You can see the Android UI as it currently exists (or rather, barely exists). It’s plain, but seems comfortable and stable with room to grow into something nice, support for touchscreens, smartphones, larger VGA screens, a Webkit-based browser, Java virtual machine, threaded (conversational) text messaging, playback of MPEG-4, h.264, MP3, and AAC file formats.
Here’s a video showing Android in action, featuring Sergey Brin’s new “hung over” look and some idea of how the UI isn’t fully realized or much in competition with the iPhone. The Google Maps app has some good ideas, the web browser looks like it can’t do anything, the history app is a nice addition, the spinning globe shows that Android can do 3D pretty cool, and Google Maps Street View is nice.
Scoble isn’t impressed. I’ll say that it has a lot of potential, but they aren’t showing enough to make me believe that any of that potential includes significant success.
Gizmodo has an interesting look at the fonts created by Ascender for Android, the Droid family of fonts (fitting name). They seem pretty clean and well thought out. You’d be surprised how important fonts are in operating system design, but if you think about it, you do spend a huge amount of time staring more at the letters than the pretty boxes, so it makes sense that Microsoft and Apple put a lot of work into getting the best fonts and font rendering techniques.
Looks like there are over 1,000 Google millionaires. Even the ex-masseuse has a million dollars in Google stock. The average employee who joined a year ago is already worth $276,000 and counting.
Larry Page, Google founder and one of the ten richest people in the country, is getting married December 8 to Lucy Southworth, his girlfriend. Richard Branson and SF mayor Gavin Newsom are expected to attend, as well as many former and current Googlers, and, via videoconference, Al Gore.
Google and GoDaddy have teamed up on Google Webmaster Tools. GoDaddy customers will automatically have their sites submitted to Google Sitemaps (and thus rank better and fresher, without any effort) and a customized version of Google’s Webmaster Tools in their control panel.
Google changed the area in AdSense ads that can be clicked by the user, from pretty much the whole ad space to just the title and URL. Publishers are worried that the move, which is really supposed to just decrease accidental clicks, will cost them regular clicks, too. Early feedback is that the effect on earnings is minimal. My clickthrough rate is pretty consistent, though still kind of low.
Google Transit, which lets you get public transportation directions in Google Maps, now shows some European cities. They’ve got southeast of the UK, SBB, Switzerland, VBZ, Zurich, Switzerland, Turin, Italy, and Florence, Italy, but still no New York.
Google has a new widget you can add to your site which users can click on to automatically translate your website into the language of their choice. Microsoft added a similar widget at almost exactly the same time.
I’ve mentioned this before with regards to phishing, but it bears repeating that the same method applies when faced with threatening or abusing email coming from a Gmail email address.
E*, who is a member of our country’s armed forces, and his wife L*, contacted me that they were receiving some awful messages from a Gmail user, making sexual messages toward L and threatening to kill E when he comes home for Thanksgiving. Even though most internet crazies are just harmless idiots, you should always take the proper steps to protect yourself, as you never know when you are dealing with the genuine sociopath.
Just like last time, the proper way of dealing with this is to contact Google. Go to this page and select “I have received a harassing message from a Gmail account.” Paste the full contents of the harassing email. Google should get back to you and hopefully help you fix the problem. If that doesn’t work, and even if it does, you should your local police department so they can look into it and protect you if it seems like a legitimate threat.
Last night my husband and I both got crazy emails from someone using gmail. The email basically said that they was going to kill my husband when he comes home for thanksgiving and that they have do crazy things with me. I really need to find out who {redacted}@gmail.com is. Please help me with this problem.
There are some scary people you meet on the internet, but the first thing to remember is that they are mostly just idiots with an email address. They usually rely on anonimity to harass, but won’t actual get up and threaten you. In most cases, you have more of a chance of making their life hell than they do of hurting you, and taking the proper steps to protect yourself should make it go away very quickly.
Hope I could help. It’s always worth remembering that I am not Google’s support department. I don’t work for Google, and I can’t fix the problem all the time. I can usually dispense advice, but your best bet is to contact Google directly and hope they can help you. If you contacted Google already and their notoriously lax support didn’t get back to you, then you should contact me and I’ll try to help.
