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New from Google: Paid web apps, drawings in web clipboard, latest breathtaking 45° imagery in Maps


Stunning 45-degree views are now available in Maps for more places in the US and abroad.

Never content with resting on its laurels, Google have been iterating their products at a pace faster than ever before. Here’s a quick overview of some of the noteworthy changes we spotted in Google’s popular services, such as Docs, Tasks, Chrome Web Store, Blogger and Maps. The latter now features breathtaking 45° imagery for many more US cities (full list here), including international locales, such as Córdoba, Spain. If you haven’t yet seen highly detailed aerial photography in action, definitely give it a try now by checking out the Córdoba, William P. Hobby Airport or the Houston Ship Channel 45° views from all four directions.

Chrome Web Store, the Google-ran online repository of web apps, now supports more markets, having added sixteen new countries for 31 countries in total. In-app payments in web apps distributed on Chrome Web Store are also a go-go: Google confirmed paid transactions in web apps will be available to users in twenty countries “later this year”. Zyngas of this world will love it, that’s for sure. More features in other services right below the fold.

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Blogger gets favicons

If you maintain a Blogger blog, your visitors will be able to navigate through individual blog posts using swipe gestures. The +1 button can now be placed on individual Blogger pages as well as blog posts and the ability to create custom favicons on your Blogger blog is now available to all users using the Design > Page Elements tab. The search company’s also been on the offensive with new privacy controls across products that let you easily export your data, they call it Data Liberation Front. Applying the “data is yours” philosophy to Google Tasks, the search firm unveiled Google Tasks Porter. What is it?

Google Tasks Porter liberates your tasks list

Google Tasks Porter is a new open source application that lets you import and export your task lists from desktop applications into Google Tasks using iCalendar or CSV formats. You can also download all of your tasks in an HTML format. In addition, Google Tasks Porter integrates with Remember the Milk, allowing you to import and export data via email. Additionally, Google says, you can “create a set of ‘snapshots’ of your data, each representing a list of all your tasks at a particular point in time. You can then save or delete these snapshots, and you can export a snapshot at any time to another application using any of the available formats”.

Google Docs: Drawings in web clipboard, better right-to-left support

The Google Docs team has also been busy implementing new features to the online productivity suite which is attracting more and more businesses, non-profits and government agencies with each passing day. You can now copy and paste drawings across your docs via the web clipboard accessible via the toolbar in Google Docs editors. You can also use the web clipboard to move a drawing from a document into the standalone drawing editor. Hebrew and Arabic users will appreciate the ability to create tables that are visually right-to-left, provided they enabled right-to-left controls from their docs list Settings.

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