Google

YouTube Announcements at VidCon 2014

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 28 Jul 2014 00:47:00 +0000

Chromebook (Chrome OS) for Beginners

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 14 Jul 2014 18:00:00 +0000

Chromebook: How to change your wallpaper

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 14 Jul 2014 17:58:00 +0000

Inside Google's Data Center

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 14 Jul 2014 17:43:00 +0000

How BIG Is Google?

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 14 Jul 2014 17:41:00 +0000

Chromebook: Video Chat with Google+ Hangouts

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 14 Jul 2014 17:35:00 +0000

Go Google: Google Drive

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 14 Jul 2014 17:22:00 +0000

Meet the new Google Drive

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 14 Jul 2014 17:14:00 +0000

Google Is About To Take Over Your Whole Life, And You Won't Even Notice

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 02 Jul 2014 08:06:00 +0000

Google Is About To Take Over Your Whole Life, And You Won't Even Notice

GOOGLE'S NEW DESIGN ETHOS, LIVING ON AND BEYOND EVERY SCREEN, COULD MAKE GOOGLE AN AMORPHOUS PROBLEM SOLVER OF UNIMAGINABLE SCALE.

“I have a weird question for you,” I stammered, sitting in a hotel room across from Matias Duarte and Jon Wiley, the Google design leads for Android and Search, respectively. As a reporter, you tend to ask a lot of stupid sounding questions, and it’s generally no big deal. But I was about to ask an extremely stupid sounding question--the type of question that, just by breathing it into the air, might out me as actually stupid, tainting every future conversation we’d have to come.

“What is Google?”

Yes, It's A Lot Of Services

The question may have been stupid, yes, but it was apropos. Google had just announced a new initiative called Material Design that promised to unify all Google products (and even third-party Android apps) under a common UX tongue. Google seemed to be morphing into something, but what?

With Material Design, Google has become a second reality inside touch-screen devices--complete with its own rules of logic and physics--and if Google has its way, it will eventually break free of touch screens to quite literally reshape the world around us.

“When you make things, you inherit thousands of years of expertise. But software design is just getting started,” Wiley had explained earlier. “We took a step back. We looked at all of the software and asked, what is this made of?”

A day before, as Google revealed its big plan at its annual I/O conference, it was overwhelming to conceptualize what this blob of digital services had become. Was Google a search bar that lived in a laptop web browser? Was Google a dashboard for your car? Was Google the Android tablet, being used to control an Android TV game? Was Google thesystem of white note cards, being sent from an Android phone to an Android Wear smartwatch? Was Google a magic blue button that lived on these cards, making anything possible with a tap?

In reality, all of these notions of Google are true. It's a series of services that have become our digital infrastructure. And in the very near future, Google will exist, not as something you need to understand as "Chrome" or "Android," but as a conduit of information that's on just the right screen at just the right time. When you check your watch at the train station, you'll see when your next train is arriving. But when you check that same watch at work, you'll see the most important email from your boss. That watch will unlock your computer--no need to use a password--and your email will be waiting. Walk away mid-response, no problem. Your phone has the email waiting on its screen, cursor blinking mid-sentence, as you walk to your meeting.

Luckily it's not all work. After five, on your ride home, every one of these screens will be dedicated to new tasks: picking up your kids, making your dinner, and showing you Game of Thrones reruns.

And Google is grounding all of these infrastructural services through a new approach called Material Design, which will be introduced inside their upcoming mobile OS, Android L. It's an impressive, underlying logic to Google's interface across all devices that I believe will not just unify their services across the digital world, but bring them into our analog world, too.

The Stuff Google Is Made Of

Material Design wants to add the intuitive feeling of physical objects in a purely digital environment. It renders all of the windows and buttons behind your screen as pieces of cardstock. Each piece catches light and casts shadow in a simulated 3-D space that meets your finger at the screen's glass, but this nanometer-thick wonder surface that's more capable than any material known to man. Where real cardstock would rip, Google's ambiguous stuff can balloon to double in size or split into two or three pieces and then recombine. Where real cardstock would appear dead white, Google's stuff can ripple with colors and animations.