* - obviously, I’m trying to protect their privacy by leaving out their real names
Ionut Alex reports that the Gmail team decided to make hacking their user interface even easier, adding an API for Greasemonkey. Greasemonkey is the Firefox add-on that lets you seriously alter the code behind running webpages, and Greasemonkey hackers are always having to work around changes made to Gmail, but the new API should keep things a lot more stable and open more options for Gmail Greasemonkey hacking.
Ionut Alex found evidence in the source code for the newest version of Gmail that hints at features we may be receiving soon. He found code for Jabber transports, which would allow contacting people from other instant messaging networks over Google Talk/Chat’s Jabber connection, which makes sense given the fact that Gmail’s new contact manager asks for Yahoo, MSN and AIM usernames now.
Also, he found code that seems to hint they will be enabling users to choose different colors for labels, which should make quick identification of categories of email messages possible (though how they will manage emails with multiple labels is a mystery to me). Also, you might soon gain the ability to seperate emails from a conversation, a necessary addition to the Gmail conversation management we’ve waited three and a half years for.
It’s been well-known for a while that Google is readying a version 2.0 of Gmail, designed to update the four-year old email software that has been looking dated lately. At Google’s recent Analyst Day, they talked about the new version publicly for the first time, and listed some of the upcoming changes. They include:
A new JavaScript backend for Gmail that will speed up performance, a big help for those who feel Gmail has gotten too slow.
Email messages will be prefetched, so that when you click on them they will have already been downloaded, and will load instantly. When reading a message, you can click Next, Next, Next, and there’s no lag, speeding through a ton of messages instantly. You can even hold down the key and your mail flies by.
A new contact manager will launch, integrating accross multiple Google products (including Docs and Calendar).
More integration with other Google Products, such as opening email attachments in the appropriate Google Docs application.
Looks exactly like Gmail does today, but under the hood it’s completely different.
The speaker didn’t say when it’ll launch, just that it’ll be “very soon”.
It should really shine “on the new MacBook Pros and the newest version of Safari”, taking advantage of new browser technology. Relevant information for a small market segment, but what about the rest of us?
Uses the same text editor from Page Creator and Google Groups.
Here’s the video where he discusses it (starting around 35 minutes, ending around 41):
The screenshot above is two frames from the video, one showing the new interface is just like the old one, and one showing the new contact manager.
Some people are seeing that new version right now, so check out your Gmail account and let me know if there are any other interesting changes.
First, your introductory experience with the application: As expected, a page with two blank text fields, one for your Gmail address, one for your password. Only, they aren’t text fields! They’re links to this wonderful page:
Yes, a page that looks like something broke! Instead of letting you enter text into a simple, standard text field the application takes you to a seperate page with a big blank text box where you are supposed to enter the information requested on the previous page. With text input fields being a basic, brain-dead element of UI design, why did Google decide to go this route? God only knows.
Worse, because of the poor performance of everything Java (and yes, regrettably, this is still a Java app, not a native Windows Mobile app), even entering text in this page is a chore. It doesn’t recognize my backspace key or my arrow keys, text selected becomes immediately unselected, the occasional keystroke is completely ignored or dropped, and caps lock turns on and off at will. We’re talking text input, not rocket surgery, people!
For some reason, the text input page doesn’t even start off letting you type in the text input box. You have to click/tap/select it first, even though there’s literally nothing else on the page. Why not start with a blinking cursor? So, it’s click, click, type (if you make a mistake, cancel and start again because backspace doesn’t work), click Done, click, click, type, click Done, click Sign In. Talk about making things easy for the user.
Why am I going crazy about this? Because the rest of the application is pretty good, but the first screen you see is such a chore, you might give up without even trying. Google needs to get it right at the first user experience, otherwise there won’t be a second.
Naturally, I try to sign in, and my connection was dropped throughout all the clicking and backing up, so Java asks me for permission, not once, but twice, and instead of taking me back to the application and signing me in, it takes me back to the MIDlet Manager page. Gotta love Java. Really, a great choice for an application platform.
Anyway, here’s the inbox view:
The scroll bar is too small for anything but a tiny fingernail to grab, which is fine, since it doesn’t scroll, it paginates. And if you miss it, you get to read an email! Scroll with the arrow keys, and save yourself the tsuris.
