Home »

April, 2009

New in Labs: Google Search right in Gmail

Posted by Adam de Boor, Software EngineerI used to have a problem. People would ask me questions, over chat or email, and I'd have to leave Gmail to search Google for an answer. Then I'd have to select the answer, copy it, go back to Gmail and paste the answer into the chat window or my reply. Sometimes I'd get distracted and forget to go back to Gmail, and I'd have to go through it all again when I remembered what I'd been doing.With the new Google Search experiment in Gmail Labs, my problem is solved. When you turn this feature on from the Labs tab under Settings, you'll see a new search box on the left side of your inbox, like this:Type your search in, and a window (like a chat window, but a bit bigger) appears at the bottom of your screen with the first few search results. You can click on a search result and it'll open up in another window (or another tab) so you can make sure it's what you're looking for. Once you're sure it's a result you need, moving your mouse over the result back in Gmail reveals a pull-down menu that lets you do stuff with the search result.What's in the menu depends on what you're doing in Gmail:

  • If you're reading a message, you can start a reply to the message with the search result as the first thing in your reply.
  • If you're writing a message, you can paste the result, or just the URL into your message.
  • If you're chatting with someone, you can send the result via chat.
  • You can also always compose a new message to send the search result.

If you have keyboard shortcuts turned on, typing g and then / will take you to the search box when you're not composing, and Ctrl + g will do it when you're composing (that's ⌘ + g for Mac users).Like all things in Gmail Labs, we're going to be tinkering with it, so let us know what you think. Oh, and one other thing: with all the stuff we've been adding to Gmail Labs lately, the left side of your account might be getting crowded. A lot of the people who've been playing with this new feature have found it useful to turn on "Navbar drag and drop" in Labs so they can move the web search box up to the top where it's easy to get to.

Google Apps Directory Sync to sync Google Apps user accounts with your LDAP system

With Google Apps Directory Sync, you can automatically provision users and groups in Google Apps based on the user data in your LDAP system, such as Microsoft Active Directory or Lotus Domino to match your existing organizational schema.Editions included:Premier, Education and Partner EditionsLanguages included:US EnglishHow to access what's new:To download and learn how to install Google Apps Directory Sync, click here .Learn how to upgrade to Google Apps Premier Edition to use this feature.For more information:http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2009/04/sync-google-apps-user-accounts-with.htmlGet these product update alerts by emailSubscribe to the RSS feed of these updatesTip: The Google I/O Developer Conference is happening on May 27 & 28 in San Francisco. Learn more.

Themes for forms in Google Docs

You can now apply a theme to forms you create in Google Docs. Editions included:Standard, Premier, Education, Team and Partner EditionsLanguages included:All languages supported by Google DocsHow to access what's new:To apply a theme to a form, click the 'Theme' button at the top of your form, select a theme and click 'Apply'. Note: The theme will be visible to your respondents when they respond in a form window, but not if they reply from an email message with an embedded form.For more information:http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2009/04/spruce-up-your-surveys-70-colorful.htmlGet these product update alerts by emailSubscribe to the RSS feed of these updates

Who's @ Google I/O - spotlight on AJAX and Google Data APIs

There are over 60 Google APIs across a wide range of products and technologies. The AJAX APIs include Google Search, Language, Maps, FriendConnect, and Visualization APIs. The team recently launched v2 of the AJAX APIs Playground, an app designed to show interactive code samples for some of our coolest Javascript APIs. The Google Data APIs provide a simple standard protocol for reading and writing data on the web and are used by many products including YouTube, Calendar, Picasa Web Albums, and as of last week, Analytics.Google I/O will feature many sessions covering the AJAX and Google Data APIs. Here are a few of the developers who'll be leading sessions and/or demoing at the Developer Sandbox:

  • RedfinRedfin is an online brokerage site for buying and selling homes. Redfin uses the Google Maps, Charts, and Feeds APIs. Redfin actively talks about the behind-the-scenes development decisions, which can be found at the Redfin Developer Blog. (For example, they blogged about why they switched to the Google Maps API) Sasha Aickin, Engineering Manager, will be speaking on a session called Performance Tips for Geo API Mashups.
  • Lonely Planet Lonely Planet is known by travelers for producing informed and honest travel advice. Lonely Planet uses the Google Maps Javascript API to power interactive maps on lonelyplanet.com, the Google Static Maps API on its cross-device mobile site, m.lonelyplanet.com, and OpenSocial, App Engine, and Android in products soon to be launched. Ken Hoetmer, Lonely Planet's neogeographer in residence, will be speaking on a session called Maps APIs & Mobile.
  • AdobeIntroduced with Adobe Creative Suite 4, Adobe Community Help utilizes Google Custom Search (a product which also supports the AJAX APIs) to aggregate the most relevant help content from the broader community. By integrating search directly within the application workflow, users can find answers to their software questions no matter where those answers may be found. Currently, Adobe is exploring ways of expanding Custom Search to include code samples directly within Adobe development environments for products like Flash and Flex. (Read Adobe's blog post about Adobe Community Help)
  • LuckyCalLuckyCal is a calendaring application which utilizes several of the Google Data APIs to create a dynamic calendar experience. They authenticate using OAuth to retrieve data from the Calendar and Contacts Data APIs. Based on where you'll be, who you know and what you like, LuckyCal finds events that are relevant to you. LuckyCal has also created a Google Gadget and uses the Maps API (both for UI and for Geocoding) extensively.
  • Eye.fiThe Eye-Fi Card stores photos & videos like a traditional memory card, and fits in most cameras. When you turn your camera on within range of a configured Wi-Fi network, it wirelessly transfers your photos & videos to either your computer or services like YouTube, Picasa Web Albums, etc via the YouTube and Picasa Web Albums Data APIs.
  • Vast RankVast Rank is a college ranking website that utilizes the Google Maps API in their interactive ranking map (where visitors see rankings based on what is in view on the map). With the Client Location API, Vast Rank’s personalization engine can weigh the visitor’s location into the criteria used to suggest interesting colleges to the visitor. Vast Rank creator Jon Kragh will be leading a session, Using AJAX APIs to Navigate User-Generated Content.
  • 280 North280 North's application, 280 Slides, enables users to easily create web-based presentations. With the AJAX Search API and Google Data APIs, 280 Slides builds in the ability to search Google for images and YouTube for videos and drag media directly into a presentation. 280 North is also the creator of Cappuccino, an open source JavaScript-based web development framework. Check out co-founder Ross Boucher's videos where he talks about 280 Slides' implementation.

Finally, a friendly reminder that early (discounted) registration for Google I/O ends this Friday, May 1. Visit code.google.com/io to sign up and learn more about sessions and demos that'll be in store this year.*Follow us for the latest I/O updates: @googleio.By Christine Tsai, Google Developer Products

Spruce up your surveys: 70 colorful themes

We've just launched 70 themes for forms so you can add a little (or a lot of) color to your surveys and questionnaires. Some themes are basic colors schemes (like Blue, Espresso, or Rose) and others are fancier designs (like Picnic, Zen Spring, and Dusk).How do you choose a theme? When you're editing a form, click the Theme button to find the right theme and apply it to your form. One caveat: These themes will be visible to your respondents when they fill out the form online, not within email (like Gmail).Try them out and let us know what you think.Posted by: Andrew Chang, Marketing ManagerUpdate: Replaced an extra open paren with a comma and corrected the image. Oops.

What's a rich media ad, anyway?

Since last year's DoubleClick acquisition, we've increased our focus on helping marketers and agencies use Google tools for all of their display advertising needs. DoubleClick Rich Media is the part of DoubleClick that provides the technology for the most technically advanced and engaging of these display ads, which are typically created by creative agencies for their brand-focused clients. To help make this process even easier and efficient, today we're launching DoubleClick Studio, our new rich media production and development tool.To describe rich media, it helps to think about other ad formats that we're all familiar with, starting with the simplest: text ads. With just a few keystrokes, anyone can create simple messages in a standardized format, and place them on a site like Google.com in minutes. Then we have standard display ads, ads that usually include text with a visual such as a logo or a graphic. These can be in formats we're all familiar with like .jpg, .gif, .swf and more. Standard display ads can either be static or animated with tools like Flash. They typically have only one interaction, meaning that when you click on them, you'll be taken to a destination site. And then at the most complex level, from a design and interaction perspective, we have rich media ads. With rich media, you can have ads that expand when users click or roll over, for example, and there are extensive possibilities for interactive content, such as HD video or even the ability to click to make a phone call.But making a rich media ad possible requires much more complex technology to ensure that all of the ad behaviors function properly, that all of the interactions can be measured, and to serve the ads onto web pages. Every piece of the canvas, from the video play button to the button that allows for expansion, requires coding in Flash that's made possible by a rich media technology provider like DoubleClick Rich Media. With all of this complexity, there's also a lot of room for error. So in addition to enabling the development of the ads, tools like DoubleClick Studio provide quality analysis and preview functionalities to make sure that the ads work the way they should.Here is a graphic that represents some of the differences between types of online ads:With DoubleClick Studio, we hope to make it easier for our existing users to produce rich media ads, and to expand the number of advertisers that can make these useful formats part of their marketing strategy. This is also a good thing for Internet users; rich media capabilities make advertising even more useful, letting a viewer interact with an ad and learn about a brand without having to leave the page they're on. And, advertisers have an expanded creative canvas within the ad itself, allowing for deeper, higher-quality content in the ad itself. At Google, we believe that ads at their best are useful information.To read more about DoubleClick Studio, visit the DoubleClick blog.Posted by Shamim Samadi and Ari Paparo, DoubleClick Rich Media Team

