Connect YouTube with Google+

YouTube now lets you connect your Google+ account and watch the videos shared by your friends on YouTube's homepage. At the moment, AutoShare is not available and you can't automatically share activities like uploading a video, commenting on a video or liking a video.

To enable this feature, go to Settings > Sharing and click "Connect" next to Google+.


You'll have to wait a few hours until YouTube starts to show videos shared by the people you follow in Google+. Unfortunately, there's a significant delay and the videos aren't added in real time.


{ Thanks, Katty, Herin and Venkat. Via Nirav. }

How Google's Interface Might Change

In an interesting presentation I mentioned yesterday, Jon Wiley, Google's lead designer for search, showed some screenshots that showcase Google's new interface.

There are many design changes that aren't publicly released yet: the navigation bar disappears and it's replaced by a small arrow next to Google's logo that probably lets you choose a different service, the share button and the notification button have a new interface, the application menu has been moved next to the other action buttons, just like in Google Docs. The search options have been moved from the sidebar to the action bar, next to the application menu.




It's likely that the new interfaces have been introduced gradually and the black navigation bar was just a temporary solution. The most striking evidence that these screenshots reveal some future updates is that Google Docs has recently added a new settings menu that seems redundant.


{ Thanks, Jérôme. }

Google Will Discontinue Google Buzz and Code Search

It's not surprising to hear that Google Buzz will be closed in a few weeks. Google now focuses on Google+, a product that learned from Buzz's slip-ups and became a lot more popular than Buzz. "We learned privacy is not a feature... it is foundational to the product. (...) But probably the best lesson we learned is about how to introduce a product. We started very slowly with Google+ -- in a limited Field Trial - in order to listen and learn and gather plenty of real-world feedback," says Google's Bradley Horowitz.

I'll miss Buzz because it was a lot more simple than Google+, it was integrated with Gmail and it allowed me to automatically share my favorite Google Reader posts. Buzz will continue to power the Google+ activity stream, but it will no longer be a Gmail feature.

It's not surprising to hear that Google will close Jaiku, a product acquired back in 2007 that was later open-sourced or that Google will disable iGoogle's social features powered by OpenSocial. They weren't popular because iGoogle didn't integrate with a social network.


What's surprising is to hear that Google will shut down Code Search, probably the best search engine for open source code. Code Search had a great API that was used in plug-ins for software like Eclipse. It was a brilliant way to find useful code and Google, the big proponent of open source, will close it.


"We aspire to build great products that really change people's lives, products they use two or three times a day. To succeed you need real focus and thought—thought about what you work on and, just as important, what you don't work on. It's why we recently decided to shut down some products, and turn others into features of existing products," explains Bradley Horowitz.

You can still use Buzz, Code Search and Jaiku until January 15 2012. "In addition, later today the Google Labs site will shut down, and as previously announced, Boutiques.com and the former Like.com websites will be replaced by Google Product Search." I'm sure that these aren't the only Google services that will be closed: at some point orkut, Knol, Google Toolbar, Google Bookmarks will have to go away.

Google Analytics in Real-Time

Two weeks ago, Google Analytics launched real-time stats. This feature is not enabled for everyone yet, but you can request an invitation using this form. After receiving the invitation, you need to switch to the new Analytics interface, select a site, go to the "Home" tab and click "Real-Time (Beta) / Overview".

I must say that this feature is addictive because it shows a lot of information about your site in real-time. You can find the number of active visitors, the number of pageviews, the top referrals and the top active pages. There's also a map that highlights the cities where your visitors are coming from. And all this information is updated so frequently that it's difficult to keep up with the ever changing stats.


Google Analytics is great for the intuitive reports and the advanced filters that help you understand traffic fluctuations, but a lot of people will use the service more often because of the real-time stats. They're constantly changing, they're mesmerizing and empowering.

Disable Blogger's Dynamic Views

If you don't like Blogger's Dynamic Views, but your favorite blog enabled one of them, there's a way to go back to the previous template: just add &v=0 to the URL. For example, here's the URL for Gmail's blog: http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/?v=0.

Unfortunately, the change is not persistent and you need to add the parameter every time you visit the homepage or one of the posts. You can also bookmark the URL.

Tabs in Google Translate

Google Translate made it easier to translate a text into multiple languages by adding tabs. When you select a language from one of the two lists, it's added as a tab and you can quickly switch between the most recent three languages. Google's language detection works pretty well, so I'm not sure why there are tabs for the source languages, but the tabs for the target languages are useful.


You've probably noticed that Google Translate's custom drop-downs for selecting languages remember the most recent languages you've selected and highlight them.


In other Google Translate news, the Android app's conversation mode now supports 14 languages. "Earlier this year, we launched an update to Google Translate for Android with an experimental feature called Conversation Mode, which enables you to you translate speech back and forth between languages. We began with just English and Spanish, but today we're expanding to 14 languages, adding Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Polish, Russian and Turkish," informs Google.

{ Thanks, Xavier. }

More About Google's New Design

Google's lead designer for search, Jon Wiley, explained in an interesting presentation at the UX Week 2011 that the unified interface is the biggest redesign in Google's history. It's interesting to know that the interface has nothing to do with Google+, but it was associated with Google+ because it was the first Google product that used it.

