Tag Archives: browser

Street View: your friendly campus tour guide

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For many, the start of a new year is also the start of a new semester. Whether you’re a current student trying to familiarize yourself with campus, an applicant assessing your options or an alumnus feeling nostalgic, the Street View feature in Google Maps can be your tour guide without the backward walking. We recently added imagery of more university campuses to the existing special collections already available via Street View through our Partner Program . Let’s take a quick tour of some of the many beautiful campuses around the world. In Tokyo’s Shinjuku ward, you can find Waseda University . Founded in 1882, it is known for producing some of the top Japanese politicians and business leaders in recent history. Check out the statue of Ōkuma Shigenobu , who founded the university. View Larger Map Halfway around the world, we can visit the University of Glasgow in Scotland. Founded in 1451, this university is one of the oldest in the world , and the fourth oldest in the English speaking world. Take a tour of the magnificent campus starting at the West Quadrangle of the Main Building. View Larger Map Hop the Atlantic and cross the U.S. to Stanford University , which was founded in 1891 in Palo Alto, Calif. Located near Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, both of our founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, attended Stanford for their graduate studies. Explore the campus starting at the palm-lined main quad with a view of Hoover Tower. View Larger Map Students, take note: Even though your campus is now available in your browser, you still need to go to class! To view other imagery collections of popular universities around the world see a complete list of the campuses or visit a few more highlights in the Street View gallery . Posted by Chris Fiock, Program Manager for Street View

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Street View: your friendly campus tour guide

Google Toolbar 7—cleaner, fresher and faster

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Today we’re bringing the speed of Google Instant to the latest version of Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer. We’re also introducing a fresh, clean look that personalizes Toolbar with the tools you use most. Toolbar Instant If you’ve used Instant on google.com or in Chrome , you’ll be right at home with Toolbar Instant. Just start typing in the search box and search predictions and results will appear instantly as you type, getting you the results you want faster. You can also type Alt+G to get to the Toolbar search box more quickly. To enable Toolbar Instant, visit Toolbar Options and click “Enable Instant for faster searching and browsing.” Toolbar Instant works on IE8 and IE9; if you’re on an older browser, you can either upgrade your Internet Explorer version or try Instant in Chrome , which includes many of the same tools you’re familiar with in Toolbar. Personalized Toolbar This new version of Toolbar is simpler, cleaner and emphasizes what’s important to you. The tools that you use most will remain visible on the toolbar, while buttons that you haven’t used recently will be moved to the new “More” button. As you discover and use particular tools that help your browsing experience, like Share or Translate, they’ll automatically appear on the toolbar, making your most relevant tools easy to access. This personalization is stored only on your computer, so no information is sent to Google unless your usage statistics are enabled. You can learn more about this personalization at our Help Center . Making Toolbar work for you Some Google Toolbar features, such as PageRank and spell check, require sharing some information with Google in order to function properly. With Google Toolbar 7, we’ve made it easier for you to control your privacy settings. From a single settings menu, you can decide which of these features you’d like to enable and which ones you’d like to stay off. We’ve also continued to improve the performance of Toolbar 7 without slowing down your browser, making it one of the fastest add-ons you can use in Internet Explorer. Google Toolbar 7 is available in English on our download page and will be coming to our other supported languages over the next week. If you’re already using Toolbar, you’ll automatically be updated to the new version over the next few weeks. You can also find out more about Toolbar on our features page. Posted by Allen Huang, Associate Product Manager, Toolbar

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Google Toolbar 7—cleaner, fresher and faster

