Google Gears - Offline Functionality for Web Apps

Web applications bring your data online and make it available anywhere there's an Internet connection. But happens when you're on a plane or when you can't find a WiFi hotspot?

Google launched an open source browser extension for IE and Firefox called Google Gears that enables web applications to be available offline.

"Gears is an incremental improvement to the web as it is today. It adds just enough to AJAX to make current web applications work offline. Gears today covers what we think is the minimal set of primitives required for offline apps. It is still a bit rough and in need of polish, but we are releasing it early because we think the best way to make Gears really useful is to evolve it into an open standard. We are releasing Gears as an open source project and we are working with Adobe, Mozilla and Opera and other industry partners to make sure that Gears is the right solution for everyone," explains Google.

Once you install the extension, every Gears-enabled web application will ask your permission before storing data offline.


Depending on the functionality implemented in the application, Google Gears caches resource files so they're available offline, stores data in a SQLite database that has powerful search features and synchronizes data in the background.

Google Gears will enable you to read the most recent messages from Gmail while offline or to edit your documents in Google Docs even without a network connection.

Google Reader is the first Google application powered by Gears. To enter the offline mode, just click on the small arrow and all the recent feed items are downloaded to your computer. You can disconnect from the Internet or click on "work offline" in your browser and you will still be able to read your favorite feeds in Google Reader. Like in any feed reader installed on your computer. Well, almost, because Google Reader doesn't download images or other multimedia files embedded in the posts.




You can even close Google Reader's tab and try to load the site again: it will instantly show the cached data. Try to add tags to a post or star it; once you go back online, Google Reader will synchronize the data.


P.S.: Another nice update in Google Reader is that you can see the exact number of unread posts for each feed. Google Reader learned to count beyond 100.

Found on http://googlesystem.blogspot.com

Google Gears: Take Your Online Apps Offline

The only problem with Google’s web applications, is that you need to be ONLINE to use them. Google Gears hopes to fix that. Gears is a browser extension using Java, that enables web applications to provide offline functionality. So, now you can load up your favorite enabled Google applications (Think Writely, or Feed Catcher) when you DON’T have an internet connection.

The Google Gears Beta is currently available for Windows XP, Vista, Mac and Linux.

More Information
Google Gears (BETA) is an open source browser extension that enables web applications to provide offline functionality using following JavaScript APIs:

	Store and serve application resources locally
	Store data locally in a fully-searchable relational database
	Run asynchronous Javascript to improve application responsiveness

Get the BETA version here!

Google’s Gmail integrates Office Powerpoint viewer

Yet another reason to make the move to Gmail as your primary email service, Google quietly released the option to view attached Powerpoint slides using a Google Flash tool. Since making the move to Gmail and deciding to drop Microsoft Office, Google & Gmail have definitely helped make life without Office much easier - contacts / clients still prefer to send Office documents (there’s just no way around it).

Now that attached Powerpoint slides can be viewed from [select] Gmail accounts, when will we see Google Docs updated to support the file format?

found on uneasy silence - well said.

iGoogle Gadget Maker

As reported by Google Blogoscoped, Google Personalized Homepage will be rebranded as iGoogle and will let you build your own gadgets using wizards. The gadgets are very simple and are more like containers for things that matter to you: photos, videos, events.

"Once the gadget is created, you can invite other people to view & use the gadget, and make it publicly available for other people to view & use it." So whatever you choose to add to a gadget will be visible to the people you invited.

The wizards let you enter the settings for seven new gadget templates:

1. Photo album - add up to 7 photos that can be rotated.

2. GoogleGram - enter seven greeting messages.

3. Daily Me - type what you are doing.

4. Countdown - count the days until a special event.

5. Simple list - you can use it as a ToDo list, shopping list.

6. YouTube videos - up to 10 videos.

7. Freeform gadget - add an image and some text.

The gadgets are a way of staying in touch with your friends: if one of your Gmail contacts creates gadgets you'll be able to see them in a new section of iGoogle called "My Community".

found on http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/

Fresh News Become Standard Search Results

As promised last week, Google's web search results integrate results from Google News. The standard news OneBox that was displayed at the top of the page for queries related to recent news was replaced with a list of links to news articles, displayed anywhere in the top results.

