest possible date value is 12/31/99999999.
The poll is part of Google Reviews.
Poll results is displayed using AJAX.

Creating Polls (click on thumbnail to enlarge)

Enclosure links let you turn your blog into a podcast. According to Blogger In Draft blog:

If you’ve uploaded your audio or video to the web, you can link to it as an enclosure so that your readers can subscribe and download it using iTunes or another podcatcher. We’ve also gone ahead and added enclosure information for all videos uploaded directly in Blogger, making video podcasting crazy easy!

To enable this feature, you will need to go to Settings -> Formatting and set the "Show Link fields" option to "Yes". After changing this, each time you post an article in post editor and you will see a "Show enclosure links" link located right under the Title box, click there, and start adding your enclosure link.

Adding enclosure link (Click on thumbnail to enlarge)

There's still one more news related to Blogger. Now, it can display in 17 more languages in addition to 19 languages that were there before.

I'm very interested in Vietnamese language which is my mother-tongue. But actually, blogger display it in a ugly way :(.

[via Buzz.Blogger.com]

Embed audio using Gmail's Audio Player

If you want to embed your mp3 file to your blog or web page, here is the easy solution for you. Using the flash-based Gmail Audio Player has many advantages over traditional way of embedding audio file. Your visitor can start listening to the music or speech without having to wait for the buffering or until the download finishes. With flash-based audio player, your visitor don't have to open a media player to listen to your audio.

To embed the player, you just enter the following code to the place on your page where you would like it to appear, replacing URL with the actual url of your mp3 file:

<iframe
src="http://mail.google.com/mail/html/audio.swf?audioUrl=http%3A//URL"
style="border: 1px dotted #e0e0e0; width: 500px; height: 27px;">
</iframe>

In the code given above, you can change the width of the player to any value. But you should keep the height at 27px if you don't want to affect the looks of your player.

Check what I have done below:

Enjoy ... !

PicasaWeb adds Map feature and goes Mobile

PicasaWeb just got new update today, which allows you to map your photos to location where the photo is taken right inside PicasaWeb album. You can enter just a single location for an entire album, or place each photo from an album to a small map using drag and drop.

If you are in a particular album page, just click on "Map Photos" button (which indicated with

icon) located near "Slideshow" - or you can click on the "Map Photos" link located at bottom-left corner - a Google Maps widget pops up on next page and lets you search for a location. After that, you can drag & drop favorite photos to location where you took the the snapshots.

The most impressive is the combination between a map and a slideshow. If you select a mapped photo and click on "play", the photos will move on the map according to their locations.

Mapped PicasaWeb Photos

Click on image to enlarge

You can view sample photos album here.

The Picasa desktop client also can easily GeoTag photos (add geographical identification) using integrated Google Earth

There's more. PicasaWeb just launched a version which built specifically for mobile devices - PicasaWeb mobile. With the PicasaWeb for mobile, you can access your favorite photos on the go using a mobile phone. Thumbnails and photos are automatically resized to fit your mobile screen, so your photos always look good and download fast.

Image has been modify to fit the page (click to enlarge)

You’ll be presented with a list of your albums after you logged in to your Google Account, and clicking on an individual album will reveal a tiny thumbnail. If you select that tiny thumbnail, a not-so-tiny-but-still-small thumbnail of the image will appear.

It's very simple, clean. Not only browsing, but also the mobile version of Picasa Web Albums lets you add a quick comment on a photos, using your phone. And of course, you can use Search to find your photos, and you can browse you Favorite photos on your mobile as well. All you need to is a phone with a web browser and a data plan.

Google Docs gets new Start Page

Google completely redesigns Google Docs & Spreadsheets start page today. The documents list now look more familiar to Window Explorer. In the left panel, there is a navigation pane with Folders – instead of labels or tags like before. And in the right panel, there is your documents list.

You now can filter the view of docs list by folder, by type and by collaborator. Each folder now can have its description. Unfortunately, the sort (previously, all docs can be sorted by name and author) function has been changed, and now the docs list can only sort by date.