Of course, the most impressive part of it all is that these physical properties feel almost as logical as dominos falling. Unlike interfaces where you tap a button while the rest of the screen sits dead, every action inside Android L seems to have an equal and opposite reaction. Tap a day in your calendar, and it grows while every other day around it is pushed away by its volume and mass. Read through your email as one long sheet of paper, tap on an individual message, and just that relevant thread is sliced out. Tap a circular play button inside the music player, and its colors echo forth into what becomes a fuller, rectangular control pad.

It’s in part the result of Google’s careful study of the way real paper works. The team went so far as to craft their app icons out of paper to see how light and shadow could interact with relatively flat (but real) material, and Wiley told me he became a bit obsessed with folding Post-it notes in the process, too. But it's also sheer wishful thinking of what our physical world could do if its rules could be cheated. Paper can't split itself and recombine, after all.

So to test if their designs pushed the limits of believable too far, the team stripped away all typography, photos, and colors from their interface during development, instead focusing on the way their wonder paper worked. One insight Duarte has is that you don’t need to be a designer to spot when a rule is broken in the physical world. Imagine if you dropped a piece of paper and it thumped on the table like a stone. This led the design team to agree it was easier to offer functional improvement of any Google product with the natural world as a point of reference for its digital concepts. It's what makes Material Design more than just a pretty aesthetic ploy.

Second Nature

With a solid enough universe of rules, Duarte added, it would be possible to bring other materials into the mix. Paper was the natural choice because it's relatively easy to render on a screen--its flat white surface doesn't have the complicated textures of bricks or treebark--but I begin to imagine cloth--from table linens to stains--and liquids that ooze and bubble. Sound cheesy? Quite possibly. But these materials would be a far cry from Apple’s last wave of skeuomorphic interface that included felt green poker tables and wood grain book shelves. They’d be borderline real, just rendered in a world on the other side of the glass.

Apple's skeuomorphism was a shorthand reference to the material world to make the digital world more approachable. Google's wonder paper also makes their interface more approachable. But it's not just an allusion to our physical world. It's more an explanation of what is happening when windows suddenly appear or disappear behind our screens. It's as if Google is reverse engineering magic tricks the industry has used for years to render interface, showing us the strings so that these animations make sense. If they're not attempting to write the language of interface, they're certainly trying to understand it in order to push the discourse forward.

When it comes to digital environments, there aren't natural, physical reasons to dictate the way objects and elements inteact and behave--for example, running an Android app on a Chromebook, or pushing a text message from your smartphone to your smartwatch. We've simply learned that these things are possible. So when we talk about interface, we stumble around words like "intuitive" that we'd never use to describe a chair or a table. Material Design is Google's synthetic explanation of what's going on between their screens and apps. The digital physics might not be real, but it provides a grounding to the virtual interface nonetheless.

Material Design is a way for Google to unify what it is--not just as a collection of similarly designed services for various screens--but as a real secondary world in which everything you see is a snippet of something tangible. So when you receive a push notification on your Android Wear watch, it's not just a dead bit of text unrelated from everything else, it's a bit of cardstock--a bit of itself, actually--passed from your phone to your wrist. Those same pieces of Google will pass between your watch and TV, your TV and your glasses, and who knows where else?

Our windows to that world may not always be the same--sometimes it might be circles on our wrists, other times it might be rectangles in our hands--but Material Design promises that we'll always have access to the same, inherently logical bits information regardless of what we're interacting with. And as content merges more and more between these screens, the feeling will be as natural as gravity.

But all of this is not simply a grandiose interpretation of Google's ideas. Google's ideas are actually that grandiose. Duarte points out that soon, our objects will reshape themselves--MIT’s Inform comes to mind--and at this point, Google’s big Material Design play can break through the glass of smartphones, tablets, and watches. Hardware and software will meld together, allowing interaction designers to step in and really work their magic. The object will become the interface, and the interface will become the object. In Duarte's mind, one can see Material Design powering a living infrastructure in a world where every conceivable surface glows, shifts, and ripples, quite literally reshaping the way we communicate, learn, work, and live. Whether we're interacting with a phone, a home, or a watch, Google will fulfill our needs ergonomically.

“What is Google?” I ask.

The team laughs nervously at the question. Duarte mentions company ethos. Interface speed. Simplicity. Wiley uses the extra time to collect his thoughts.