Google Apps highlights – 4/15/2011

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This is part of a regular series of Google Apps updates that we post every couple of weeks. Look for the label “ Google Apps highlights ” and subscribe to the series. – Ed. In the last few weeks we’ve improved Google Apps with easier email snafu avoidance, better document and spreadsheet printing, stronger business security features for Android and more. The pace of entire organizations switching to Google Apps also continued to build, and many have shared their stories about moving to the cloud. Recipient suggestion features graduate from Gmail Labs We’ve all made the embarrassing mistake of forgetting to add an important email recipient, or even worse, sending an email to the wrong person with a similar name as someone else. To help you avoid such a digital faux pas, we experimented with Gmail Labs features that could notify you while drafting a message if it appeared you had addressed your message incorrectly. We heard lots of positive feedback about these Labs, so on Wednesday we rolled out recipient suggestion features for all Gmail users. Keep an eye out for the tips that show up beneath the address box! Pagination and better printing for documents Google Docs speeds up collaboration right in the browser between classmates and colleagues, but people often want to see how documents will look on paper before actually printing. On Tuesday we advanced Google Docs another notch by adding pagination —the ability to see where page breaks fall. We also made document printing a whole lot better on Chrome. Printing is now a simpler operation right from the browser’s “File” menu, and what you see in your browser is exactly what you’ll get on paper. Improvements to spreadsheet printing, too As of Monday, you can now print spreadsheets from your mobile phone with Cloud Print, building on the mobile document and email printing capabilities we announced earlier this year. You can print from most mobile browsers that support HTML5 to any cloud-connected printer . We also made improvements to spreadsheet printing from desktop browsers, with new options for printing spreadsheet titles, sheet names and page numbers. Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office interface improvements If your school or business wants some of Google Docs’ collaboration magic in familiar Microsoft Office software without upgrading Office or deploying SharePoint®, then we think you’ll like Google Cloud Connect. People can work together on the same files at the same time in Word, PowerPoint® and Excel® without the agony of attachments. We recently added 38 new language interfaces and a top feature request: the ability to minimize the Google Cloud Connect toolbar . Better Android security and productivity for businesses Last week we treated our business and education customers to three new Android features : storage encryption for Android 3.0+ devices, a streamlined contacts experience that makes it faster to find and connect with people in your organization and the ability for users to locate and secure lost or stolen Android 2.2+ devices without burdening IT administrators. Who’s gone Google? Since our last update here, over 60,000 businesses have moved to Google Apps. We’ve profiled quite a few on the Google Enterprise Blog recently, including Boxx Group , South Carolina REALTORS , Just Salad , 3Tailer , and our favorite switch story of all, Contoso . Thousands of schools, nonprofits and other organizations made the move as well. Welcome to Boise State University , Edina Public Schools , ESSEC Business School , Monash University , Oakwood Junior School , the Georgia Department of Corrections and The Phoenix of New Orleans . I hope these product updates and customer stories help you and your organization get even more from Google Apps. For more details and the latest news, check out the Google Apps Blog . Posted by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Marketing Manager

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Google Apps highlights – 4/15/2011

Pagination comes to Google Docs

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(Cross-posted from the Google Docs Blog ) Exactly one year ago, we launched a new version of the Google document editor , created from the ground up to take advantage of the latest capabilities in modern web browsers like Chrome. In particular, we baked in a way of supporting text features that aren’t natively included with browsers—for example, we added a ruler for controlling the margins, text that wraps around images to create eye-catching docs and discussions for a more collaborative editing experience. Today, we’re doing another first for web browsers by adding a classic word processing feature—pagination, the ability to see visual pages on your screen. We’re also using pagination and some of Chrome’s capabilities to improve how printing works in Google Docs. Pagination is rolling out now and should be available to everyone by the end of the day. Pagination adds visual page breaks while you’re editing your documents, so now you can see how many pages of that report you’ve actually finished. Because we’re able to show you individual pages, we can improve the way other features work too: headers now show up at the top of each page instead of just at the top of your doc, manual page breaks actually move text onto a new page and footnotes appear at the bottom of the pages themselves. If you prefer editing documents with a continuous layout, you can hide page breaks by selecting the “Compact” document view from the “View” menu. Pagination also changes what’s possible with printing in modern browsers. We’ve worked closely with the Chrome team to implement a recent web standard so we can support a feature called native printing. Before, if you wanted to print your document we’d need to first convert it into a PDF, which you would then need to open and print yourself. With native printing, you can print directly from your browser and the printed document will always exactly match what you see on your screen. For now, native printing is only available in Google Chrome, but we’re hoping other browsers will implement the same web standard so everyone can have the best possible printing experience with Docs. Pagination and native printing are great examples of how modern browsers are making it possible to take the best parts of the desktop experience and bring them online. Please share your feedback on the Google Docs forum . Posted by Luiz Pereira, Software Engineer

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Gmail is moving, fingers are fitter, YouTube goes centennial

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With the help of Gmail Motion , we’ve been working faster than ever this week to build new products and celebrate a few existing ones. Here’s a roundup of our most recent efforts: Chromercise helps you increase your hands’ strength and dexterity while browsing the web YouTube celebrates its 100th anniversary with a flashback to its original homepage and a blog post by President Taft Body Browser lets you explore new anatomical terrain Look who’s going Google ! Google Maps now features strange sightings around the world Docs Motion follows Gmail Motion into new gestural terrain Meow Me Now helps you find kittens near you We announce an exciting acquisition Seriously great typists may apply to be autocompleters gBlimps : the inevitable new ad platform New sessions added to Google I/O Fans of Mail Goggles should like the Voice-alyzer function in Google Voice New display advertising formats take marketers back to the good old days It was only a matter of time before Voice Search became available in this language ChromeLite is an even faster version of our browser you know and love After extensive user testing, we’ll soon be making Comic Sans the default font for all Google properties—get a preview on the search results page Travel through time and space to discover things from “then and now” with Google Teleport Search (in Chinese only) Tired of life on Earth? Learn more about a Moon loan Use Earkut to receive notifications when someone visits your Orkut profile A new look for our webmaster team members It’s been a busy—and frankly, odd—day at Google, but with our finger sweatbands in place and our savvy email-writing moves, we’ll work faster than ever on new and exciting projects. Update 4:06PM : Updated with additional announcements. Posted by Michael Krantz, Project Manager, Google Creative Lab

