Whipped up a quick bookmarklet that lets you manually put the Google +1 button on any webpage you visit. This is good if you’re using the +1 button for aggregating links on your profile. Once installed, click the button on any page you visit to add a +1 button in the top right corner of the webpage.
Drag this link to your bookmarks bar → +1 here
Google Wallet is the all new “wave your smartphone to pay” solution from Google. The logo is a stylized W (for “wallet” one would assume) which kinda looks like soundwaves, or perhaps radiowaves from a Near-Field Communication chip. Similarly, the GLAAD logo evokes both communication and amplification.
The GLAAD logo was first, by the way.
Google’s IO keynote is over. One day was dedicated to Chrome OS, another to Android OS — one day for each of Googles operating systems. Here’s what thay said about the next Android OS, Ice Cream Sandwich:
Our goal with Ice Cream Sandwich is to deliver one operating system that works everywhere, regardless of device. Ice Cream Sandwich will bring everything you love about Honeycomb on your tablet to your phone, including the holographic user interface, more multitasking, the new launcher and richer widgets.
So naturally, people are asking: if the goal is one OS for all devices, why does Chrome OS exist?
A couple of months ago, I threw together a quick Google Chrome web-app — simply a link to a wide view of Google Tasks. Here are a few anecdotal observations since then.
Google rolled out password sync today! Wohoo! They also rolled out a new options page with styled select boxes and push buttons:
Looks nice, doesn’t it?
Still, the styling of UI widgets seem to represents a shift in how Google does things. For the longest time, Google has been accused of doing “non-design” — their approach to design being extremely minimalist with little or no styling and whitespace as long as the eye can see. I believe this trend traced way back to the time when Google swayed us from using AltaVista and MetaCrawler; it was the really fast, no-frills search engine that got us the result faster than any of the other search engines.
I have been a fierce proponent of keeping UI widgets unstyled. I’ve always tried to adhere to the usability studies done by Jakob Nielsen which suggest that the less UI you have to learn, the better; that if you let your buttons, select-boxes and radio groups stay the way their operating system made them, users will know natively what to expect. But something has changed. I feel it in the water.
The nativity argument was a good one, so what ruined it? Could it be the plethora of nasty advertisements that look like alertboxes? Could it be a new digital age where computers are appliances and moms no longer fear them blowing up when they turn them on? Maybe, simply there are so many apps that only the good ones — the well-designed ones — float to the top? Perhaps Jakob Nielsen was wrong all the time — is it enough that a button looks like a button, for people to confident in what happens when pressing it?
Nah, it’s still good advice. I’ll still take a native app over a non-native one any day of the week, and I still think that unless you know what you’re doing, you shouldn’t style your widgets. As clear as it is that things are no longer like they used to be — lickable buttons be darned — you can’t go wrong with common UI. This is Unix! I know this!
Google just revamped their profiles:
We think this new design helps highlight the information that’s most important to you, making it easier for people who visit your profile to get to know you. As the new layout gradually rolls out, current users of Google Profiles will notice that their existing profile will automatically update to the new style. To update and add to your profile, simply click on the new “Edit Profile” button.
Here’s my revamped profile, and here are my thoughts about it:
I’d like a redesign, but everything else about this, I kinda like. That said, it’s no-where near replacing my about.me/joen profile in my email signature yet.
TechCrunch writes that Google is in the process of killing the URL bar from its Chrome browser. To be fair, this is not recent news. Google has been exploring various UI configurations to its Chrome browser for for most of the last year, and the information looks to have come from the Window UI page from the Chromium documentation project.
It’s also worth noting that the proposed UI change appears to have found its way to the Android Honeycomb browser:
Either way, the direction for Chrome is interesting, and for a number of reasons, it makes sense.
Apple has demonstrated that there’s a great economy in apps, but “app” is an increasingly diffuse term, considering you can create quite complex create apps in HTML and a number of new non-platform-native technologies.
If Google can change the public understanding from an app being something you download and install to rather being a place you visit, the change can help inventorize the web. The result could be easier to make discoverable to users but most importantly, it could be monetized. On the old web, you’d visit The New York Times and throw up in your mouth at the paywall. On the new web, you’d visit The New York Times and get all the free content, but have an option to buy a premium web-app which stores your access credentials while it serves as a bookmark.
The URL bar is the commandline, and like iOS doesn’t need a commandline for you to launch Angry Birds, Chrome doesn’t need a URL bar for you to launch Facebook.
A few weeks ago, I created a Chrome web-app to see how the Chrome web-store works. That app has now been installed a couple of hundred times a week, even though the app is merely a glorified bookmark for a Google service. If we can learn anything from this, it is that pointing at a large fingerfriendly icon on your new tab page is quicker than typing in a URL or clicking a small navigation bar bookmark.
But what about search? Search is the core of Googles business, and Google won’t revamp a proven UI without good reasons. While putting apps front and center makes a lot of sense, there’s a UI challenge in having both search and apps front and center.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about Internet Explorer 9s new UI which disconnects the URL bar from the tab:
But with the emergence of Chrome Web-Apps, which are just around the corner, there’s a new, albeit not super strong, argument for disconnecting the addressbar from the tab, and that is that it’s still, despite web-apps, a place people use to launch new webpages. In the case of the omnibar, it’s also where people start searching. In Chrome Web-Apps [...], the omnibar is hidden when you’re inside, say, the Google Maps web-app. How do you launch a new page or search? You have to click “new tab” in order to get the omnibar back.
The solution could be putting the omnibar on the new tab page. Clicking “new tab” would then set text focus on the search field:
It’ll be interesting to see where Google goes with this.
It’s no secret that I’m a huge fan of many Googles web-services. I live in Gmail and Google Calendar is my PA. Google also has a little service called “Tasks”, which you might have found it as a little panel in Gmail, though it’s the more accessible canvas view version of Tasks that I’m the most fond of.
I’ve recently thought about Googles Chrome web-store and the fact that most of the apps present there are simply glorified bookmarks; large icons that do nothing but link to a website. What’s the point? Do websites become more discoverable for people casually browsing the web-store?
In the hopes of finding out just that, I’ve wrapped up Googles Tasks service as a Chrome web-app. If you install the app, you’ll get a tasks icon on your new-tab-page, and it’ll take you to the wide canvas view. Since I’m merely piggy-backing on the work of Google, the extension is free forever (or until it’s replaced by a better version, hopefully from the mothership itself). We’ll see how it does and I’ll get back to you. In the meantime, enjoy my first Chrome web-app: GTasks.