Pokemon Go clearly has a lot of fans, but if you’re one of the many that simply have no interest — whether it be in Pokemon itself, gaming in general, augmented reality, or giving Google all your data — there’s now a Chrome extension made just for you. “Pokemon NO!” is a free extension that allows you to mute all mentions of Pokemon Go on the web…
Google Photos is arguably one of the best photo services available today, however one feature it’s been missing since launch is the ability to play a slideshow. Whether you missed it or not, the feature is now finally here.
If you — like me — have enabled auto-upload to Google Photos on pretty much all of your devices, you’ve surely noticed that some photos just don’t arrive on the site with the correct orientation sometimes. The Google Photos editor — which also has filters, brightness control, etc. — is an easy fix for this (it only take a few clicks), but now Google has made rotating photos in the app even easier with a quick keyboard shortcut that you can use when viewing any photo…
Google frequently says they’re working to get the next billion users online and onto its services. With seven different products that have a billion users, the company knows how to design for large audiences. To help Android and web developers do the same, Google has published a new site that details best practices for scaling to billions of users.
After adding a new Goals feature on Android and iOS, Google Calendar will now send users event notifications on the web. Google is likely moving away from using email notifications as Drive recently added a similar capability.
Following the introduction of AMP articles to Android, iOS, and the mobile web, Google News will now highlight local coverage of national stories by using a new “Local Source” tag. The feature is live on all platforms, including the full web, starting today.
Google’s web-based alternative to Microsoft PowerPoint is getting a big update today that adds the ability for members of the audience to easily ask questions during a presentation. Additionally, Google Slides is adding more presentation options on iOS and a cool laser pointer tool.
Google announced today that it’s bringing the “Smart Reply” feature previously only available to mobile users to Inbox by Gmail on the web.
Google is rolling out a new feature for Google Docs on Android and the web today that will make navigating through long documents much easier. The new “outline tool” adds a new pane on the left of the page adds quickly links to the document’s headers so you can quickly jump to that section without having to scroll through the whole document to get there.
Displayed in a pane to the left of the page, the outline features headers for each section of your document, making it simple to quickly jump from section to section. If you haven’t manually applied headers, no worries—we’ll do it for you, intelligently detecting the logical divisions within your work. You can then edit or remove these headers as necessary.
And there’s also a second component to it that lets users scroll through documents easier with a new “navigation handle” that will appear once you start to scroll. “Touching that handle will display the entire document’s structure, allowing you quickly skip from section to section, instead of slowly swiping up and down.”
Here’s a look at the feature in action:
Look out for the feature in Google Docs on Android and the web starting today.
After rolling out voice typing functionality to Google Docs on the web in Chrome back in September, today the web app is adding the ability to make edits using your voice too.
HTTPS has become the rule, rather than the exception to the rule, in recent years. And in an effort to usher in the encrypted and more-secure communication protocol, Google announced last month that it would begin prioritizing HTTPS sites over HTTP sites when indexing the web. Unsurprisingly, Google is also slowly-but-surely making sure all of its own web properties use HTTPS over standard HTTP. Google’s cached pages available on the search site are now part of the club…
Chrome on Mac, Window, and Linux is being updated this week to version 48. The latest update contains the usual bug fixes and improvements for the desktop browser, but mobile devices will see the bulk of the improvements. Future updates to Chrome, we’ve learned, will bring a new compression algorithm that will help the browser load faster pages and use less power on all platforms.
I wouldn’t go as far as to say that Gmail is on the way out quite yet, but it seems a new message is appearing for some Inbox by Gmail users notifying them that they will now be redirected from Gmail to Inbox by default. Of course, users still have the option to turn this off if they would like their gmail.com and inbox.google.com inboxes to remain separate…
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The AMP Project — to speed up and improve mobile web pages — is picking up steam since its announcement six weeks ago, and now we know that it’s expected to launch in an official capacity early next year. A bevy of new media organizations and ad tech companies have announced their support and commitment to the open source project, as well.
The new Google+ interface is rolling out on the web today, and if you’re anything like me, you don’t have much patience for slow rollouts. I still hadn’t been prompted to click the “Let’s go” button and get the new layout, but luckily I stumbled on a way (via Sean S) to opt myself in without any wait time. Here’s how…
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If you’re a Chrome or web developer, you’re probably already aware that the Chrome Dev Summit is set to take place today and tomorrow. The event brings Chrome engineers and web developers together for a two-day “exploration of building beautiful and fast mobile web applications.” This is an important event for many people, especially considering the growing relevance of web apps.
This is a two-day event, as I mentioned, and day 1 is set to start at 9 AM PT on November 17th. Google has provided livestreaming video of the entire event, and you can tune in below…
Google is rolling out updates this week for Google Docs and Sheets for Android as well as Google Drive on the web, the company announced in two separate blog posts today.