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Gmail is moving, fingers are fitter, YouTube goes centennial

Google Apps highlights – 3/25/2011

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This is part of a regular series of Google Apps updates that we post every couple of weeks. Look for the label “ Google Apps highlights ” and subscribe to the series. – Ed. We’ve been busy over the last few weeks adding better discussion tools to Google Docs, improving collaboration within traditional productivity software and making it faster and easier to work with information in your email inbox. Google Apps administrators can also now view detailed information about how their users are being more productive with our collaboration tools, and control how quickly new features are released to their organizations. Better discussions in Google documents Productive discussions can help teams write better documents, and last Wednesday we introduced improvements to how you can converse about documents within Google Docs. Profile pictures and timestamps make it easy to see who made a comment and when, and you can direct a comment to someone using an @mention. You can follow discussions with notifications right in your inbox—and even continue a discussion from your inbox by replying to the notification email. Instead of deleting a discussion when it’s wrapped up to remove clutter, you can now mark discussions as resolved so you can go back later and see how the discussion played out. Data filtering, new chart options and more in Google spreadsheets We’ve added a heap of frequently requested features to Google spreadsheets over the last few weeks. First, you can now filter spreadsheet data to hone in on rows that match criteria you set as filter options. For example, a sales manager could choose to view transactions processed by Peter and Phil, but not those managed by Andrew, Cindy and the rest of the sales team.

Speedier, simpler and safer: Chrome’s basics get even better

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(Cross-posted on the Google Chrome Blog ) Just three weeks ago, we kicked off the Year of the Rabbit with a speedy Chrome beta. Today, we’re excited to bring these speed improvements and more to everyone using Chrome . With today’s stable release, even your most complex web apps will run more quickly and responsively in the browser. (For the curious, this boost corresponds to a 66% improvement in JavaScript performance on the V8 benchmark suite .) We realize that speed isn’t just about pure brawn in the browser—it’s also about saving time with simple interfaces. Chrome’s new settings interface will help you get to the right settings quickly so you don’t have to dig endlessly to find a way to import your bookmarks or change your browser’s homepage . We’ve added a search box that shows you the settings you’re looking for, as you type. On top of that, you can also copy and paste a direct link into Chrome’s address bar to jump to a specific settings page. (No more long, frustrating phone conversations with your dad on where to find that specific setting in the browser!) Here’s the new settings interface in action: For those of you who save your passwords in the browser, you can now quickly log on to the websites you frequent even when you switch computers, by simply synchronizing those passwords across your computers. You can also encrypt those passwords with your own secret passphrase for extra security. To enable sync on each of your computers, visit the “Personal Stuff” section in Chrome’s settings (or just type “sync” in the settings search box). You can also choose to sync bookmarks , extensions , preferences, themes and more. Finally, you’ll be even safer as you speed around the web, as we’ve extended Chrome’s sandboxing technology to the integrated Flash Player in Chrome. So if you’re using Windows Vista or newer versions, you’ll benefit from the additional layer of protection against malicious webpages . To learn more about sandboxing, check out this animated video: We hope that Chrome’s speed, simplicity and security will continue to make your daily life on the web more enjoyable. You can download the browser at google.com/chrome , or if you’re already using Chrome, you’ll be automatically updated to this new version soon! Posted by Tim Steele, Software Engineer

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Google Apps highlights – 1/28/2011

