Tuesday 16 February 2010

A new beta of Google Chrome for Mac - with extensions and more

Since we released Chrome for Mac in beta last December, we've been busy adding new features. Today, after some incubation in the developer channel, we're happy to make some of these features more widely available. The new beta release of Chrome for Mac offers extensions, bookmark sync, and more.

With this new version, you'll be able to install any of over 2,200 extensions (and counting!) currently available in Chrome's extensions gallery. Extensions can add useful, informative, fun, or quirky functionality to the browser. You can manage your extensions by clicking on the Window menu and choosing "Extensions."

For this release, we remained focused on providing a snappy, safe, and simple browsing experience on the Mac. If you haven't tried Chrome on the Mac yet and are curious about its features, this video will take you on a brief tour:



Those of you who use several computers will now be able to keep your bookmarks synchronized between them. If some of your computers aren't Macs, don't worry: bookmark sync works in Chrome for Linux and Windows too. We also added bookmark and cookie managers in a way that feels completely at home on the Mac. For technically-oriented users, our new Task Manager will help you keep tabs on all of your tabs.

If you're not using Chrome yet, you can try all of these new features out by downloading the Google Chrome Beta for Mac. Existing Chrome users should be automatically updated to the new beta within the next day – just check the About window and look for version 5.0.307. We hope you're as excited about this new version as our animated friends are:



Simple wedding planning with Google Docs

Cross posted on the Official Google Blog

We all want important life moments — like graduating from school, getting married or having your first baby — to be perfect. For many couples, your wedding is a chance to celebrate with everyone you care about; it's also the largest, most complicated party you'll ever host. From tracking guest RSVPs, to picking the right florist, DJ and caterer, to coordinating every last detail with your wedding party, it's no surprise that the process can become overwhelming and expensive.

After proposing to the woman of my dreams with 100 red roses, six months ago I started planning my own wedding. My fiancee and I decided to use Google Docs to manage every aspect of our wedding, starting with shared budget, guest list, to-do list and venue-tracking spreadsheets and keeping all our docs in our "Wedding" shared folder. I ended up talking to other couples who planned their weddings using Google Docs and discovered I wasn't alone in thinking that it helped save time and avoid headaches.

Today, I'm happy to share this knowledge in the form of over 20 wedding templates available in the Google Docs template gallery. These tools make it easy to estimate and track your wedding budget, collect addresses for invitations, compare vendors and much more. For example, take a look at the address book template below. Instead of emailing hundreds of guests and copy/pasting hundreds of addresses into a spreadsheet, you can send a Google form and collect addresses in a spreadsheet automatically:


Because these documents, spreadsheets and forms live online in the cloud, you can easily get help by sharing them with your parents or bridal party, and you can access them from the bakery, bridal shop or anywhere around town using your smartphone. Plus, you never have to worry about versions and email attachments, because everything is always up to date.

Having the tools to plan a wedding is a good start, but you also need to know what questions to ask when interviewing vendors and which factors to consider when inviting guests or choosing music. To give you a leg up, we've teamed up with StyleMePretty, a popular wedding blog, to add tips from wedding experts to each template. Style Me Pretty is also hosting a sweepstakes and asking engaged couples to share their wedding planning experiences: one randomly selected winner will receive free consultation with celebrity event planner Michelle Rago and a $500 gift certificate to Wedding Paper Divas.

We're excited to give more engaged couples tools to make the wedding planning process easier and more fun. To learn more about simplifying wedding planning with Google Docs and Style Me Pretty, check out docs.google.com/wedding.



A new Buzz start-up experience based on your feedback

Posted by Todd Jackson, Product Manager, Gmail and Google Buzz

We've heard your feedback loud and clear, and since we launched Google Buzz four days ago, we've been working around the clock to address the concerns you've raised. Today, we wanted to let you know about a number of changes we'll be making over the next few days based on all the feedback we've received.

First, auto-following. With Google Buzz, we wanted to make the getting started experience as quick and easy as possible, so that you wouldn't have to manually peck out your social network from scratch. However, many people just wanted to check out Buzz and see if it would be useful to them, and were not happy that they were already set up to follow people. This created a great deal of concern and led people to think that Buzz had automatically displayed the people they were following to the world before they created a profile.

On Thursday, after hearing that people thought the checkbox for choosing not to display this information publicly was too hard to find, we made this option more prominent. But that was clearly not enough. So starting this week, instead of an auto-follow model in which Buzz automatically sets you up to follow the people you email and chat with most, we're moving to an auto-suggest model. You won't be set up to follow anyone until you have reviewed the suggestions and clicked "Follow selected people and start using Buzz."



For the tens of millions of you who have already started using Buzz, over the next couple weeks we'll be showing you a similar version of this new start-up experience to give you a second chance to review and confirm the people you're following. If you want to review this list now, just go to the Buzz tab, click "Following XX people" and unfollow anyone you wish. If you don't want to share the lists of people who are following you and people you are following publicly on your profile, you can opt out at any time from the edit profile page.

Second, Buzz will no longer connect your public Picasa Web Albums and Google Reader shared items automatically. Just to be clear: Buzz only automatically connected content that was already public, so if you had previously shared photos in an "Unlisted" album or set your Google Reader shared items as "Protected," no one except the people you'd explicitly allowed to see your stuff has been able to see it. But due to your feedback Buzz will no longer connect these sites automatically.

Third, we're adding a Buzz tab to Gmail Settings. From there, you'll be able to hide Buzz from Gmail or disable it completely. In addition, there will be a link to these settings from the initial start-up page so you can easily decide from the get go that you don't want to use Buzz at all.



It's been an exciting and challenging week for the Buzz team. We've been getting feedback via the Gmail help forums and emails from friends and family, and we've also been able to do something new: read the buzz about Buzz itself. We quickly realized that we didn't get everything quite right. We're very sorry for the concern we've caused and have been working hard ever since to improve things based on your feedback. We'll continue to do so.

Introducing Google Maps Labs, your passport to a world of new features


We are pleased to announce the launch of Maps Labs, a set of opt-in features that add useful functionality to Google Maps. Labs allow us to quickly experiment with new Google Maps features, add new ways of interacting with the map, or just try out something wacky. If a Lab proves popular it may become a standard feature of Google Maps in future.

To activate individual Labs features, click on the green conical flask icon at the top right of the screen. This will bring up a list of Labs that you can enable. If you're logged in with your Google account, we will remember which Labs you have enabled when you next visit Google Maps.
To get started we have a range of useful Labs available today. You can enable the Aerial imagery that we recently launched in the Google Maps API. You can zoom in to a particular location just by dragging a box around it using the new Drag 'n' Zoom control. You can browse nearby businesses with the What's Around Here button and test your world geography with our Where in the World game. Or in case you still yearn for the days when you could turn paper maps upside down we even have Rotatable Maps.
We chose not to offer a lab that replicates the experience of struggling to fold a map back up though. If you really miss that, we can't help you.

Because they're experimental, Labs may not be quite as robust as some other features on Google Maps. In fact there's a chance they could change, break, or disappear at any time. Just in case, we've provided an escape hatch. If you discover that a Labs feature causes you problems use this link to disable all Labs and select just those you want to keep: http://maps.google.com/maps?ftr=0.

We hope Labs enhance your Google Maps experience and look forward to adding more in the future. To keep up to date with the latest Labs, get help with a particular Labs feature, or even suggest new Labs, check out the Maps Labs Google group.



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