Google Checkout Merges With Google Wallet

When Google Wallet was introduced, I described Wallet as "Google Checkout's extension to offline payments". Now Google Checkout is transitioning to Google Wallet and Google will no longer have two payment services. "We're starting to take all the great functionality and ease-of-use you've come to know with Google Checkout and merge it with Google Wallet to create a single wallet, whether you're buying online or in-store. We're also starting to integrate Google Wallet as the payment method on Android Market, YouTube, Google+ Games and many other Google sites."

If you already use Google Checkout, the site will redirect you to wallet.google.com, where you can manage your transactions and payment methods. Google Checkout is now known as the Google Wallet Online Service, "a free service that lets you carry your wallet on the web". Not all the sellers will use the new name right away, so you'll still see Checkout's logo in many sites.

For now, the offline Google Wallet only works in the US and the Android app is only available if you buy a Sprint Nexus S 4G phone. "Our goal is to make it possible for you to add all of your payment cards to Google Wallet, so you can say goodbye to even the biggest traditional wallets. This is still just the beginning and while we're excited about this first step, we look forward to bringing Google Wallet to more phones in the future," said Google back in September, when Google Wallet was launched.

Find WebP Images

WebP started as an experiment to create a better format for image files. Google's format has recently added a lot of features: animation, ICC profile, XMP metadata, transparency and more. "Photographic images typically encoded as JPEG can be encoded in WebP lossy mode to achieve smaller file size. Icons and graphics can be encoded better in WebP lossless mode than in PNG. WebP lossy with alpha can be used to create transparent images that have minimal visual degradation, yet are much smaller in file size. Animations compressed as GIFs can use animation support in WebP," explains Google.

WebP is the one-size-fits-all solution that can replace all the other image formats. Unfortunately, it's only supported by Chrome, Opera and Android's browser (Ice Cream Sandwich). You can also install the WebP image codec in Windows, use image editing software that supports WebP (GIMP, ImageMagick and more) or install a Photoshop plugin.

Now you can also find WebP images using Google's image search engine. Just add filetype:webp to your query or go to the advanced search page and select "WebP Files" in the "File types" section. Here's an example.

If you restrict the results to .com domains, Google only returns 1830 WebP images. There are 115 results for [Google], 7-9 results for [webp] and 88 results for [image].

{ Thanks, Herin. }

Table Snippets in Google Search

Google has improved the snippets for the pages that include big tables. They're just like the snippets for lists, but columns are clearly separated and snippets also include the table header.

Barry Schwartz says that "Google is trying to figure out the make up of the old fashion HTML tables to show the snippet in a table format". Google also finds the most relevant columns from the table and usually displays the first two rows.

{ Thanks, Herin. }

Google Music Store

Google Music is out of beta and users can now buy songs, but only in the US. Business Insider reports that the store has 13 million songs from 3 major labels (EMI, Universal, Sony) and other independent labels, self-released artists can upload their own songs and T-Mobile customers can pay for songs on their phone bills.

Google Music Store is available in the Android Market (both the web interface and a new version of the mobile app that will be released soon). A surprising feature is the integration with Google+: "if you use Google+ to share a song or album with someone either privately or through a circle, the person who receives the share will get one free full play of the song or album. If you do a Public share, people in your circles will get one free full play of the shared song or album. Everyone else who sees the share will get a preview."

Google offers a lot of exclusive songs and albums, but you can't download the free songs from the store without associating a US credit card to Google Checkout.



Google Music will store the songs you've uploaded or bought and now you can also download them. For example, in the web interface, click the arrow icon next to a song and select "Save to computer". The catch is that "you can only download each purchased track from the web 2 times". To download all the songs you've purchased from Google Music, use the Music Manager app.

"Google Music is about discovering, purchasing, sharing and enjoying digital music in new, innovative and personalized ways. Google Music helps you spend more time listening to your collection and less time managing it. We automatically sync your entire music library — both purchases and uploads — across all your devices so you don't have to worry about cables, file transfers or running out of storage space," informs the Google blog.

Gmail's Hybrid iOS App

Two weeks after the embarrassing launch, Gmail's app for iPhone and iPad is back in the App Store. Google fixed a bug that broke one of the main features: notifications and that's the reason why the app has been temporarily removed from the App Store.

Gmail's "native" app is actually a wrapper for a new version of the Gmail web app, enhanced with a few features that integrate it with the operating system: basic push notifications, image upload and a new navigation menu. It's interesting that the new interface of the mobile web app is only available if you use the "native" app.