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This is part of a regular series of Google Apps updates that we post every couple of weeks. Look for the label “ Google Apps highlights ” and subscribe to the series. – Ed. Over the last couple of weeks, we added ways to keep up with new messages in Gmail and printing capabilities from Gmail mobile and mobile documents, and announced a partnership with Verizon to make it easier for millions more businesses to start using Google Apps. Desktop notifications for Gmail When people switch to web-based email, sometimes they miss seeing desktop alerts when new mail is waiting to be read. In the past, Gmail required a helper application to show alerts, but on Wednesday we made it so Gmail can display desktop notifications for new email and chat messages with nothing more than a browser. If you use Google Chrome, you can enable desktop notifications in the Gmail settings panel. Search-as-you-type for Gmail Labs Gmail Labs is a testing ground where you can try out new features and provide feedback on your experiences. As the list of Labs has grown to more than 50 options, we wanted to make it easier to find features you’re interested in, so we introduced search-as-you-type on the Labs page . With just a few keystrokes, you can pinpoint just what you’re looking for—no more scrolling down a long list of options to find what you want. Unread message icon in Gmail Labs The Gmail tab in your browser displays how many unread messages you have, but if you have lots of tabs open or use pinned tabs in Google Chrome, the Gmail browser tab is too small for you to see the count of unread messages. On Tuesday we added a new Lab that shows your unread message count in the browser tab icon , so you can always see at a glance how many new messages you have. Visit the Gmail Labs settings page and type “unread” in the new search box to find and try this feature. Cloud Print for Gmail and Docs Printing is sometimes tricky even when you’re in the same room as your printer, not to mention when you want to print on a remote printer or from a mobile device. Last year we introduced Cloud Print to make printing easier from any device to any Cloud Print-enabled printer, without the need for any special software. On Monday we added support for Cloud Print to Gmail mobile and mobile documents , so now you can print messages and documents directly from your phone or tablet to your Cloud Print-enabled printer. Education category in the Google Apps Marketplace Businesses, schools and organizations can shop for third-party applications, features and services that complement Google Apps in the Marketplace , and over the last few months we’ve seen a surge in listings geared for schools and universities. To make it easier for schools to link up with great partners in their field, we added a dedicated category for educational listings . There you’ll find powerful add-ins from LearnBoost, Grockit, Aviary and many other education software providers. Who’s gone Google? More than 3 million businesses, plus many more schools, non-profits and government agencies have switched to Google Apps over the last few years, and we’re looking forward to helping the next wave of customers get started. To that end, we’re thrilled to have Verizon as our newest partner. Verizon will provide Google Apps to many of their small business broadband customers, making it possible for businesses to obtain a more complete set of small business IT services from a single provider. Welcome to Google Apps! I hope these product updates and customer stories help you and your organization get even more from Google Apps. For more details and the latest news, check out the Google Apps Blog . Posted by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Marketing Manager

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Google Apps highlights – 1/28/2011

Rebuilding L’Aquila in 3D with Google SketchUp

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(Cross-posted from the SketchUp Blog ) On April 6, 2009, a powerful earthquake struck l’Aquila, Italy. Three hundred and eight people died, and most of the buildings in the city center and surrounding areas were damaged or destroyed. About six months ago, we received an email from a British architect named Barnaby Gunning proposing an ambitious project: to use Google SketchUp to build a digital 3D model of the city, as it is now, in order to stimulate discussion about its reconstruction. He had already created a website—called Comefacciamo (“What can we do?”)—to contact and organize volunteers. Barnaby Gunning with the project T-shirt Barnaby asked if Google would support a geo-modeling workshop in L’Aquila in an effort to create a digital model of the city. An engineer working on SketchUp and an Italian by birth, I was asked to travel to L’Aquila and give geo-modeling classes in Italian. I was excited! I could visit my motherland, teach people about the product I work on and help out with a project that could have a great impact on reviving the city. I ended up teaching six full-day classes over the course of two trips in October and November. Teaching Google SketchUp skills to volunteers in L’Aquila Teaching in Italian about a product on which I work almost exclusively in English proved to be more challenging than I thought. It took me awhile to get used to using the correct Italian name for the Push/Pull tool: Spingi-Tira . (It’s more fun to say, though.) The passionate volunteers who attended my classes more than made up for the language frustrations. Not only were they interested and attentive learners, but their desire to do something for their beloved city was contagious. The church Santa Maria Paganica in real life (top) and modeled with SketchUp in Google Earth (below). The modeling phase of the project is now in full swing. Several of the volunteers’ models have already been accepted into Google Earth—you can see them in your browser if you like. You can even take part in the project by helping to model the city from wherever you live. We’ve added L’Aquila to the list of places where you can use Google Building Maker to create geo-models, so no previous 3D modeling experience is necessary. If you’d like to dive in a little deeper, you can use SketchUp in connection with the many photos and other information on Barnaby’s website . My few days in l’Aquila teaching SketchUp proved to be a fantastic experience. I met so many people who are enthusiastic about this project and willing to sacrifice their weekends to learn how to model, and to provide an exhaustive photographic record of the current situation. The time I spent with them was a wonderful remainder of the love they feel for their city—a love that I now share. I count myself lucky to be a participant in this important project. Posted by Simone Nicolò, SketchUp Software Engineer

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Rebuilding L’Aquila in 3D with Google SketchUp