There are a good number of hotkeys, so you can archive, mark as read, star, report spam, delete email, go back to the inbox, search, and compose just by hitting the appropriate number (or the asterisk key). However, they are bound to the keys on a traditional phone’s keypad, with no shortcuts for letters on a keyboard, like my PDA has, so I need to hold down a modifier key, or just give up on shortcuts at all (which is exactly what I do). How about shortcuts for keyboard folk?
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ARGHH!!! I just discovered another annoyance! If you press Menu to close the menu, it doesn’t close the menu! Instead, it selects the item highlighted in the menu, and asks you to confirm if you really want to perform that action on that email, and the same Menu button is now the confirm button, compounding the likelihood you’ll screw up!. Really, I clicked menu to use the menu, not to leave it? Who thought that was good UI design? I lost two emails, maybe three, because of that.
When you try to send an email, you get this page:
Good and simple, especially the “Sent from Gmail for mobile” signature (by the way, when I clicked to close that menu, it tried to send my message. Brilliant). Click on the To field, and you get a page with your most popular contacts, and check boxes so you can select multiples (you can use the menu to get at the complete list of contacts.
By the way, the Subject and message body areas just take you to that empty page for text entry. Gotta hate it.
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So, the good things about this application is that it lets you browse your email without reloading webpages and wasting bandwidth, it’s fast and convenient as an application, instead of a website. You can now click to have your phone call phone numbers that are listed in emails. The bad is that the UI design still makes a lot of mistakes, stupid little mistakes that should be easily avoided.
Google wants to have a smash hit in the mobile space, designing some sort of Google mobile software system and dropping hints of a GPhone, but the live applications they’ve released so far show a severe disconnect with proper UI design. If the iPhone is a fashion model, Google mobile has the same sense of style as… a typical Google engineer. If Google can learn from these mistakes, there’s hope, but for now I’m just frustrated and annoyed.
Go to Gmail.com/app if I haven’t scared you off. It’s worth downloading, since it is a much better way to access Gmail, but be prepared to be annoyed until you get used to its quirks.
Google has added IMAP access to Gmail, letting you use that protocol to access your email. IMAP, or Internet Message Access Protocol, is one way of accessing your email from outside Gmail (POP3 is the other), that works better syncing with mobile devices than POP3. According to Wikipedia, advantages of IMAP over POP3 include:
Connected and disconnected modes of operation - IMAP users stay connected to the server so long as they are using the email client, allowing for message content downloading on demand. POP3 users must download all the new messages first.
Multiple clients can simultaneously connect to the same mailbox
Can retrieve parts of a message as needed, instead of the whole message, like portions of a MIME structure or the text of an email without the attachments.
Can flag message states on the server, marking them as read or replied to or other things on the server, making syncing them with multiple devices possible
Interaction between multiple mailboxes on the server, including moving messages between boxes.
Searching the mailbox on the server side is possible
Allows extensions
Disadvantages include increased complexity, increased server resource usage, slow connections over mobile devices, and a requirement to transmit sent messages twice.
What does this mean? The biggest advantage for IMAP is that it works real well with multiple computers and mobile devices (albeit slower), meaning you can access your email from a Windows Mobile device or iPhone, or from your laptop, home computer and work computer, and have messages remain synced among all of them, almost like having an Exchange Server.
Did not know this, but Amit Agarwal writes about some benefits your Gmail account gets when you use Google Apps. Besides getting 25 gigabytes of email storage (eight times what a regular account has), uptime guarantees and hiding advertisements, you get certain benefits from Postini, which has recently been added to Apps.
What do you get?
The ability to create a list of approved senders and approved email domains. Any email from those addresses or those domains will go straight to your inbox, no worries about them getting stuck in the junk mail filter. You also can make a list of blocked email addresses and blocked email domains, and you’ll never see emails from them.
Postini backs up your deleted email, so if you delete something, you can still recover it for up to 90 days. Search Postini’s archive and you can get them back.
Google Apps is $50 a year, so if deleted email recovery is worth that to you, go for it.
Google has decided that the storage in Gmail accounts has been increasing at too slow a pace, so they’ve sped up the counter. Considering Yahoo’s free unlimited email accounts, plus the fact that Windows Live Hotmail can top them at any time, Google was wise to do this just to offer some semblance of keeping pace with its major competition.
