How to Try Google's Cleaner Interface

I mentioned in the previous post that Google tests a less cluttered interface and there's now a way to try it. Techno-Net noticed that you can change the NID value of a Google cookie and get the same interface.







Here's how to do this in Chrome:



1. Install "Edit this Cookie", a cookie manager for Chrome.



2. Go to Google's homepage and click the yellow cookie icon from Chrome's toolbar.



3. Find the line that starts with NID, click it, select the value (Ctrl-A or Command-A for Mac), delete it, paste the following value (use Ctrl-V or Command-V for Mac) and click "Submit cookie changes":



50=RbHwrmdgEAl6v3XPDKfJey5zpW7n84oRvsTZOK0LuYwW0m0UDFcPmts2HqKaZc2-Rdo7iLsrYKOUVKV4ztyb7JMDWavDVmvsyC2UldBcyFKsmyM_4Qhr761WpGHfoZPZ





Here are the instructions for Firefox:



1. Install Cookies Manager+ and restart the browser.



2. Go to Google's homepage.



3. Press Alt-T and select "Cookies Manager+". You'll also find the option in the "Web Developer" item of Firefox's unified menu.



4. Search for google.com and find the entry named "NID". If you're not in the US and you use a different Google domain, search for your domain (for example: google.co.uk in the UK).



5. Click "edit" and replace the content with:



50=RbHwrmdgEAl6v3XPDKfJey5zpW7n84oRvsTZOK0LuYwW0m0UDFcPmts2HqKaZc2-Rdo7iLsrYKOUVKV4ztyb7JMDWavDVmvsyC2UldBcyFKsmyM_4Qhr761WpGHfoZPZ





Opera already has a cookie manager that lets you edit cookie values. You only need to go to Google's homepage, right-click on the page, select "Edit site preferences", go to the "Cookies" tab and edit the item that starts with "NID".



I couldn't find some great cookie managers that worked in the latest versions of Internet Explorer and Safari, but the instructions should be similar.



Sharing the "NID" value allows other people to try an experimental Google interface. The next time when you find an interface that looks different and you send a tip to gostips@gmail.com, you can also include the NID value of your Google cookie.



If Google constantly changes the "NID" value and you can't use the experimental interface for too long, delete your Google cookies and start again. What if you don't like the interface and you want to go back to the regular UI? Just remove the "NID" key or delete its value using the cookie manager.

Google Tests a Cleaner Interface

Google started to test a variation of the search interface I mentioned the last month. The experimental interface removes all the icons from the sidebar and the icons for Google +1 and Instant Preview, which are displayed next to the results.





When you mouse over a search result, Google shows a bigger Instant Preview icon in a vertical bar. Mouse over the bar, and you'll a large screenshot of the page, the links to the cached paged and other similar pages and the Google +1 button.





Like the previous variation of the experiment, Google's header and the search options sidebar are sticky, so you'll see them even if you scroll down. It's the perfect interface for implementing infinite scrolling, which is also tested in a separate experiment.







{ Thanks, Herin. }

Google Chrome Adds Support for Native Client Apps

Almost three years after its announcement, Native Client is almost ready for prime time. It's enabled in Chrome 14, which is now in beta and will reach the stable channel in less than a month.



Native Client is a very complex framework that allows browsers to run native compiled code in a sandbox. Google's goal is to "maintain the OS portability and safety that people expect from web apps", while allowing developers to use their preferred language. Right now, the only supported languages are C and C++ and Native Client only works in Chrome for Windows, Mac and Linux.



"Native Client apps live on the web platform, so you don't need to create separate versions of your app for each operating system. Rather than relying on OS-specific APIs, Native Client apps use Pepper, a set of interfaces that provide C and C++ bindings to the capabilities of HTML5. This means that once you've ported your code to Native Client, it will work across different operating systems, and you only need to maintain one code base. Today Native Client supports the Pepper APIs for 2D graphics, stereo audio, URL fetching, sandboxed local file access (File API), and asynchronous message passing to and from JavaScript. In future releases we will be adding support for hardware accelerated 3D graphics (OpenGL ES 2.0), fullscreen mode, networking (WebSockets and peer-to-peer connections), and much more," informs Google.



Google announced that developers will be able to upload their native apps to the Chrome Web Store once Chrome 14 hits the stable channel. In the meantime, Chrome 14 users can try the examples from this gallery: a pi generator, a sine wave synthesizer and John Conway's Game of Life.