I've always thought that Gmail's mobile web app is much better than the native Android app, so it's a pleasant surprise to see that Google didn't develop a completely new app for iOS. This way, you'll always get the latest features and you don't have to wait until Google releases a new version.

Regarding notifications, the app only supports badges and sound notifications, so you won't see the banner notifications introduced in iOS 5. Hopefully, Google will address this issue in a future update.

"To try out the Gmail app today, install it from App Store on any iOS 4+ device. Those who already have the Gmail app released Nov 2 must uninstall or log out of the old app prior to installing the new app," suggests Google.

Google Verbatim

Your query is just the starting point for Google's searches. Sometimes Google fixes misspellings, replaces some of the keywords with synonyms or other related keywords, disambiguates your query using your search history. These changes usually improve the quality of Google results because it's hard to come up with the perfect query and improving the query is the first thing you need to do to get better results.

Unfortunately, Google's adjustments aren't always helpful and this adds noise to the list of the search results. For example, I've noticed that Google matches many pages that mention "iPhone 4" when you search for [iPhone 4S] and that's a really big mistake. Having to use quotes every time you enter a query that includes "iPhone 4S" is annoying, but that's probably an issue that will be fixed when there are more pages that mention the name of Apple's latest phone.

Another way to improve Google's query adjustment algorithms is to use "Verbatim", a new feature from the search options sidebar. Just click "show more search tools" in the sidebar, select "Verbatim" and Google will no longer change your query.

"With the Verbatim tool, you can search using the exact keywords you typed," explains Google. Verbatim disables Google's spelling corrections and Google no longer replaces some of your keywords with synonyms (e.g.: television / TV), similar terms (e.g: buy flowers / send flowers), words with the same stem (e.g.: fixing / fix). Verbatim also disables search personalization.

Here are the results for [iPhone 4S fixing battery], after/before enabling Verbatim.


"In addition to verbatim search, which will be rolling out to all users over the next few days, we're also applying similar ideas directly to our algorithms, such as tuning the accuracy of when our query broadening search improvements trigger. In the meantime, if you want to search for a very specific term, be that [carosel] or the [etymology of sissors], give the verbatim tool a try," mentions Google.

{ Thanks, Venkat and Herin. }

Cara Mengembalikan GRUB Linux Yang Hilang

"Om Swastiastu"

Sebelumnya saya akan jelaskan apa itu GRUB.
GRUB adalah implementasi referensi spesifikasi Multiboot, yang menyediakan pilihan untuk boot dari salah satu OS yang terpasang pada komputer atau memilih konfigurasi kernel tertentu yang tersedia pada partisi sistem operasi tertentu (biasanya muncul jika memakai dual OS).

Bagi kalian yang memakai dual OS (Linux dan Windows) biasanya GRUB ini tidak akan mucul jika kalian telah menginstall ulang Windows. Naa,,, disini akan saya berikan cara mengembalikan GRUB yang hilang.

Yang harus disiapkan adalah : 

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Google X

New York Times has an interesting article about Google X, a secret lab where Sergey Brin and other Google employees tackle important projects that aren't yet ready for primetime.

In a top-secret lab in an undisclosed Bay Area location where robots run free, the future is being imagined. It's a place where your refrigerator could be connected to the Internet, so it could order groceries when they ran low. Your dinner plate could post to a social network what you’re eating. Your robot could go to the office while you stay home in your pajamas. And you could, perhaps, take an elevator to outer space.

Google X is the place where Google works on the driverless car and New York Times reports that Google is considering manufacturing the cars in the US. Many projects are related to Android @ Home, an initiative announced this year that tries to make everyday objects smarter. "We want to think of every appliance in your home as a potential I/O device," said Google's Joe Britt. Google tries to build the "Web of things" by connecting home accessories, wearable objects to the Internet.

Most of the ideas tackled at Google X involve robots. "Fleets of robots could assist Google with collecting information, replacing the humans that photograph streets for Google Maps, say people with knowledge of Google X. Robots born in the lab could be destined for homes and offices, where they could assist with mundane tasks or allow people to work remotely".

It's interesting to note that one of the Google X projects could be released by the end of the year, although it's not clear what it does. At the I/O conference, Google announced that it will introduce "a Web-connected light bulb that could communicate wirelessly with Android devices," so this might be the product that will be released.