New Google Docs start page (Click to enlarge)

Not only the interface is changed, but also there are some new features has been added to the Google Docs & Spreadsheet.

The documents listed in right-panel can be drag & dropped to any folder listed in left-panel, the function actually makes users feel like using their Window Explorer.
An suggestions as you type function has been added to the search box located on top of Google Docs & Spreadsheet start page. For instance, when you enter a keyword there, it will dynamically filter the docs list and offer you documents which its title contains the keyword... clicking on it will open that file on a new window (or tab).

The new interface is a huge step forward and makes room for more types of documents and better ways to share your files, Google Docs now looks more and more like an office application. But sooner or later, Google will rename it to something meaningful like “Google Office” or "Google Docs", because the Presentation application will be released this summer.

Adsense offers Rounded Corner for ad unit

Today, I noticed a new feature which allows users to choose different conner styles for ad unit in the AdSense control panel. Adsense Publishers can now select:

Square corners - that we all knew.
Slightly rounded corners.
Very rounded corners.

The new "Corner styles" feature will add one extra line of javascript to your adsense code. It's looked like this:

google_ui_features = "rc:6";

The extra line actually mean User Interface features with its values:

rc:0 - Square corner 0px
rc:6 - Slightly rounded corner 6px.
rc:10 - Very rounded corner 10px.

Here's what the new corner styles looks:

Square Corners

Slightly Rounded Corners

Very Rounded Corners

The Corner Style section is located right after Color section, where you create ad unit.

The Corner Style feature seem to be a great update for adsense publishers when almost internet users now familiar with normal adsense ad format. This great stylizing make the ad unit become more attractive to internet users, hence increase revenue earning for publishers. Now adsense publishers have more choices to customize the ad unit that looks best for their sites.

5 improvements for Google Apps

Google today rolled out some new features to Google Apps. One of these new features, email migration tools (available in Premier edition only), which allows users to move their exist emails from old IMAP server to Google Apps' Gmail service. Gmail will put messages into conversation threads, display the original sender, recipient, and date of messages, and convert existing mail folders into labels. Currently, the migration wizard supports Exchange 2003, Cyrus, Courier, and Dovecot, but more will be added soon.

Another new feature is "Shared address book" among users on your domain. When composing messages, you should be able to access Gmail's new address book by clicking on "choose from contacts" link. Unlike the old way of adding contacts to a new email, you can now browse through your entire address book, choose your frequently mailed contacts, or use the search feature to add more people at a time. According to Google, they said:

The shared address book makes it even easier to get in touch with everyone in your organization without going to a separate list or company directory. When composing a new email, or sharing a document, you now have the option to search through all the users on your domain, even if they aren’t in your personal contact list. Need to send a note to Paula S in Sales, but aren’t sure of her email address? As long as she has a Google Apps account on your organization's domain, all you have to do is type in the first few letters, "Pau ...", and your address book will help with the rest.

Other update for Google Apps is chatting though Google Talk gadget within domain start page. The Google Talk gadget here is exactly the same as we normally use, but it's only available if Administrators has activated the Start Page feature. Actually, users can add more gadget of their choice to their Domain start page.

The Gmail service in your Google Apps also received some update which available for normal Gmail user. The updates include Increase attachment to 20 MB and View Powerpoint presentation as Slideshow.

Google promises a completely new layout for the document management interface of Google Docs, but it's unclear if this will be available for everyone. "Soon we'll complete a visual overhaul of Docs & Spreadsheets that will make it much easier for users with dozens or even hundreds of documents to search, locate, and organize their documents", said by Google.

You can find more information here.

Group Chat in Google Talk Gadget

Google Talk Gadget just got a major update, it now supports Group Chat feature. When you are in a conversation, just click on the "Group Chat" button, then you can invite other people to join your current discussion.