NaCl (Native Client) + Pepper -> a lot of games, business apps, educational apps, image editors and virtual machine software running inside your browser. Suddenly, Chromebooks are no longer that limited.

Audio Pronunciation in Google Search

Google added a new feature to the dictionary OneBox: audio pronunciation. This feature was available if you clicked "More" to read all the definitions, but now it's more accessible.





Google uses Flash to play the audio file, so the feature doesn't work if you disable Flash. It's interesting that Google shows the audio icon if you use an iPad, even though the device doesn't let you install the Flash plugin. The HTML5 audio tag is a better option for iOS devices and for the browsers that support it.

Weather Layer in Google Maps

Google Maps added a layer for weather. Just mouse over the satellite box and select "weather" from the list of layers.



"When zoomed out, you'll see a map with current weather conditions from U.S. Naval Research Lab. And, if you look closely, you can also tell if it's day or night around the world by sun and moon icons. Enabling the weather layer also gives you an instant weather report for friends and family living around the world," informs Google. Weather reports are powered by weather.com and include information about the current conditions (humidity, wind speed, temperature) and a 4-day forecast.







The nice thing about Google Maps layers is that you can combine them. For example, you can enable both the terrain and the weather layers, like you can see in the screenshot above.

Google Tests Infinite Scrolling for Search Results Pages

After testing a persistent header, Google continues to experiment with infinite scrolling for Google search results. A Webmaster World user spotted a new box that replaces the standard pagination links: "show more results". When you click the message, Google loads the second page of results below the top results.





Barry Schwartz says that Google tested a similar interface back in June. I remember that SearchMash, Google's old playground for search experiments, used infinite scrolling in the first iterations. Last year, Google Image Search added infinite scrolling,



There are many extensions that add infinite scrolling to Google search results pages. One of the best is AutoPager, which is available for Firefox and Chrome.

Gmail's Newest/Oldest Pagination Features

The latest Gmail design refresh replaced pagination links with arrow buttons. Even if it's not obvious, the navigation links that sent you to the newest/oldest messages are still available in the new interface. Just click the message similar to "11-20 of 3903" from the screenshot below and you'll see the two options that appeared to be missing.





This works for Gmail's search results and when you click one of the labels. For example, you can go to the "All Mail" system label, click the pagination message, select "Oldest" and find the first messages from your Gmail account.



For the search terms that return a lot of results, the only pagination feature that works is "newest" because Gmail shows vague estimations for the number of results like "1-20 of hundreds" or "1-20 of thousands" and it can't determine the last page of results.



{ Thanks, jpp. }

Undocumented Shortcut for Caps Lock in Chrome OS

One of the most important changes Google made when designing the keyboard for Chrome OS notebooks was replacing the Caps Lock key with a search key. While the search key is not very useful since it only opens a new tab, the Caps Lock key made a lot of comments, forum threads and emails unreadable.





If you really need to use the Caps Lock key, there's a way to change the search key into a Caps Lock key in the settings. Unfortunately, this is time consuming, especially if you constantly switch between the search key and the Caps Lock key. There's a better way: press both Shift keys at the same time to enable or disable Caps Lock. It's an undocumented shortcut that works in the latest versions of Chrome OS.



{ Thanks, Cougar. }

Google Related for Chrome

Launched as a Google Toolbar feature last month, Google Related is now available for Chrome. "Google Related works in the background to find you the most interesting and relevant content on the topics you're currently viewing. For example, if you visit a restaurant's website, Related can show you a map, reviews from Google Places, mentions from across the web and other similar eateries that you might want to try," informs Google.





Google Related is a good opportunity for Google to track all the pages you visit and to offer something useful in return. After all, Google Related is a lot more useful than the PageRank button from Google Toolbar or Internet Explorer's Suggested Sites feature.



The bar is displayed at the bottom of the window, but not for all the pages. If there's not enough information related to the page, you won't see the bar. For example, Google Related is not displayed when you visit CNN's homepage, but it's displayed when you go to a CNN article. Another great thing about Google Related is that it shows various types of content, depending of the page you're visiting. Sometimes you'll see news articles and images, for other pages you'll find maps, local results and in other cases you'll see videos that play without leaving the page.



Google Related would be even better if you could see the related content on-demand (for example, by clicking a button). This way, you would no longer send your browsing history to Google and Google would get less information, so it's quite obvious why Google didn't add this option. Hopefully, Google will release an API for Google Related and other developers will create better extensions and widgets.