Currently, Gmail users get 2.9 gigabytes. According to Haochi, at the new pace, Gmail will have 4.2 gigabytes by October 23, increasing 1.3 gigs in just twelve days. Then, the counter will slow a tad, reaching 6 gigabytes by January 4, then increasing by about 1.5 gigabytes a year afterwards. So, in essence, Google just added 40% more email storage, and is doubling email storage by the end of the year.
Anyone complaining? Yeah, I thought not.
UPDATE: Ionut Alex has a chart showing how the initial burst of new storage slows over the next 15 months. He also notes that the free version of Google Apps has been updated to match the regular Gmail quote (previously, it was frozen at 2 gigabytes).
A German court has fined Google for using the Gmail.com domain in Germany despite not being allowed to use the trademark in that country. The court ordered Google to pay $14,000 (10,000 Euros) because the use of the domain, even though Google calls it Google Mail there, means that Google is only partially complying with the law and infringing on the true owner of the Gmail name.
At least it wasn’t a lot of money.
UPDATE: Also worth noting that there’s been some evidence lately that Google is preparing a new interface for Gmail, including Google Gears integration for offline usage and data on who’s accessing your account from where.
13 months ago, I asked you guys when you thought Gmail was going to lose the beta tag. Obviously, that still hasn’t happened (unless it happened in the last twelve hours, since I wrote this before I went away). Here’s how your guesses have gone:
December 2006: 25, 26
January 2007: 1, 18, 22
February 2007: 1, 22
March 2007: 1, 15, 17
April 2007: 1, 24
June 2007: 3
August 2007: 1, 15
September 2007: 19
October 2007: 14
December 2007: 6
January 2008: 1
February 2008: 20
April 2008: 1, 15
August 2008: 1
April 2009: 1
As Jack pointed out, more than 60% of your guesses have already passed. Does that mean Google is exceeding expectations? Sure, lets say that!
Anyway, if your guess has expired, add a new one, and submit a guess now if you haven’t already. I’ve got plenty of DVDs now to give away, so the winner of this is getting something nice.
Personally, I think it would be really cool if Arjun won and Gmail lost the beta tag in six days.
Got an email this morning from account.alert7@googlemail.com (googlemail.com is a Gmail email domain, used in countries where Google does not own the Gmail trademark). The email was a standard phishing email, asking for my username and password to “confirm my account details”, and I would have ignored it, till I saw the email address. I felt the address was too legitimate looking, and, being that it was owned by Google, I could have my good deed for the day and have the account shut down.
If you get a phishing or spam email from a Gmail address, go to this webpage and post as much information as you can. Shutting down people like this can help save another person from identity theft. If you’re already too smart to fall for this stuff, you can do your part to help others who aren’t as aware.
Barry listed these search engine (and related) stuff being done for today:
This ran on Dogpile:
and this on Search Engine Roundtable:
Google didn’t run anything, and neither did Yahoo, Ask or Windows Live.
New Google Web Toolkit
Google released a new version of its Web Toolkit, a toolkit for creating high-end Java applications in the Google style. Read more about it here.
Google Earth, Windows Live Maps & Others In Flash
Flash Earth now lets you use a Flash interface to get around Google Maps, Windows Live Maps (aerial and labeled), Yahoo Maps, Ask Maps (aerial and physical), OpenLayers and NASA Terra daily satellite imagery.
(via, via, via)
Google Sued For Email Patent
Polaris IP, one of those soul-sucking companies that appears to exist for no reason except to sue companies who do productive and innovative things over patents they own and don’t use, has sued Google, Amazon, Yahoo, AOL, Borders and IAC over some email patent. The patent has something to do with email rules and automatic message routing.
Considering they didn’t invent anything, but bought the patent from a company that did, and the patent shouldn’t have been issued (other companies were doing the same thing before the original patent holder filed for the patent), this is just another one of those patent lawsuits that would go away in a world with a sensible justice system.
Some Quintura Stuff
Someone pointed out Quintura to me. They’ve got this kid search engine (I think they may have just launched it), which has a kid-friendly interface (including only five results per page, to make things easier). Both their kid search engine and their regular search interface include this really cool tag cloud feature, where you roll over a word and it rebuilds the cloud (without you clicking anything) based on that word, and does so endlessly as you roll over new words.