Larry Page decided that Google needs a more beautiful UI on the same day when he became Google's CEO (April 4). Google Creative Labs, who came up with Google's Super Bowl ad and many of the Chrome ads, designed the new interface and Google's designers were really surprised that they're finally allowed to create something bold. Jon Wiley quotes a tweet from a Google user who noticed the new design and concluded that Google must have hired some designers.

While Larry Page was really pleased with the result, many Google employees hated the redesign at first (especially Gmail's new interface), but they started to like it after a few days. It's a pretty big change for Google and it's really surprising to see that it was Larry Page's idea.



{ via François }

How to Disable Blogger's Lightbox

Last month, Blogger's team launched a Lightbox-like feature which was quickly removed after users started to complain. Blogger's Lightbox was automatically enabled for all the images from a post and blog owners couldn't disable it.

The feature is now back, it's still enabled by default, but you can disable it from Settings > Formatting by selecting "No" next to "Open images in Lightbox". If you use Blogger's new interface, the setting can be found in the "Post and comments" section. As Google explains, "If Yes is selected, when a reader clicks on an image in a post, it will be displayed in a slideshow-like overlay instead of leaving your page and navigating to the image."

The old interface:


The new interface:


{ via Blogger Buzz. Thanks, Petros. }

Google Maps in WebGL

If you like the Google Maps app for Android and you wonder why it looks better than the desktop Google Maps, there's a new experimental interface that uses WebGL and it's available in Chrome 14+ and Firefox 8+. If you click "Want to try something new?" in the Google Maps sidebar and enable MapGL, you'll see a completely new Google Maps interface that shows 3D buildings and no longer uses Flash for Street View.


"We've rebuilt Google Maps from the ground up. Our enhanced Maps provide improved performance, richer 3D graphics, smoother transitions between imagery, 45° view rotation, easier access to Street View and more," explains Google.




Google says that the new interface requires Chrome 14 or Firefox 8 (beta), Windows Vista/7 or Mac OS 10.6+ or Linux and a graphics card that supports WebGL. I've tested in Chrome 14 and it works well: the animations are smooth and Google Maps looks more like a native app.

Google Maps Adds Layer Previews

Google Maps replaced the static icons for the satellite and street maps layers with interactive previews of the layers. I'm not sure if they're useful, but they look a lot better than the icons.

Corey, a reader of this blog, found a better way to describe the new feature: "When you're looking at a map in normal view, the satellite view button shows what the satellite view looks like on the little square where the button is and acts like a window to satellite view like you're looking through the regular map and it follows the map as it moves. I thought that was pretty cool."



{ Thanks, Corey. }

Google Updates the Dictionary OneBox

Google updated the interface of the Dictionary OneBox and added synonyms. They were already available if you clicked "more info" to see the entire list of definitions, but synonyms are useful enough to be displayed in the OneBox.


Another change is that the OneBox includes more definitions for each part of speech:


To trigger the Dictionary OneBox, search for [define word] or [word definition]. In some cases, Google shows the OneBox even if you don't include "define" or "definition". For example, if you search for [obnubilate], Google will show the definitions because it's likely that they're useful for many people.

{ Thanks, Bora and Venkat. }

Google+ Photos Replaces Picasa Web in the Navigation Bar

This is really weird. The "photos" link from Google's navigation bar no longer sends you to Picasa Web Albums if you're logged in. Google decided to send users to the Photos section from Google+ which shows photos from your circles, photos from your Android phone, photos you've been tagged in and your list of Picasa Web albums.





You can still go to Picasa Web Albums, but you have to bookmark the old URL or manually type it in the address bar. Google+ Photos lacks many of the features from Picasa Web Albums: Picnik integration, batch editing, entering an album description, ordering prints, creating album maps, moving photos to a different album and more. The interface is more user friendly, but it's not yet a full-fledged photo sharing app.

{ Thanks, Herin. }

Dart, Google's Programming Language for the Web

Google's alternative to JavaScript is not called Dash, the name has been changed to Dart. Designed as an object-oriented programming language that's both flexible and structured, Dart should be familiar to Java and C++ programmers, while inheriting some advantages of scripting languages like JavaScript.


Dart is "a class-based optionally typed programming language for building web applications" and Google says that it's better suited for large-scale projects. "Developed with the goals of simplicity, efficiency, and scalability, the Dart language combines powerful new language features with familiar language constructs into a clear, readable syntax."

Dart is flexible because it's both static and dynamic, it's both for clients and servers and it's useful for both small scripts and large projects. Dart apps are easier to debug, to maintain and to develop collaboratively. The language is optimized for performance and doesn't allow programmers to use features like defining constants that have to be computed at runtime.

For now, no browser supports Dart, but it's likely that Chrome will address this problem in the near future. The code can be executed "either on a native virtual machine or on top of a JavaScript engine by using a compiler that translates Dart code to JavaScript." Google already provides a simple online IDE called Dartboard that lets you edit a small program using your browser, but Dartboard will evolve into a full-fledged online IDE.

Last year, a Google employee admitted that it will be difficult to convince developers and browser vendors to adopt the new language, but the fact that it's easy to convert Dart code to JavaScript is an important advantage. Google will promote it "as the language for serious web development on the web platform" and will "actively push for its standardization and adoption across the board". After all, "the goal of the Dart effort is ultimately to replace JavaScript as the lingua franca of web development on the open web platform." It's hard to say whether it will succeed, but it's worth trying to fix JavaScript's flaws by starting from the scratch. Google will have standardize the language, build development tools and develop powerful apps that use Dart to make a better case.

{ Thanks, Venkat. }