Google has always tried to solve big problems, even if many people think that it should focus on improving search results and ad quality. "Larry and Sergey founded Google because they wanted to help solve really big problems using technology," said Sebastian Thrun, a robotics expert who invented the first self-driving car and now works at Google.

Google X could be the next Xerox PARC or it could fail, but it's important to think big and take risks. "I just feel like people aren't working enough on impactful things. People are really afraid of failure on things, and so it's hard for them to do ambitious stuff. And also, they don't realize the power of technological solutions to things, especially computers," complained Larry Page in Steven Levy's "In the Plex".

Hopefully, MG Siegler is right when he says that "whatever is going on inside of Google X, I'm fairly certain it's filled to the brim with the kind of stuff that made us all fall in love with Google in the first place".

{ Thanks, Venkat. }

Google's Info Panes

Google's search results are usually a great source of information, but Google's goal has never been to send users to other pages. If Google can provide an instant answer to a query, then the answer is usually displayed in an OneBox, at the top of the search results page. Here's a movie OneBox from 2007:


Google's OneBoxes have provided weather forecasts, simple facts, definitions, unit conversions, stock information, movie times, sports scores, maps, package tracking information, in addition to results from other specialized search engines. They're still useful, but Google can now provide a lot more information. You've probably noticed that OneBoxes are bigger and more complex these days:


Sometimes OneBoxes replace the top search results, as you can see if you try a query related to local businesses, like [pizza ny]:


The latest evolution of the OneBox is a huge section placed on the right side of the page. It doesn't have an official name yet, but I'll call it the info pane. For general local queries, it displays a static map. If you search for a local business, it now shows information about the business from Google Places.


Google also tests an info pane that shows information about people and companies: a search for [Twitter] shows the name of the CEO, the company's address and other information from Wikipedia. It's likely that the structured data is generated by Freebase, which is now owned by Google.



Google's info panes could include a lot of useful information: detailed answers, fact sheets, interactive widgets, music/video players, slideshows etc. It's a new way to display information and the space constraints of the OneBox have disappeared, now that the ads will be moved to the bottom of the page.

{ Thanks, Jérôme. }

Flash and Mobile Devices

Last week, Adobe announced that it will stop developing the Flash Player for mobile devices. It may seem like a surprising news, but the most convincing reason to create Flash apps and sites is Flash's installed base. Because of the popularity of YouTube and other sites that require Flash, most computer users install the Flash Player (99% of the Internet-enabled computers, according to Adobe).

That's not the case when it comes to mobile devices: Flash Player can only be installed in Android 2.2+, Blackberry PlayBook and HP webOS. According to Adobe, "by the end of 2010, over 35 models of smartphones were certified for Flash Player, and over 20 million smartphones either shipped with or downloaded Flash Player." The estimated percentage for Flash-enabled mobile devices shipped in 2011 is 36%. Since Apple's iOS devices and Windows Phone devices won't include support for Flash, it's obvious that Flash can't become ubiquitous on mobile devices. In fact, right now, it's mostly limited to Android and that's exactly what Adobe doesn't want to achieve.

Adobe's biggest mistake was that it assumed that Flash could be a great option for building mobile web apps. The mobile Flash Player was useful to load pages that required Flash, but that's because users didn't have other options. The experience wasn't great, scrolling was jerky, Flash objects looked disconnected from the rest of the page, so it was a good idea to only load Flash content on-demand.

Developers that want to build mobile apps right now have two options: either build HTML5 apps that work in any modern browser or create native apps for iOS, Android and other platforms. Adobe has tools for both options and the goal for the future is to improve them. "HTML5 is now universally supported on major mobile devices, in some cases exclusively. This makes HTML5 the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms," says Adobe. "Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores." Both AIR apps and HTML5 apps are already successful and the main advantage is that they don't require a plugin.

While it's nice to be able to load sites that require Flash on your phone and tablet, Flash is not a technology for the future, it's mostly for the past. Steve Jobs was right to say that "open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too)" and to recommend Adobe to "focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind".

Google chose pragmatism and started to collaborate with Adobe, who developed Flash for Android, Google TV and a more secure Flash plugin bundled with Chrome. Android's open nature and Chrome's focus on security made this possible. The end result was that users had the option to install Flash on their mobile devices and their desktop browser was more secure, since Flash was sandboxed and automatically updated.

Both Apple and Google cared about users, but in different ways: Apple wanted to provide a better experience, while Google wanted to provide more options. Flash was the wrong option for mobile devices, but it was the only option to load some sites.