The important news will rank higher than less important ones and they become a standard search result. This is the first step in Google's big plan of integrating every type of content in one index: an universal search engine that mixes web pages, images, videos, books, scholar papers, news articles and more.

It will still take some time until the change propagates to all Google's data centers, so you may not see results from Google News displayed as standard results (try to search for news-related queries like Bush, Iraq).

Creative Commons-licensed by rustybrick. More screenshots.

found on googlesystem.blogspot.com

Homeless Internet Citizens

So you open the door, you step inside and you discover that your house is empty: no furniture, no books, no family, no pets. Your home became empty and nobody bothered to explain why.

That's what happened to Google Personalized Homepage for some users today. Says Michael M.:

Today, I logged on at college and all was fine on my homepage. When I got home, I turned on my laptop and my homepage had reverted to the default, with all of the default gadgets and the default theme. I tried to re-add my gadgets, but it keeps going back to the default style. I've tried clearing my cookies/history and signing in/out.

The personalized homepage is the page I visit most on the internet, it tracks all my news and weather and lets me keep track of my schedule and chat to my friends on Google Talk.


My homepage looks the same, but there's a big thread at Google Groups with people who lost their homepages. Google's answer is so endearing:

We're now in frantic-chase-down-this-bug mode here at the Googleplex, and I hope to have more info for you soon. For now, we're not entirely sure of this, but it's possible that changing your homepage theme might cause the problem. SO, if you still have your homepage intact, please avoid changing your theme until further notice. The big question I know you'll all want answered is whether you'll get your homepage back once we sort things out... and the really honest answer is that I hope so, but I just don't know yet.



{ Thank you, Thomas, Redmar, Yasar, Michael, Joe. }

- found on googlesystem.blogspot.com

The exact same thing happened to me btw and it REALLY SUCKS! My personalized page was down right perfect and now I have to start all over.

Try Google's Next Design Before It Goes Live

Google's latest design test for the search results pages and homepage is clever and has big chances of replacing the current one. The big change is that Google adds a navigation menu for its services placed at the top of the page. The list of services includes Gmail, Calendar, Google Docs (the last two are hidden under "more"). If you click on one of the navigation link, you'll go to the homepage of that service, strange as that may seem for search-related services. Under the search box, you'll see links to other specialized search engines that provide useful results for that search. For "Bush", there are many services listed, including news, news archives and blog search, but for most queries you'll see few services listed (for "Google", you'll see only news search; for "flowers", image search; for "c++", code search, blog search and groups).


Courtesy of Webbsnack, here's how you can test this new design.

Copy this code:

javascript:document.cookie= "PREF=ID=fddb01133a87d314:LD=en:CR=2:TM=1177334998:LM=1177334998:GM=1:S=OOg0FEVzpPplxe9J; path=/; domain=.google.com";void(0);

go to google.com/ncr, paste it in the address bar, press enter, then search for something clever. I absolutely love the new design, but if you don't like it, clear your Google cookie and it'll go away.


Small observation: the number of results should be at the top of the page. I sometimes search for things on Google just to see the number of results (this is my primitive grammar checker).

found on http://googlesystem.blogspot.com

Google Spreadsheets Adds Charts

Google Spreadsheets finally added charts. This feature has been developed for many months and was one of the biggest lacks from Google's spreadsheet application.

You can create more types of charts: columns, bars, lines, pie, scatter, add labels and a legend. Just select the columns you want to plot and click on the new chart icon. After inserting the chart in the spreadsheet, you can save it as a PNG image or edit it.

The charts are rendered as SVG in Firefox/Opera and VML in Internet Explorer, so they don't require plug-ins. As usually, Opera is not officially supported, so you'll find things that don't work as expected.



You can annotate cells and Google search the content of a cell.


The above was all found on googlesystem.blogspot.com

3D Buildings in Google's Street Maps

Google Maps adds a new dimension to buildings in the street maps of more than 30 important cities from the US (like New York or Boston). Frank Taylor from the unofficial Google Earth Blog argues that they're not yet 3D. "You can't rotate or tilt your view, so it's 2D. But, the buildings have shaded 3D-like projections from an angle so you get an idea of height and shape of the buildings."


This is, in fact, Google Earth's building layer. To see it, go to the layers sidebar and enable "3D buildings".