YouTube Competitor Gets A Crappy Name
NBC and News Corp revealed the name of their YouTube competitor, which they have been talking about but still haven’t launched for half a year. The name: Hulu, exactly the sort of means-nothing non-offensive crap name that you’d expect six months of focus groups to turn out. Good work, time to move on to being a failure!
Not only does the name mean nothing of importance to users and is likely to bore people away from visiting the website, it actually means “cease and desist” in Swahili. So, at least we know they have their priorities straight! Where would you rather go: (a) YouTube or (b) SafeguardingIntellectualPropertyTube?
Of course, you could also feel bad the NBC/FOX appears to have taken the four-letter domain name from a seven-year old girl’s picture website (though the kid shouldn’t mind, since she probably got paid a hefty sum).
Google Says “We Do Dogfood, We Swear!”
After an Infoworld article mentioned in passing that Google Apps/Docs aren’t used at Google for major tasks, and I wrote an article focusing on how companies shouldn’t develop products that aren’t good enough for their own employees to use, the Google Docs blog released an article saying that Googlers do, indeed, use Google Docs.
They say that they didn’t need to convince or force employees to use it, it just happened, and that 87% of Googlers used it in the last week and 96% in the last month. Which sounds nice, but a better stat would be: How many have stopped using Microsoft Word and Excel? If Word and Excel usage have dropped by half, then you’ve got some real confidence, and I apologize.
AdSense Vista Gadget
If you need to check your AdSense earnings every few minutes without loading a webpage, there’s an AdSense Gadget for Windows Vista’s Sidebar. And if you can get the Gadget to actually work, you deserve a hug (and send me an email).
(via, via)
Google Docs Gets Right-Click Menu
Google added a good UI feature to Google Docs & Other Things, letting you right-click in the file manager to get a context menu. While it would be unfair to say they’ve now caught up with Windows 95 (they are trying very hard, and this takes time), it is good to know that the interface is maturing. Ionut Alex has examples with screenshots.
YouTube Partners Winning Over YouTube Users?
Ionut Alex wrote a post looking at the new branding for YouTube partner pages I mentioned recently, with a different YouTube player and a giant advertisement, but he also noted something strage: The Universal Music Group official version of a music video had 14 million views, compared to the user uploaded version, which had 378 thousand. This despite the fact that the user version could be embedded on any website, and the partner version was trapped in the walled garden.
Could it be that these partners are solving a problem for YouTube, bringing the user onto YouTube with their market power, instead of having users leech most of the bandwidth from external embeds? Could the partners be winning? I have so many questions, but this is supposed to be a lazy post, so, moving on…
I mentioned in July that the Gmail team was asking users to participate in a fun video project, filming a quick clip of themselves passing a large Gmail-branded envelope from the left side of the screen to the right. Google wound up getting some amazing, creative submissions, and the final video is just a load of fun to watch:
The video is the number one video this week, the number six video this month, and the top linked video of the week. I’m convinced that the wedding scene was fake, that it was just two people dressed up, but not at an actual wedding. My favorite has got to be the backwards pool scene. Which one did you like best?
Google has finally unveiled a system under which you can pay them for more storage in Gmail, Picasa Web Albums, and eventually, a bunch of other Google services. For now, if your 2.82 gigabytes of Gmail space and 1 gigabyte of Picasa space aren’t enough, you can pay $20 a year to get an additional 6 gigabytes of space. Previously, $25 a year got you six gigs of Picasa space, so this is not just a discount, but space that can be used accross both Picasa and Gmail accounts.
If you need more space, pay for it. $75 a year gets you 25 gigabytes, $250 a year for 100 gigabytes, and $500 a year for 250 gigabytes. While paying for stuff is never fun, it’s better than running out of space and having to delete emails or photos. When Google expands this to Google Docs and other services, it’ll be even more valuable.