Update. Here an interesting quote from the book "I'm Feeling Lucky" by Douglas Edwards, who was Google's director of consumer marketing and brand management until 2005:

To tell you the PageRank of a site, Google needed to know what site you were visiting. The Toolbar sent that data back to Google if you let it, and Google would show you the green bar. The key was "if you let it," because you could also download a version of the toolbar that would not send any data back to Google. The user could make the choice, though Larry and the engineering team believed — and hoped — that most people wouldn't pass up the advanced features just because Google might learn their surfing habits. We're talking free extra data here. While knowing the PageRank of a page might have only nominal value to users, knowing the sites users visited would he tremendously valuable to Google. The PageRank indicator provided a justification for gathering it.

{ Thanks, Herin. }

Google Catalogs Returns

Two and a half years after discontinuing Google Catalogs, the service returns as an app for tablets. "The Google Catalogs app features digital versions of catalogs across many popular categories, including fashion and apparel, beauty, jewelry, home, kids and gifts," explains Google.



Right now, the app is only available for iPad, but Google promises to release an app for Android tablets soon. You can find catalogs from stores like Neiman Marcus, Macy's, Sephora, Bergdorf Goodman, Nordstrom and a few others. The application lets you find information about products, buy them, add them to favorites or to collections. For some of the products, you can watch videos or view photo albums. If you like one of the catalogs, add it to favorites and you'll get notifications when new issues arrive.







While the list of catalogs isn't impressive, Google says that it will continually add new catalogs. There's even a form for merchants.

{ Thanks, Herin. }

New Google Movies OneBox

Google's OneBox for movie showtimes has a new interface that offers information about more movies. It's much easier to compare movies and you can click "show more movies" to expand the OneBox. Google links to the Google Movies site, which shows short snippets from reviews, trailers, small photos, but also links to IMDb.







Here's the old OneBox:



In other related news, François Beaufort spotted that the Google.com sprite, which includes all the images that are used in the search results pages, added 4 icons for flight search, music search and movie search. Back in March, TechCrunch noticed that the music search feature no longer worked. "The music search feature introduced in 2009 is currently unavailable while we make some updates to the user experience," explained Google.





{ Thanks, Surat. }

Google Buys Motorola

Google found a way to solve the problem of Android patents and it's only three times more expensive than acquiring the Nortel patents: buying Motorola for $12.5 billion.



"Motorola has a history of over 80 years of innovation in communications technology and products, and in the development of intellectual property, which have helped drive the remarkable revolution in mobile computing we are all enjoying today. (...) In 2008, Motorola bet big on Android as the sole operating system across all of its smartphone devices. It was a smart bet and we're thrilled at the success they've achieved so far," says Google's CEO, Larry Page.



A few days ago, Motorola's CEO said that the company owns "one of the strongest and most respected patent portfolios in the industry. We have over 17,000 patents granted and over 7,000 patents pending with particular strength in 2G and 3G essential, non-essential patents important to the delivery of competitive products in the marketplace, video particularly compression, decompression and security technologies and finally, a leading position in 4G LTE essential." Sanjay Jha also said that IP was important to differentiate from other Android vendors. It's clear that Motorola didn't want to license its technology to other Android OEMs, so Google's solution was to buy Motorola.



Samsung, HTC, Sony Ericsson and LG had a unanimous reaction. "We welcome Google's commitment to defending Android and its partners." After all, it's Google who created the software, so Google has to spend $12.5 billion to solve the mess.



Google promises that Android will continue to be an open platform, but the other Android OEMs will have their reasons to doubt. Google's biggest acquisition to date could be an answer to Android's problems, but also the beginning of the end for Android as an open-source mobile operating system. Motorola released two of the most important Android devices (the original Droid and the XOOM tablet) and Android smartphones saved it from bankruptcy, but Motorola is a US company that can't compete outside of US and it doesn't have a good track record when it comes to releasing the latest software updates. Buying this company to save the Android ecosystem will only work if Motorola disappears.



Update. An interesting quote from Motorola's CEO (June 2011): "I expect consolidation to occur. Our customers are consolidating, and our supply base is also consolidating. But my view is that consolidation occurs in some interesting ways. I'm not convinced that handset manufacturers acquiring other manufacturers is the best way for value to be created for shareholders. Consolidation across content manufacturers and hardware and software manufacturers -- I see a bunch of different ways for this consolidation to occur, to create shareholder value and create different structures to the industry. You've already seen the acquisition of Palm by HP, a very interesting acquisition that brought software and hardware assets together. The relationship between Microsoft and Nokia also speaks to that. Do we expect Motorola to be an independent company? I don't know yet. I hope very much that we are."