Google Earth's layers contain a lot of useful information that enhance the satellite imagery: road names, airports, parks, populated places, pictures and more. The cool thing is that they reside on Google's servers, so you don't need to update Google Earth to see new information. Google Maps could become much more useful if it included these overlays.

googlesystem.blogspot.com

A Batch of Gmail Accounts, Accidentally Disabled

Next time when you can't access Gmail, be happy that Gmail is down only for a few minutes. Other people have to live days without their Gmail accounts (and you know it's hard to do that).

Last week, the Gmail team realized that a bunch of spammers found a temporary home at gmail.com. Says the Gmail team: "We have been actively investigating a batch of accounts that were accidentally disabled and are currently in the process of re-enabling these accounts. This error occurred in an effort to target a large network of spammers to keep them out of the Gmail system and keep your inbox free from spam. We apologize for this inconvenience and appreciate your patience as we re-enable these accounts as quickly as possible."

Collateral damages, you'll say. But not if you're one of the poor souls who had the misfortune to be the target of Gmail's team raid. While some of the accounts were disabled, others didn't have links to email attachments.

My account is readable.. like i can logon. but i can't download any of the attachments. i have two huge presentations coming up and all the files are on my account. i trust google more than a usbkey soo i always have my files on my account. now i can't even get them.. and i can't get any one to send them to me. so please please fix it soon. "lockdown on sector 6" is what i get and i abide by google's terms of use.

Benedikt ("benedictus" means "blessed" in Latin), the wise soul from Gmail's Google Group, saves the day:

I think this extremely unfortunate event shows us the danger of having all the important information in one place, a place that depends on the functionality of one large software package, such as GoogleMail. (...)

What we experience right now is such a failure and most of the posts in this topic that have been posted before this one show us the consequences that can have. So let us hope that the capable engineers of Google will succeed in restoring GoogleMail's full functionatlity as they have succeded in building up the virtual world of collaboration, information and communication that has made Google what it is today.

While Gmail is a useful web application, you shouldn't use it to store mission-critical files or information. And if you do, make sure you have backups: store your files on different storage mediums, forward your Gmail messages to other accounts or pray that Gmail team doesn't have a bad day and disables your account. If you see an error message like "Lockdown in sector 4 (or 6)", complain to Google.

Google says they promptly re-enabled the affected accounts, but there are still people who can't access Gmail. And might "move their operations" to other sites, if the Gmail team continues to treat them like that.

I've been locked out of my original email for a full 7 days come midnight. I'm also locked out of anything google associated, so I can't post new content to my blog, nor check AdSense income. I thought I would have to wait the standard 5 days and now I realize my account wasn't having password issues, this was a long standing issue that it seems they knew about.

Which makes me upset enough to move my operations from google; I hope everyone else does the same...this is the only free email service I have known with regular outages, shutdowns and no customer support. The last time I lost access to my email was 3/14/06, my birthday no less...luckily, I got it back in 24 hours. Now, it's been 7 days.

found on googlesystem.blogspot.com

Batch Upload Files to Google Docs

You'd think that Google considered Docs & Spreadsheets important enough to make it easy to import files. Or to export files. You can do that one file at a time, but it becomes tiresome if you have a lot of files.

Fortunately, the latest version of Google Toolbar for Firefox has a feature that lets you drag and drop files to your browser and they are automatically uploaded to Google Docs. To upload more files at a time, go to Windows Explorer or other file manager, select your files and drag them in Firefox.

To activate the feature, to go to Google Docs & Spreadsheets after installing the toolbar. You'll get a prompt that asks you if you want to enable the feature. Alternatively, click on Settings / Options and enable "Docs & Spreadsheets".

Found on googlesystem.blogspot.com

Gmail Paper...April Fools!