"We look for moments where we can use our technology, innovation, and design to give back time--to give people choice in how they spend their time," Wiley says.

In other words, any point of friction in your day to day life is an opportunity for Google. It's not any one preconceived thing, but a wide, opportunist infrastructure that can constantly conform to your life.

Google wants to be as amorphous as its wonder paper.

Hands-on with Google's $249, ARM-based Chromebook.

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 18 May 2014 12:56:00 +0000

Google Glass Actually Costs $80

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 18 May 2014 06:23:00 +0000

Chrome Web Store

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 18 Jan 2014 15:22:00 +0000

Chrome Web Store

InterNet TV

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 18 Jan 2014 12:41:00 +0000

Google TV

internet-tv.

Social Media Magnetic Icons

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 04 Jan 2014 13:40:00 +0000

Deck your device with these Google apps

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 31 Dec 2013 00:47:00 +0000

Get the best of Google

For your new holiday devices

Google Drive

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 01:07:00 +0000

Google Drive. Keep everything. Share anything.

Go to Google Drive

Google Glass

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 10 Sep 2012 18:57:00 +0000

< A model wearing Google Glass backstage at Diane < von Furstenberg’s show in Lincoln Center.

Google Glass and Google co-founder Sergey Brin made a surprise appearance at New York Fashion Week Sunday afternoon.

Models walked down the runway at Diane von Furstenberg’s Spring/Summer 2013 collection show wearing Glass, the upcoming headset/eyewear device that Google is developing. The augmented reality-enhanced glasses have many smartphone-like functions: users can take pictures, record video, receive messages and check calendars, among other things.

The bands of each pair were modified to complement the collection’s palette of corals, blues, whites and grays. It was the first time Glass had ever appeared on a runway.

Chrome 15

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 21:41:00 +0000

Use your Google+ profile with your Blogger blogs

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 00:25:00 +0000

by A Googler at 5:37 pm

In fewer than 4 months since its launch, more than 40 million people have joined Google+, making it a living, breathing space for social connections and sharing to thrive.

Today we’re excited to announce the first way you will be able to leverage Google+ -- by making it possible to replace your Blogger profile with your Google+ profile.

In addition to giving your readers a more robust and familiar sense of who you are, your social connections will see your posts in their Google search results with an annotation that you've shared the post.

Plus, bloggers who switch will automatically get access to the Google+ integrations we’ll be rolling out in the future.

If you blog under a pseudonym and you don’t want to connect your common name with your blog, this integration may not work for you. That’s why we’ve made it completely optional to switch.

This option is available for all users today in our testing ground, Blogger in Draft, and will be accessible fromwww.blogger.com in the coming weeks.

If you have a Google+ account and would like to replace your Blogger profile with your Google+ profile, log in todraft.blogger.com and click “Get started” on the promotion message, pictured below.

If you don’t have a Google+ account, you can create one here first, and then head back to draft.blogger.com and look for the promotion message.

To learn more, check out our FAQs or visit our Help Forum. Happy blogging!

Posted by Vardhman Jain, Software Engineer

http://buzz.blogger.com/2011/10/use-your-google-profile-with-your.html

Google Buzz Bites the Dust

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 20:53:00 +0000

Goodbye, Google Buzz. The social messaging platform, which was meant to rival Twitter, is beingtossed aside by Google in an effort to slim down.

Google Buzz launched in February 2010 as a way to share status updates, photos, videos, and links with friends through Gmail. The secret sauce was a "page rank" algorithm that determined which status updates should be featured prominently and which ones should be collapsed. Google Buzz also mined users' Gmail contacts and set users up to automatically follow the people they e-mailed most.

Unfortunately for Google, this turned out to be a privacy nightmare. By default, users' follower lists were public, revealing their most frequent e-mail contacts to the world. Google Buzz also lacked a way to block people who didn't have public profiles at first.

Although Google apologized and fixed these problems, the network's reputation was already damaged. The fiasco even brought complaints from the Federal Communications Commission, forcing asettlement in which Google agreed to comprehensive, company-wide privacy measures.

Even if Google Buzz hadn't botched privacy, it still probably would've failed. The service did little to differentiate from Facebook or Twitter, and users quickly lost interest.