The Group Chat button uses auto-completion based on Gmail contacts, so you can invite other people quickly without searching all the contacts' address - it similar to what we used in Gmail.

At this time, this feature is only available for web-based version of Google Talk (GTalk gadget), it's not implemented in any other clients, unfortunately. Instead of using the same client, if you receive a Group Chat invitation which is displayed as a link, then clicking the invitation link will automatically launch the web-based version of Google Talk for you to join the group chat.

Invitation link displayed in Google Talk (Window client)

Confirm screen when invitation link is clicked

There are at least 2 new updates for Google Talk gadget which are 2 new emotion sets, and the Group Chat, but none of them available for Windows client of Google Talk at the moment. We all hope the next release version of Google Talk client will have all the updates as well as the phone call feature.

[ via GoogleSystem.blogspot.com ]

Related post: Google Talk in Firefox sidebar.

New feature in Google Translate - Google Dictionary

Google Translate just released a new feature today - Google Dictionary where you can get a word’s translations, definition and sometimes related phrases. At this time, Google's dictionary translation is only available between several languages which are English and French, English and German (beta), English and Italian, English and Korean, English and Spanish.

Using Google Dictionary is pretty straight forward, Google explains in Translate FAQ:

Type a word or short phrase into the search box.
Select the language of the dictionary in the "Dictionary" drop down menu.
Hit the Enter key or click on the "Find" button.

Click on thumbnail to enlarge

You can quickly get the web page or just a piece of text translated while surfing the web by using Translation Browser Buttons. There're more than 20 translation button for your choice. Simply Drag and Drop your chosen translation buttons listed there into your browser link toolbar, then you can get Translation whenever you want.

To translate a piece of text, select the text with your mouse and click the browser button.
To translate a whole web page, simply click the button.

A few weeks ago, Google also gave you the ability to "Search websites in another language" in a three staged approach:

First Google translates your search terms into the target language.
Then it queries Google for results with that translation.
Finally it displays the results translated back into a language that can be understood by the user.

New gadget and Share tab in iGoogle

You can now share a specific iGoogle tab along with the gadgets it contains. To do so, click on the little arrow next to the tab name and select “share this tab” – you can then enter a bunch of email addresses as well as a short message into "Send to a friend" popup box, and send it off. There's no auto-completion based on the Gmail address book for the email field, unfortunately. What the recipient will end up with is a special URL that triggers a confirmation dialog before the tab is added to their Google homepage. [via Blog.Outer-Court.com]

Click on thumbnail to enlarge

Another news is AJAX feed API now available as a Google gadget for iGoogle. According to Google AJAX Search API blog, they said:

The Google Gadget supports any direct feed that uses the MediaRSS extensions. In addition, it has configuration support for discovery of public Picasa Web Albums and tag-based search over PhotoBucket. We will most likely add other tag-based domains in the near future.

To add the gadget to your iGoogle, you can click the link (button) here:

Check out the sample here (from Google AJAX Search API Blog)

Google acquires another presentation company - Zenter

Google has acquired the assets of Zenter, a company that provides software for creating online slide presentations, as Google said. Currently, Google has a presentation feature in Gmail, and not for long time ago they acquired Tonic which is also a web-based presentation company. Is this the last piece to complete their web-based office application, Google Docs?

Click on thumbnail to enlarge

It's seem that, the Zenter technology will be added to Tonic system. Said by Nick Gonzalez "Zenter was focusing on the front end of the application, as well as community/sharing features".

On GoogleBlog, they said:

You've heard us talk a lot about using the web to improve group collaboration and information sharing. These days, when you create a document -- whether it's a text document, a spreadsheet, or a presentation -- you usually want to share it, collect feedback, or communicate about it in some way. We on the Google Docs & Spreadsheets team focus on making this experience easier and more powerful for you. In particular, we're working to add presentation-sharing capabilities to Google Docs & Spreadsheets, and we're excited about the addition of Zenter's technology and team to that effort.

