Nice to know they still promote Google Reader on its logon page, despite it shutting down in a few months.
You can even still take the tour.
Google Reader still promoted on its logon page
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Category Archives: Google and Gmail
Forcing Youtube to another aspect ratio
This is handy… I had a Youtube video which Youtube had detected as 16:9, even though it’s actually 4:3.
You can tell Youtube to override on playback by adding a tag: yt:stretch=4:3
There are other tags for cropping to 16:9, or forcing 16:9 display — more details in this article: Fix aspect ratio of YouTube videos, which is based on the official Youtube article
Did Gmail’s certificate expire?
Surely not? Yet I’m getting this error in Chrome…
IE doesn’t appear to have this problem.
Update 21:43. Ah, it’s come good. Momentary blip? Wonder how many others got the scary message.
Bye bye Google Wave
Google Buzz went west; the lesser-known Google Jaiku is shutting-down in January. No surprise to hear another aborted Google social media product will go belly-up: Google Wave to go read-only from 31/1/2012, and being switched-off on 30/4/2012.
They must really be hoping that Google Plus stays the distance.
NoFollow not working?
Nofollow attributes were added to the web in 2005, with major search engines and blog/CMS vendors providing support.
I find it interesting that it clearly hasn’t stopped comment spammers, who continue to bombard blogs. I can only assume they don’t care about Pagerank etc, but just want their links to be seen by humans, though I would have assumed most blog owners use spam detection of some kind, and most spam comments which do make it through are unlikely to get clicked on.
But that’s always been the issue with automated spam. Only a tiny number have to be acted upon to make them profitable.
Google Apps to support last two browser releases
Interesting: Google Apps has stated they will support the last major version, and the second-last of web browsers.
As of August 1st, we will discontinue support for the following browsers and their predecessors: Firefox 3.5, Internet Explorer 7, and Safari 3.
I suppose IE6 was around for so long that it’s easy to think of IE7 as being “new”. But in fact it’s five years old this year (official release October 2006), and was officially superseded two years ago.
Hopefully all those corporates who dragged their heels on IE6 can move a little faster off IE7.
Google Chrome targeted by Malware
Interesting piece by Ed Bott: Malware authors target Google Chrome (on Windows).
Sounds similar to these kinds of fake Windows anti-virus scans which you see around the place, and try to convince you to click and download an executable which will supposedly clean up your PC:
This type of thing reinforces the fact that no browser/platform is safe from malware, and that it’s important not to regularly run your account with Admin privileges on your PC.
Personally I reckon it wouldn’t hurt to have a setting in Windows (and other operating systems) that prevents running executables from any directory where the current (non-Admin user) has write-permissions, eg only letting them run programs that have been installed by an Administrator.
Does any OS offer something like that at the moment?
GMail irritation #2
I love GMail, and this error probably seemed like a good idea when they coded it…
…but it’s just irritating.
Please trust me. I know what I’m doing. I know I’m replying to something in the Trash. I don’t care if the sent copy isn’t saved… invariably it’s going to an email list which I have no interest in archiving for myself when it’s stored on Yahoo’s servers or whatever.
So I don’t need this error popping up unpredictably multiple times to interrupt me, when I’ve seen it hundreds of times before.
In fact despite the wording, I didn’t save the message. GMail auto-saved it for me.
And when I send the email, just to cap it off, I get this:
1. These shouldn’t even be Errors. They should be Warnings.
2. How about an option to turn these warnings off, once and for all?
Email startup times
A quick timing test on my main home workhorse computer, which isn’t the fastest in the world, but isn’t the slowest either. (Windows 7, Athlon 64 X2 dual core 4400+ 2300 Mhz, 3 Gb RAM, on a fast ADSL2+ net connection.)
Having started Windows and logged onto a clean desktop:
- Start Chrome with GMail set as the home page: 8.5 seconds to ready
- Start Thunderbird: 11.6 seconds to ready
No wonder people are heading into the cloud.
Subsequent timings (without a reboot, so some things may be cached, eg later in a session when you’ve closed your email and you want to go back in):
- Chrome with GMail: 3.4 seconds
- Thunderbird: 3.1 seconds
Interesting.
Gmail irritation #1
Sometimes Gmail decides your session has expired, when you’re in the middle of writing an email.
If you’re lucky you might be able to copy the text from the draft out. If not, the most recently saved draft may or may not be up to date.
This is bad design. Why interrupt like this when you’re in the middle of something?
If you must have sessions that expire, than at least give the user a bit more time to actually finish what they’re doing — send and/or exit the draft — and then ask them to logon again.
Google’s buggy and annoying custom backgrounds
Google’s introduced custom background images for its plain search page.
You know what? I find it annoying. It’s just slowing down the page, and making it less readable.
And the clincher is… you can’t turn it off! Initially there’s a very well-concealed link at the bottom left to do it, but once you take a look at the options and try it out, that becomes a “Change background image” option, and there’s no way to remove it completely.
I’ve also seen it momentarily change to a “Remove background” link, but it doesn’t work — instead it changes back to a default picture.
Seriously, if I wanted this kind of crap, I’d use Bing.
Under Editor’s Picks, there is an option for a white background (as well as other colours), but choosing white is not very readable, because the writing has also been changed to white, with a grey shadow. For now, I’ve switched it to the blue one, which isn’t excessively bad, but I’d like it gone completely.
Mashable has found there are a couple of not-very-convenient ways to turn it off:
Go to http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=all
or use HTTPS, eg https://www.google.com/
Attn: Google, by all means offer this as an option, but for heaven’s sake provide an easy way to turn it off.
Update: Google blog post about this (via Richard Thornton.)
Update 8am Friday: They’ve fixed the bug, so the Remove Background Image link now works. As this update notes: Due to a bug, the explanatory link did not appear for most users. As a result, many people thought we had permanently changed our homepage, so we decided to stop today’s series early.
Call me crazy, but maybe they should have tested it properly before turning it on. (Thanks again Richard)
Google Pac-man!
To celebrate Pacman’s 30th anniversary, Google’s banner today is not only Pac-man-based, it’s a playable game if you wait for a few seconds.
And yes, if you clear the first two boards, you get the traditional cut-scene.
Is that totally awesome or what?
Am I correct in thinking it’s not actually written in Flash, but in some clever HTML-type thingy?
Update: Yes. CNet reports: ccording to Germick, the company worked with Pac-Man’s publisher, Namco Bandai, to make the project as realistic as possible. Yet the Google team, with the inspirational lead of Marcin Wichary, a Google senior user experience designer, built their version of the game from the ground up using JavaScript, HTML, and CSS.
Update 4pm: If you click Insert Coin twice, you get a two-player game (W/A/S/Z controls Ms Pac-Man). And there is one minor bug I’ve noticed — sometimes when chasing ghosts after eating a power pill, you can pass right through them.
Update 9:30pm: Google Pac-Man: The FAQ + Kill Screen Winners — contains more details on how it was written, where to find it when it’s gone from the main Google page, and a picture of the”kill” screen.
Update Monday: It’s gone from Google’s home page now, but is still online here: www.google.com/pacman