Yes folks, it's April Fools Day today and Google is joining in on the fun and pranks with it's latest addition, Google Paper. Here are the technical specs for this fictitious new service:

• Is it free? Yes. The cost of postage is offset with the help of relevant, targeted, unobtrusive advertisements, which will appear on the back of your Gmail Paper prints in red, bold, 36 pt Helvetica. No pop-ups, no flashy animations—these are physically impossible in the paper medium.
• How about attachments? All part of the deal. Photo attachments are printed on high-quality, glossy photo paper, and secured to your Gmail Paper with a paper clip. MP3 and WAV files will not be printed. We recommend maintaining copies of your non-paper Gmail in these cases.
• Is there a limit? You can make us print one, one thousand, or one hundred thousand of your emails. It’s whatever seems reasonable to you.
• But what about the environment? Not a problem. Gmail Paper is made out of 96% post-consumer organic soybean sputum, and thus, actually helps the environment. For every Gmail Paper we produce, the environment gets incrementally healthier.
  
  
  

Google Notebooks Get Sexy!

Google Notebook has a new UI. The notebooks can be ordered alphabetically or by modified date, it's easier to add notes: just click in the space between any existing notes. Google Notebook borrowed the layout of messages from Gmail and placed the editing buttons at the top of the page so you don't feel any disruptive interface change when you edit a note. You can now add comments to notebooks and remove the title and the URL of a clipped note.



Google auto-saves each note, so you don't have to press a "Save" button. There's no option to search public notebooks anymore (but you can use Google search to do that).

found on Googlesytem.blogspot.com

Yahoo Mail, with Unlimited Storage

Yahoo Blog announces that Yahoo Mail will have unlimited storage. They'll be rolling this out over a few months, starting from May.

The official explanation is that the cost of storage dropped and users send more attachments. "We have been closely monitoring average usage. We are comfortable that our users are far under 1 gig(abyte), on average. What we see are an increasing number of rich media files as consumers send more photos."

Yes folks, this does make Yahoo better than Gmail....for now.

Google Screensaver

Google Screensaver is a Windows screensaver that displays photos from different locations:

• Your computer. You select a list of folders that contain photos and Google Screensaver monitors the JPEGs from these folders.


• Picasa Web Albums. If you use Google's photo sharing site, you can view pictures from the most recently modified albums and from your contacts. It's probably the most interesting feature of Picasa Web Albums: you can monitor all the photos uploaded to your contacts' albums.


• Web feeds. You can find them in photo sharing sites like Flickr, Picasa Web Albums or at this page. My favorite feed: Flickr's interestingness. To add a new source, right-click a link to a feed in IE and Firefox and select "Add to Google Photos Screensaver".

The screensaver acts like a slideshow so you can move to the next/previous photo using the mouse. The title and the author of a photo is always visible and you can go to the source of the photo by clicking to one of the links from the bottom of the window.

You can configure the visual effects (collage, wipe, pan and zoom, cross fade) and how often the photos change.


The screensaver is a part of Google Pack, but if you get it from this page you can install only the screensaver. Then you can uninstall Google Updater and keep the screensaver.

Update: AT in the comments points to the direct link of the screensaver installer (this link may change in the future):
gpdl.google.com/installers/ci_ss/en/2.2007.0323.1359/gpscrsav.msi (4.5 MB)

found on googlesystem.blogspot.com

The New Google Mobile Search

found on googlesystem.blogspot.com

One week ago, Yahoo released a new interface for mobile search (available at m.yahoo.com) that focused on showing more local information, more direct answers, and less links. Now Google responds and launches a new version of Google Mobile Search.

The new site is location-aware, so you have an option to enter your location, so you get results related to where you are.

You can now create a mobile version for the personalized homepage right from your phone. Unfortunately, the list of options is limited to weather, stocks, movies and a list of popular news sites. But the good news is that the weather and movie listings are restricted to your location, which can be easily changed.

Because you've already told Google your location, you don't have to enter it each time you search. Here's a comparison between the old version of mobile search and the new one, for the query "pizza". Google shows 6 web results instead of 10 and the focus in on the business listings, which are targeted to my location.


You don't have to specify the type of search (local listings, for example), because the structure of the results is query-dependent. For some queries, you'll see image results or news articles at the top; for others, you'll see local results or only web results. Each section of search results can be expanded.

Another improvement can be found in web search results. Google optimizes the pages for mobile and splits them so you can easily read them on your mobile phone (that's not new), but now it sends you directly to the section that's most relevant to your query, highlights the query in the page, creates a table of contents for some of the pages and shows a link to the feed, so you can read it in Google Reader. That's pretty impressive.

If I search for "tea house google theme" and click on the result from Google Operating System, I'll read only the most relevant section of the page.