So the web-based presentation will be added to Google Docs and available to public this summer. Hence, the Google Apps suite will have ability to present and share presentation files by end of this year through it - cos, the Google Apps suite included the Google Docs, and the presentation will be used as its component.

So far, Google Apps at this point is closest suite competitor Zoho. Both have plenty components of web-based office apps. IMO, Zoho web-based office does its jobs better than Google Docs, but none of them can compete with Microsoft Office at the moment.

9 more countries for YouTube

YouTube's just launched 9 more countries beside the United States. The newly launched countries consist of Brazil, France, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Poland, Spain and United Kingdom. You can switch among the countries by clicking on the Country link and Flag located on top-right corner.

Click on thumbnail to enlarge

On the homepage of each country, you will see slightly different design. But most of them lack of the Videos Being Watched which use Active Sharing feature.

On the homepage of different countries, you will see localized selected, most viewed, top rated videos. I suppose the statistics are categorized into different countries by following the country you chose when signing up for a YouTube account.

Some of the features such as TestTube and sponsored campaigns are not available in countries outside the US, though it is very likely that YouTube will be launching similar localized campaigns in other countries.

Official announcement should be made during the Google Press Day 2007 when the YouTube founders, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, will speak for an hour.

[via gSpy.blogspot.com]

Get fresh search results from Google

Do you know that Google Advanced Search has an option to let you get the most fresh results within 3 months, 6 months and 12 months?

The date-based search feature did not get enough attention when first time around, but it's actually help you a lot to get most up-to-date results.

Click on thumbnail to enlarge

The date search result is filtered by the last time Google bots index the page. That means, if the page was created 1 year ago but just get indexed by Google within 3 months, then it's still shown up on date-based search result which restricted to "past 3 month". The page is considered as a new page each time Google re-indexed it.

Normal Google search result for "YouTube" keyword (Click on thumbnail to enlarge)

Retricted "past 3 months" date-based search on "YouTube" (Click on thumbnail to enlarge)

The new implementation of the date range determines the URL's age by the first date it indexed the URL, meaning that it now works the way you would expect. If you want to find fresh Google results on a topic, the advanced search just became a lot more useful.

[via Matt Cutts Blog]

Strange Google Links

Have you ever seen these links on Google:

And here're some more strange and funny Google links:

[ Collected from pufone.org/blog/ ]

YouTube on Mobile

YouTube launched a mobile version of it @ m.youtube.com. The first page warns mobile users that “YouTube Mobile is a data intensive application”, and it recommends mobile users to upgrade to unlimited Internet access plan to “avoid additional charges”.

To be able to use it, you need a mobile phone that can play streaming videos (RTSP/3GP with H263/AMR). Most modern mobile phone support 3GP so you don't need to worry about that. The important thing as they warn us is internet connection on your mobile. You can also play these files on your computer if you have a codec pack that support to play the 3GP file extension.

After the warning page, it displays 10 featured videos on each page. If you want to browse more videos, you can click on Next (Prev) link. Each video displays video title, time and rating along side with its thumbnail. Below the featured videos is Menu which contains all other links. It includes:

Search box
Featured
Recently Added
Most Viewed
Top Rated
Top Favorites
People
Entertainment
Grab Bag

Additionally, there are 3 more links at the bottom of the page which are: Help, Back to Top and Home.

The image has been modified (click to enlarge)

I don't have any chance to get my real view of Mobile YouTube on my phone, but I think you can get to any link listed there quickly by press the number displayed a long with it.

When you click on a video thumbnail or title, you will jump to video page where you can watch the movie and see more details of it such as user who upload the video, upload date, category and description. Right below the video metadata is Most Recent Videos which displays 10 feature videos.

The image has been modified (click to enlarge)

There're only a small part of YouTube's videos are available @ mobile version of YouTube, but more videos will be added soon.

Google Apps to get Presentation

Google will add online presentation application to Google Apps by the end of this year. Possibly it's the result of acquiring Tonic company, but other applications could be added to the suite. The suite may include note-taking, group discussion, blogging and video.