When Google+ launched in June, Google Buzz was assumed to be dead. Now it's official. Google+ is off to a much better start, with 40 million members, so it's unlikely that Google will give up on its newest social network so easily.

Google+ Real Time Search & Hashtags

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 23:47:00 +0000

Google is giving Google+ users two enhanced ways to find information disseminating across the social network, with real-time search and hashtags.

“Now when you search in Google+, you’ll see a message about new posts the instant they’re available,” Vic Gundotra, Google’s SVP of social, explained in a post on Google+ Wednesday. “If you click on this message, or select ‘Most recent,’ then relevant posts will start appearing in real-time.”

Also, should you opt to put a hashtag in any of your Google+ updates, that hashtag will automatically link to search results for the term.

The improvements will come as welcome additions for Google+ power users, journalists and media types interested in keeping up with breaking news on Google+. The search updates may do little to convince more casual social networkers to stick around on the social site or give it second chance.

They have some long-term significance, however. We expect this technology to become the foundation for a revamped real-time search experience on Google.com itself.

You may recall that Google Realtime Search went on hiatus in July — after Google failed to reach an agreement with Twitter for continued access to its firehose of data

Google Introduces Cloud Database

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 12:04:00 +0000

CloudSQL service is free, for now.

Google has launched a new service to make its cloud computing platform more appealing to businesses. The company on Thursday introduced a limited preview of Google Cloud SQL, a scalable, hosted MySQL database environment.

Navneet Joneja, product manager for Google Cloud SQL, says that one of the most frequent requests from Google App Engine users has been for an easy way to develop traditional database-driven applications. Using App Engine, Google's platform-as-a-service offering, in conjunction with Cloud SQL allows developers to avoid the burden of database management, maintenance, and administration.

And at the moment, the price is hard to beat.

"Cloud SQL is available free of charge for now, and we will publish pricing at least 30 days before charging for it," said Joneja in a blog post. Google says it will not charge for the service in 2011.

But the price will go up eventually. Google in May said it planned to increase the price of using its App Engine cloud computing infrastructure later this year and recently shocked developers when the magnitude of the price increase became apparent. The outcrythat followed--partly the result of expectations set by the low price during App Engine's beta period--prompted Google engineering director Peter Magnusson to apologize for not providing developers with the tools to understand how their apps would be affected by the price change.

[ Find out more about Google's plans for App Engine. ReadGoogle Revs App Engine With Business Features. ]

Google has defended the price increase as necessary to make App Engine work as a business.

Chrome extension enables remote computer control

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 23:17:00 +0000

Months of work on "chromoting" have reached fruition with Google's release on Friday of a new Chrome extension to let a person on one computer remotely control another across the network.

The Chrome Remote Desktop beta version, which arrived Friday, is a browser-based equivalent of remote desktop software for conventional operating systems. Such software is handy for IT administrators managing employees' machines, people taking care of their relatives' computers, or individuals getting access to their own machines from afar.

"Chrome Remote Desktop BETA is the first installment on a capability allowing users to remotely access another computer through the Chrome browser or a Chromebook," the release notes said. "Chrome Remote Desktop BETA is fully cross-platform, so you can connect any two computers that have a Chrome browser, including Windows, Linux, Mac, and Chromebooks."

Using the Chrome remote desktop extension requires the person sharing access to a computer give an access code to the person who will tap into it remotely.

(Credit: Google)

It's that latter category that likely was a very important factor in the development of the technology. Google's Chrome OS is geared in part for organizations that want to lower their computer administration costs, and remote management is an important factor when it comes to that goal.

The technology right now is limited so that permission must be granted each time remote administration is activated. "This version enables users to share with or get access to another computer by providing a one-time authentication code. Access is given only to the specific person the user identifies for one time only, and the sharing session is fully secured," the release notes said.

Via Erica Joy

Google Wallet Review

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 01:19:00 +0000

http://www.google.com/wallet/#utm_source=HA&utm_medium=ha_sem_bk&utm_campaign=en-US&utm_term=%2Bgoogle%20%2Bwallet

New Google airline flights

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 09:49:00 +0000

http://www.google.com/flights/