If you have a clever phone that knows how to handle web pages, you can deactivate Google's transcoder in the settings.

Google removed the option to search only mobile-optimized pages and merged them with the standard web pages. You'll notice that pages written for mobile phones have a small phone icon next to them in the search results.

All in all, there's an improvement. People can find more information relevant to them with fewer clicks (especially if they're in the US), but Google could have added unit conversations, mathematical calculations, facts, sport results, traffic information etc. For now, simple queries like "13*3.14" or "Italy population" don't return the right answer.

Google Mobile Search is available at google.com/m, although entering google.com into your mobile phone should work as well. You should see a link to try the new version at the top of the page.

Update: Here's a page where you can compare the old and the new version of Google Mobile Search with Yahoo Mobile Search and Windows Live.

Errors in Gmail!!!

ANNOUNCEMENT! Gmail is experience technical difficulties! Upon logging in users are blasted with this error message/apology. Could Google be changing something??? Or maybe they're fixing some kind of security breach we have yet to uncover. Maybe, just maybe the site is down for a make over or a new service is being added! One can only speculate at this point.


UPDATE!!! The error message happened world wide. Julio Dudu has posted the following picture on his blog, which you can see here, and was kind enough to share it with us!

Is JotSpot Google's Glue?

found on googlesystem blog...

Many people wondered why Google bought JotSpot, a wiki company. After all, JotSpot let you create and share documents, spreadsheets, calendars, photos, videos and more. Google already has different services for most of these types of files, but they aren't integrated (or the integration is very limited).

Guillaume Belfiore suggests that JotSpot could integrate all the communication services created by Google into a single interface - let's call it GDrive. "In the end, many existing Google services would be accessible in one place. To me it is pretty obvious that, should GDrive become true one day, it will make an extensive use of the JotSpot technology," says Guillaume.

To get an idea, visit this gallery from JotSpot that shows applications for their free-form wiki model ("everything is a wiki"):

* spreadsheets (think Google Spreadsheets)
* blogs (Blogger)
* forums (Google Groups)
* mail (Gmail)
* calendar (Google Calendar)
* photo gallery (Picasa Web Albums)
* and more (project manager, to-do lists, file cabinet, knowledge base)


Here's what Scott Johnston from JotSpot says about this:

"At Google we will continue to realize our vision of collaborative applications built on an integrated development platform."

Google Tests a New Design for the Homepage

It wouldn't be the first time when Google tests new designs for the (classic) homepage or the search results pages, but this time someone saw a radical change. The links to Google's services were detached from the search box and were moved in the top left corner. Because there's no visible connection between the links and the search box, this move allowed Google to add non-search services: Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Docs. Now that anyone can get a Gmail account and services like Calendar and Docs & Spreadsheets have matured and reached a wider audience, Google plans to make them even more visible.


Note: the screenshot was slightly edited to fit on this page. Click to see the original screenshot.

found on googlesystem.blogspot.com

Picasa Web Albums + Picnik!

I did a post about a very nice service called Picnik back in February. Picnik is an amazing, free service. With no install nessacary, Picnik is great for quickly editing all your online photos from one place. It's the easiest way on the Web to fix underexposed photos, remove red-eye, or apply effects to your photos.

Picasa web albums is the easiest way to upload and share photos online. So what happens when you put these two great services together? You get one mindblowing service. This will be done with Picasa's API. More information on API and what it has done for Picasa can be seen below.

The Picasa Web Albums data API allows client applications to view and update Picasa Web Albums content in the form of Google data API ("GData") feeds. Your client application can request a list of a user's albums, photos, comments, or tags, edit or delete content in an existing entry, and query the content in an existing entry.

Here are some of the things you can do with the Picasa Web Albums data API:

• Include your public photos in your own web page, and allow users to comment on them (and have the comments stored in Picasa Web Albums).
• Write a plugin to manage your albums and photos from a desktop or mobile phone client.
• Create a custom screensaver to display your Picasa Web Albums photos on your computer.

More projects other than Picnik + Picasa are on the way and they can be seen below.

ShoZu

Have a camera phone? Use ShoZu to upload your pictures to Picasa in just one click!

Booksmart

Free bookmaking software for both PC and Mac. Make your own bookstore-quality books.