Presentation is feature of Google Docs, and it could be included in the suite as a Google Docs' component, and it's not necessary to build a separate application.

Announced in April, Google was working on a presentation component for its Google Apps suite of Office-like applications that include e-mail, a document editor, spreadsheet and other collaboration tools. What's happened if Google includes other application like Notebook, PicasaWeb, etc to Google Apps? Yes, It would be great if these applications as well as collaboration tools is offered as part of the suite. Users can have more choice and more tools when using Google Apps as their online storage and collaboration applications.

Currently I'm running standard edition of Google Apps which offers email accounts (2GB each), Google Docs, Calendar, Chat (GTalk). But the premier edition which target corporate users offer much more than that. It includes Gmail with 10GB of storage, Goggle Docs, integrated instant messaging and search tools, Google Talk for IM and VoIP services, support for Gmail on BlackBerry mobile devices, Google Calendar, a set of APIs and partner technologies to integrate with existing enterprise applications, and 24/7 phone support. The premier suite is priced at US$50 per user.

More information on the 2 editions of Google Apps available here.

Google is aiming to get party between online and offline capabilities of the suite. As we know, Google last week released a set of APIs as part of Google Gears that let web based applications available offline. It comprises three APIs that provide a local server on the client, local data storage and a background synchronization capability. The sample application that works with Google Gear is Google Reader, its syndication software.

Blog redesign ...

If you visit my blog regularly, you may notice that my blog has changed the look and the feel. It's completely redesigned. There're so many reasons why I did this, but the most important reason is I want my own blog to be looked unique - like no other. After 3 days working with Blogger template code, I finally released my own blog template and applied over the original one which modified from TicTac template.

The new design of my blog is looked not very nice, but at least it fulfill my requirements. Now it's really looked like no other. Other than that, it's my own template.

The old one (Click to enlarge)

The new one (Click to enlarge)

As you can feel, the blog now can be loaded a lot faster than before. You also can do it by following my tips on speedup blogger loading time article. Yes, I follow exactly what i wrote there.

There're still some bugs in my design. If you find anything need to be improved, pls let me know. Any suggestions for my new design?

Blogger experimental features - Draft Blogger

The Blogger experimental feature has been released today called Blogger in Draft, it's available @ Draft.Blogger.com. The look and feel is remained the same as normal, but you may experience new features and design before they're ready for full release.

The new official blog called Blogger In Draft has been created to notice us the latest draft features. According to the blog it said:

Blogger in draft is a special version of Blogger where we try out new features before releasing them to everyone. Think of it as our sandbox, or laboratory, or just “Blogger + new things.” By taking your feedback and looking at what works and what doesn’t, we’ll be able to make features that much better when releasing them to everyone.

The first feature released is Video Upload where you can upload video directly from Blogger's post editor. When you click on upload video icon (

), a popup will display which let you choose video to be uploaded from your computer as well as its title.

Right after that you can continue working with your post while the video is being uploaded. An placeholder will appear on your post where the video actually is. You cannot publish the post until the video uploading is finished.

The interesting is uploaded video can be resized and played in Rich-Text mode, and it's kept private. It is hosted by Google Video but will not listed in Google Video search result.

YouTube redesign and move to Google Account

Youtube.com homepage has just released the new design of the site. The Leaderboard which located under navigation tabs has been removed. The search box is now placed right below navigate tab, and the search results now can be displayed in the list or grid view. The new design also adds a list of videos that are being watched using Active Sharing..

The new design moves video details and rating below video. Hence, it's easier to rate as well as find related videos. You also have an option to choose whether view video by old design or the newer one.

Beside updating interface, YouTube account has moved to Google account. You now can sign-up to YouTube using Google account, or link your existed YouTube account to Google Account.

Not so long time ago, YouTube also updated the video player. You can find more information about that here (Thanks Ionut Alex. Chitu).

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