Enable the Default Web Apps in Chrome 8

Google Chrome 8 has been launched, but where is the Web Store? It will be available soon. Google has already started to inform developers about the upcoming changes to the extensions gallery:

"These last few months, our team has been hard at work, preparing for the Chrome Web Store launch later this year. Extensions and themes for Google Chrome will be part of this new store."

While waiting for the Chrome Web Store launch, you can enable the apps section from the new tab page and install the 3 default web apps: Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Docs. Here's how to do that:

1. Close all Google Chrome windows.

2. In Windows, right-click on a Chrome shortcut from your desktop, select "Properties" and append the following text to the Target field: " --enable-default-apps" (don't use quotes, but don't forget to add a space before adding the command line flag). Click "OK" to close the dialog and then open Google Chrome.

On a Mac, quit Chrome, open the Terminal and paste this:

open /Applications/Google\ Chrome.app --args -enable-default-apps

For Linux you could use this:

/opt/google/chrome/google-chrome -enable-default-apps

3. Type chrome://extensions/ in the address bar (or click on the wrench menu and go to Tools > Extensions).

4. Click the "developer mode" link and then click "Update extensions now".

5. After less than a minute, your new tab page should look like this:



You can open the apps in regular tabs or you can right-click and select "open as pinned tab" or "open full screen".

Why Google Maps Labels Look Better

If you've ever wondered why Google Maps labels look more readable than the labels used by Bing Maps or Yahoo Maps, Justin O'Beirne has some answers.

"The white outlines of Google's city labels are thicker, and you can't see maps' background details (roads, rivers, etc.) behind them. (...) Google typically uses more classes of city labels, at a time, than the other two sites. (...) While the primary difference between each site’s city label classes is their size, Google takes this one step further by also using color to differentiate its city label classes. In that, the smallest city labels on Google’s maps are significantly lighter in color than the largest ones. These lighter labels, in turn, enable smaller cities to fade into background, while allowing the larger cities to stand out."


{ Image licensed as Creative Commons by Justin O'Beirne. }

Google Reader for Android

Google Reader's mobile web app works really well and it has a great interface, so there aren't many reasons to create a native application for Google Reader. The main issue is that the application doesn't work offline, but this is a feature that could be easily implemented.

Instead of improving the mobile web app, Google decided to release a native Android app for Google Reader. The application supports multiple accounts, synchronizes your subscriptions and works offline. It also lets you search your feeds -- a feature that's inexplicably missing from the mobile web app.


Google Reader for Android uses infinite scrolling, has bigger touch areas, it integrates with the operating system's "send to" actions and has a neat trick in the settings that lets you navigate between articles using your phone's volume keys.

Google's Shift From Search Results to Answers

Google's post about the European Commission antitrust investigation reveals two important things about the Google search engine: the goal is to answer user queries and "the only constant is change".

"Sometimes the best, most relevant answer to a query is our traditional 'ten blue links', and sometimes it is a news article, sports score, stock quote, video, or a map. Today, when you type in 'weather in London' or '15 grams in ounces' you get the answers directly (often before you even hit Enter). In the future, we will need to answer much more complex questions just as fast and as clearly."

Universal Search and the integrated search experience that combines results from different search engines will make it even more difficult to understand Google's algorithms and to find unadulterated web search results. Instant Search will force Google to provide more instant answers and to treat web pages as sources of information. It's the subtle difference between an answer:


... and a potentially useful search result:


The difference between showing links to reviews and showing a clever summary based on sentiment analysis:


Google's conclusion is that the "ten blue links" will soon be a thing of the past and search results will become more dynamic:

"Our results are continuing to evolve from a list of websites to something far more dynamic. Today there's real-time content, automatically translated content, local content (especially important for mobile devices), images, videos, books, and a whole lot more. Users can search by voice - and in a variety of languages. And we've developed new ad formats such as product listing ads and new pricing models such as cost-per-action. We cannot predict where search and online advertising will be headed, but we know for sure that they won't stay the same. By staying focused on innovation we can continue to make search even better - for the benefit of users everywhere."

Google Editions to Be Released This Month

The Wall Street Journal reports that Google will launch this month Google Editions, the service that will allow users to read copyrighted books from Google Book Search.

The long-delayed venture — Google executives had said they hoped to launch this summer — recently has cleared several technical and legal hurdles, people close to the company say. It is set to debut in the U.S. by the end of the year and internationally in the first quarter of next year, said Scott Dougall, a Google product management director. (...)

Google Editions hopes to upend the existing e-book market by offering an open, "read anywhere" model that is different from many competitors. Users will be able to buy books directly from Google or from multiple online retailers — including independent bookstores — and add them to an online library tied to a Google account. They will be able to access their Google accounts on most devices with a Web browser, including personal computers, smartphones and tablets.

This will finally answer the question "How can I read an entire book in Google Book Search?". Right now, you can only read books in the public domain and some books from the Partner Program. "Many of the books in Google Books come from authors and publishers who participate in our Partner Program. For these books, our partners decide how much of the book is browsable - anywhere from a few sample pages to the whole book," explains Google. Google's partners will now have an incentive to allow full access to the books: users will actually pay to read the books.

Web Store, the Most Important New Feature in Chrome 8

Even if Google didn't mention it in the release notes, Chrome 7 has support for installing web apps, but Chrome Web Store is not yet released. The store will be the most important new feature in Chrome 8, which will be launched very soon.

"Chrome 8 is the first version that supports the Chrome Web Store," mentions a Google Chrome engineer. There's already a new icon for the store in Chromium and this should be the final icon.


Google Chrome 7 was launched on October 21, almost 6 weeks ago, so Chrome 8 and Chrome Web Store should be available this week.

Most Shared Section in Google News

Google News has a new section that lists the most shared articles. It's not clear if Google counts the number of people who used the sharing feature from Google News or tracks the references from Twitter and other social sites, but Google's chart is not very reliable. When I started to write this post, the most popular news article was a story about Google's Groupon acquisition that has been shared by 2,189 people.


15 minutes later, the most popular article was a NASA press release shared by 10,893 people.


{ Thanks, Cougar Abugado. }

Link to a YouTube Comment

If you happen to find a YouTube comment that's really interesting and you want to share it with other people, mouse over the comment, click on the "Share" button and copy the link.


Each YouTube comment has a permalink, but it's not easy to notice that the comment is displayed below the video in a special section titled "Linked Comment".


You could also use this feature to annotate a video before sharing it with your friends. Post a comment, copy the link and use it to highlight your comment.

Google Earth 6: Better Street View and 3D Trees

Google Earth 6 doesn't have too many new features. You can now use Street View just like in Google Maps by dragging the pegman icon. "To view street-level imagery for a specific location, zoom into an area at an altitude of approximately 500km. You will see a pegman icon appear at the top right below the navigation controls. Click and drag the icon across the 3D viewer. A blue border will appear around roads that have street-level imagery available," explains Google.

Another new feature is the "3D Trees" layer that can be enabled from the "3D Buildings" section. Google Earth includes 3D models for city parks (San Francisco, Chicago, Tokio, Athens) and remote forests (Amazon Forest).

Historical imagery is now more accessible: just click on the date of the oldest imagery in the status bar and you'll be able to see all the historical images that are available for the same location.

Google Earth 6 also adds ground-level navigation that lets you explore 3D buildings and 3D trees, 3D measurements for heights and widths of buildings and a much better Tour Recorder that improves motion fidelity.