For Sheets, the update brings the ability to “add new and reply to existing comments,” while the updated Google Docs for Android app gets the ability to see suggestions and comments when in the app’s Print Layout view. “resolve, close, accept, or reject those comments and suggestions—making it simpler to move between their desktop and mobile devices.”
Google also highlighted improvements to editing charts in the Sheets app on Android:
…if a user a selects a single cell and inserts a chart, we’ll automatically expand that data selection to include the immediately surrounding cells. This will make it easier for users to create robust charts with relevant information. In addition, when an employee creates a new chart, they’ll now see three recommended chart types, which we’ll suggest based on the data they’ve selected.
And lastly for Sheets, users will start to notice the 400 new fonts Google began rolling out to Sheets on the web this week.
As for Google Drive, the web app gets improved organization with new smarter sorting in the app’s ‘Recent’ view:
The new sorting experience removes the existing sorting dropdown options (‘Last modified,’ ‘Last modified by me,’ and ‘Last opened by me’) and replaces them with a dynamically-generated view based on the actions of the person using Drive. Items will continue to be segmented into time-based sections (‘Today,’ ‘Earlier this week,’ etc), and will now indicate whether each item was opened, modified, or uploaded by the user directly in the UI. The smarter sorting ensures that items acted upon by the user are more likely to be shown than items acted upon by other collaborators.
The updated Google Sheets and Docs apps are rolling out now.
Google’s giving the web Hangouts a revamp today. The interface (as seen above) is more minimalist and takes advantage of the full screen. Under the hood, calls should start quicker and have higher resolution. Rounding up the list of changes is a simpler invite system.
Here’s what Googler Eduardo Fernández had to say about the update:
Today, we’re introducing a new calling experience for Hangouts on the web that loads more quickly, renders video more sharply, and streamlines the interface so you can focus less on where to click and more on what to say. We’ve been using this new calling experience at Google for a while now. It’s early days, but we hope you like it as much as we do. (Note: This is not available for Google Apps for Work customers.)
Key changes include:
• Calls that start faster and stay crisper, with higher quality video
• A more streamlined and immersive full-screen interface
• A simpler way to invite friends and family to your calls
Starting today, a small group of users should see the improvements and it will be fully released over the coming days. The update is not yet available for Google Apps for Work customers.
Google looks to be rolling out a redesigned version of Google Maps on the web that introduces a tweaked user interface that in many ways mirrors its mobile app experience on both Android and iOS. As pictured above, Maps gets a redesigned menu/sidebar/search UI that is clearly inspired by Material Design and the user interface of its mobile apps.
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Google is rolling out a couple notable new features for Gmail, starting today with a new “block sender” feature on both the web and Android and a unsubscribe button coming to the Gmail app for Android.
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Adobe Flash is notoriously both resource intensive and ubiquitous on the web, which hasn’t helped the open web survive in the consumer shift to mobile devices that have smaller screens and processors. Flash isn’t even supported in most mobile environments anymore because of its poor performance. Google is as a result working hard to eliminate Flash content from its ad network and create a better web browsing experience. Today it announced September 1st is when it will begin pausing many of the Flash ads seen around the web for users of its Chrome web browser.
Fortunately for Google, it’s able to convert most of the Flash ads uploaded to its AdWords advertiser network to the less intensive HTML5 automatically. The company provides a section on its support site where advertisers can go to see what Flash ads are eligible for this conversion, and it has even made a step-by-step tool for converting ads which can’t be automatically converted or haven’t already been uploaded to Google’s servers.
Google first announced this shift back in June, and while the company has its own mobile operating system with a massive amount of native apps in the form of Android, it’s still a big proponent of the web. Perhaps because that’s where it was born, but really because the web isn’t closed off like mobile operating systems, and the underlying hypertext language of the web allows the company to easily scrape and index it for its Search business, among other things. The company introduced a setting to its Chrome browser in March which enables this disabling of Flash plugin content. Chrome for Android and iOS doesn’t support it at all.
With companies now able to apply to use their own brand as a top-level domain (TLD), there have been suggestions that doing this might be an easy way to get a boost in search-engine rankings. For example, that Samsung using something like www.phones.samsung might get more hits than the usual samsung.com domain. Not so, says Google …
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If you’ve ever been browsing the web and seen the above warning, you’ve probably done one of two things. You either quickly click the “Back to safety” button, or you navigate into the “Details” section to tell Chrome that it’s being a helicopter mom — and go about your “dangerous” browsing. Although I haven’t encountered this page too many times, I definitely fall into the latter category when I do.
Today, Google announced that as its detection of unwanted software on the web has improved, these alerts are going to become more common in your web browsing experience. Specifically, in the coming weeks, you’ll see “more warnings than ever before”…
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The familiar Google App Launcher that you may or may not use on a daily basis — found on Google’s many web properties — has four rows of icons and the ability to move them around to organize them the way you’d like. You probably didn’t even notice when these features were added, but they’re nice to have. If you have a Google Apps account too, though, you may know that the App Launcher is stuck in the past for Apps users.
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