Sync Google Apps user accounts with your LDAP system

As part of the team that joined Google when it acquired Postini in 2007, one of my responsibilities has been finding ways to weave Postini's enterprise experience into Google's business offerings. Today, I'm excited to tell you about Google Apps Directory Sync, the latest improvement to Google Apps brought over from Google's Postini security and archiving services.Google Apps Directory Sync lets businesses and schools with an LDAP user directory system like Microsoft Active Directory or Lotus Domino transition more quickly and smoothly to Google Apps. Instead of manually maintaining a separate user account directory in Google Apps, this utility lets Google Apps tap into an existing repository of user account information.This new utility is a software component that helps maintain security by running behind the firewall and pushes directory information to Google Apps – including mailing lists, groups and user aliases – to match the organizational schema in the LDAP system.This is a one-way operation, designed so data on the LDAP server is not updated or altered. The utility offers many of the customization settings, tests and simulations originally developed and refined for the Postini directory sync tool to give complex organizations the controls they need to manage their directories effectively.Google Apps Directory Sync is now included at no additional cost with Google Apps Premier, Education and Partner Edition customers.Posted by Navneet Goel, Google Enterprise Product Manager

Google Location Services now in Mozilla Firefox

With recent launches like Google Latitude and Google Toolbar with My Location, it's clear we think location-based services are useful and fun! We also want developers everywhere to be able to use location to build cool new features and applications.I'm pleased to announce that Google's Location Service (the same service which powers the My Location feature in many Google products), is now the default location provider in Mozilla Firefox 3.5 beta 4. This means that developers can, with users' permission, gain access to their approximate location without requiring any additional plug-ins or setting configurations. It just works!Mozilla Firefox 3.5 beta 4 uses the W3C geolocation API, a standard being adopted by many major browsers, so you won't have to branch code in the future.For web developers, using geolocation services in Firefox is easy! Here's a simple example to get you started:<html><head><script type="text/javascript">function displayLocation(loc) { var locDiv = document.getElementById("locationDiv"); locDiv.innerHTML = "lat: " + loc.coords.latitude + ", lon:" + loc.coords.longitude;}function getLocation() { navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(displayLocation);}</script></head><body><a href="#" onClick="getLocation()">Click here to display location</a><br><div id="locationDiv"></div></body></html>When your site calls getCurrentPosition, a drop down will ask the user permission to get his or her location. Upon acceptance of the request, the callback function you specify will run with the machine's approximate location contained in the loc parameter. Here's a screenshot of the permission dropdown:We hope you find the new and useful ways to use the new geolocation capabilities of Firefox!By Jonathan McPhie, Google Mobile Team

New in Labs: Extra emoticons

Posted by Darren Lewis, Software EngineerFor a short period of time after launching emoticons for mail, we believed we had successfully captured the entirety of human expression in 19 faces (we're still debating whether the robot face counts), important representatives of the animal kingdom such as and , emoticons for both love () and heartbreak (), and, well, a pile of .But soon a growing feeling of dread overcame the group . How could we have included a but not a cat? What if I want wine rather than ?And thus was born a new Labs feature: extra emoji, the colorfully animated brainchild of our team in Japan. Simply go to the Labs tab under Settings, enable "Extra Emoji," and have that glass of you've been dreaming about. Ask your in-laws about the fluffiness factor of their pet . Become a meteorologist and start predicting . Dance like you mean it . Then let us know what you think.(If you're wondering how we had time to create another couple hundred emoticons when we're busy doing important stuff like rewriting Gmail for mobile and making Gmail work offline, the answer is: we didn't. All of these extra emoticons are straight from the secret underground labs of some of the top Japanese mobile carriers, used with permission. Thanks guys!)

Tech Talks on the Guts of Chromium

As a developer, one of the coolest things about working on the Google Chrome web browser is that there's very little difference between being a Googler working on it and being an external contributor. Most development happens via public wikis, mailing lists, bugs, and code under the Chromium project. Chomium's openness is something we take a lot of pride in.Last Wednesday 5 of Chromium's top contributors gave tech talks on a wide range of very technical topics. Given our commitment to openness, it shouldn't surprise you that we went to great lengths to film them. None of us had filmed a tech talk before, but through a great team effort we were able to capture some really great presentations. If you're interested in the guts of Chromium's code base, I encourage you to check them out:

By Jeremy Orlow, Software Engineer