To compare with the competition, Microsoft’s Windows Live Hotmail offers 2 five gigs for free, 4 10 gigs for $20 a year. They also have SkyDrive for storage in the cloud, with 500 megabytes of free storage for sharing files or private file storage, something Google doesn’t offer anywhere. Yahoo has unlimited email inboxes, which is probably the way things should be by now everywhere, and 100 megabytes per month for Flickr, unlimited if you pay $25 a year. Flickr has one of the most unique free/premium feature differences, hiding all but your most recent 200 photos, not letting you create a bunch of sets, and a few other things unless you pay up, but at least not limiting your storage space, ever.
Not sure what’s going to happen if you pay for Google’s expanded storage this year, but not next year. I’d hate to use up all that space over a few years, then stop using Google for the next big thing, and have all my old emails and photos ransomed for more money. If I stop paying, what happens to my stuff?
(via jkOnTheRun and Loose Wire)
UPDATE: Microsoft increased their storage space to 5 free/10 paid gigabytes. Read more here.
The Gmail team is asking users to send in video of them passing along the Gmail “M” logo, as a way of participating in a Gmail promo video. This is the video Google made:
And you can get your face in there as well. Just upload a video to YouTube of you passing the M logo from the left side of the screen to the right side (under 10 seconds, audio not important), and Google will rotate a bunch of entries on the promo page, with the best ones becoming part of the official video and shown on the Gmail home page.
By the way, the Gmail/Threadless t-shirt design competition is only ten days old, and it looks like the “no logo” rule is really hurting. The t-shirts look great, but I have no idea what the hell any of them have to do with Gmail.
I sent an important document to someone, and like I have been lately, I made sure to format it pretty nicely. As I thought you should, I included a lot of important information in the header, including my name, the subject being covered, and another thing or two. I emailed it to my colleague’s Gmail address, and assumed all was well.
Turns out my friend is a fan of Gmail’s preview feature, and he shouldn’t be. I sent the document in both Word 2003 and Word 2007 formats, figuring no one could have a problem with that, but he opened it in the previewer, which doesn’t display the document header. As a result, he lacked a lot of the context required for this document, and, being a very busy person, ignored it for a while.
I finally spoke to him and asked him what happened, and we found out that because he used the previewer, he didn’t know this was what it was. Gmail strips out some important formatting information in the document preview, including headers and footers, information that can be pretty important sometimes. Worse, Gmail doesn’t even preview Word 2007 documents, even though a beta of Word 2007 has been out for over a year, the retail product is half a year old, and Word 2007 uses a publicly available document format.
Yes, there are things I could have done (and in the future, I’m sending a PDF as well), but it’s annoying that Google would have a previewer that would leave out information. I understand that formatting gets stripped from a document preview, but headers? Didn’t anyone think that was important? And why haven’t the 2007 formats been supported yet? Google should be looking for way to make these little things work better for the user.
Another thing: Yesterday, a friend had trouble signing into her Gmail account, and because I gave her the Gmail invite three years ago and set up her account for her, for some ridiculous reason the request to reset the password was sent to me! I had to reset her password and fix her account for her, and she was pretty worried about someone else having access to her email, as she should have been.
I don’t know, these are minor things, but they aren’t pushing me closer to using Gmail. Outlook has been making me pretty happy lately, especially with rich document previews that use native applications within Outlook, previews that third-parties can make, not just the maker of the email program. Plus, as long as Gmail doesn’t have a preview pane, I can’t afford to spend twice as long checking my email. I’ve had a Gmail account for three years now, and I’ve fill 4% of it, mostly with crap.
I guess I just don’t need the hassle of using Gmail.
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Gmail and Threadless have teamed up to hold a Gmail t-shirt contest, asking fans to submit the best Gmail-inspired shirt designs for a chance to win an iPhone, a bluetooth headset, a $400 JetBlue gift card, a $500 Threadless gift certificate, $2,000 in cash and a ton of Google memorabilia.
Sounds cool, but there’s a problem: Even though Google is participating in the competition, the contest policies don’t allow you to use the Gmail logo. Kind of silly, if you think about it. Your design needs to be “inspired” by Gmail, but it can’t have a Gmail logo, and seemingly can’t say “Gmail” either, or contain anything copyrighted. It seems like the problem comes from Threadless’ policies, which they won’t lift even if the copyright holder allows them to! That sure is going to make it hard to get all inspired, won’t it?
(via Philipp)
