A few days after launching a new interface for video pages, YouTube started to test a new video player with more elegant controls and a better-looking progress bar. I think the new player is in line with YouTube's latest redesign: it's cleaner, simpler and easier to use.

As StraightUpSocial shows, controls fade out when you're not interacting with the player, so they're no longer distracting. The player's progress bar becomes smaller when you're not likely to use it, while the volume control is now horizontal.


Here's a video that shows the new player tested by YouTube:



{ Thanks, Jonah and Will. }

Google Video has a new filter that restricts search results to TV shows. For example, if you search for [Seinfeld], Google lets you select one of the 9 seasons of the show. Google shows the name of each episode and a list of sites where you can watch it.



Google doesn't restrict the results to sites that are licensed to stream TV shows, so many videos are from Russian sites like Yandex and Smotri.

As you probably noticed, Google Video no longer has the option to play videos inline and Google says that there are no plans to restore it. The feature has been gradually removed from Google web search, for YouTube videos and now it's no longer available.

Here's a quick way to translate text directly from Google Search. Type the language pair, followed by the text you want to translate. For example, to translate "I love you" in French, search Google for: [en:fr love]. You can also type [translate love in french], but this query is longer.


For now, this feature only works for language pairs that include English: en:fr, fr:en (French), en:it, it:en (Italian), en:de, de:en (German), en:es, es:en (Spanish), en:ru, ru:en (Russian), en:zh, zh:en (Chinese), en:ja, ja:en (Japanese), en:ko, ko:en (Korean).

If you use the language pair en:en (English to English), Google shows definitions from Google Dictionary. For example, a search for [en:en astute] shows the definition of the word "astute" and the pronunciation. Google Dictionary uses definitions from Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner's English Dictionary.


You can also search for [astute definition], but the OneBox result shows definitions from WordNet.

Google has recently released a version of Gmail optimized for iPad, Apple's lightweight computer. Gmail for iPad is similar to the iPhone version, but the main difference is that Gmail has a reading pane.

"We're launching an experimental two-pane user interface to take advantage of its large touchscreen and tablet form factor. Building upon the Gmail for mobile web app, this new interface displays your conversations on the left and your messages on the right hand side."

Here's how to create a Google Chrome shortcut that launches Gmail for iPad:

1. launch Chrome and go to http://mail.google.com

2. create a shortcut by clicking on the page menu and selecting
"create application shortcuts"


3. you'll see a Gmail shortcut on your desktop and you'll need to edit it. If you use Windows, right-click on the shortcut, select "Properties", go to the target field and append a space, followed by this value (a short version of iPad's user-agent and a new Chrome profile):

 --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0(iPad; U; iPhone OS 3_2; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 Mobile/7B314" --user-data-dir="%tmp%\gmipad"


4. close all Chrome windows and click on the desktop shortcut for Gmail.


Obviously, Gmail for iPad works in other browsers, as well. You only need to change your browser's user-agent to:

Mozilla/5.0(iPad; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B314 Safari/531.21.10

Google Dictionary has a lot of useful information about English words and expressions. Besides showing synonyms, antonyms, definitions from the dictionary and from the web, related phrases, Google Dictionary added usage examples from Google News.

Google extracts the quotes from news articles and attributes the quotes to their authors. You can find quotes in Google News if you search for the name of a popular person and click on the "Quotes" section (e.g.: Gordon Brown, Steve Jobs). Unfortunately, you can't restrict Google News results to quotes.

Gmail Labs has two useful experimental features: hierarchical labels and message preview. If you used Greasemonkey, it's likely that you've tried Folders4Gmail and Mihai Parparita's Conversation Preview, two scripts with similar functionality to the new Gmail Labs experiments.

Nested Labels is just a cosmetic change that lets you create labels which are displayed hierarchically. If you enable this experiment and create a label like Mailing-Lists/Linux, you'll notice that Linux is displayed as a subfolder of Mailing-Lists. Unfortunately, all the other places that let you interact with labels show the label as Mailing-Lists/Linux.

"You can create complex hierarchies of labels if that's the way you like to organize your mail, and you can expand/collapse labels to save space. You'll always be able to tell whether a given label contains unread messages in its collapsed child labels by looking at whether it's bold or not," explains Google.


Message Sneak Peek shows a small preview of a conversation, so you can quickly read the first sentences without opening the conversation. Right-click on a conversation from the inbox or from another view and you should see the first unread message from that conversation. If you've read all messages from a conversation, Gmail shows the last message.

There's also a keyboard shortcut for showing the preview pane for the currently selected conversation: h. You can navigate to the previous/next conversation using k and j or dismiss the pane using Escape.


{ Thanks, Sterling. }

Google users in the US that type queries like [I want to die], [suicidal thoughts], [suicide methods] will see a special OneBox result that provides the phone number of the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.


"This is only the second time Google has added such guidance on troubling search terms, Dr. Roni Zeiger, chief health strategist for Google, said in an interview. A few months ago, the search engine began providing a phone number for the national poison control hotline after searches like [poison emergency]," reports the New York Times.

Unfortunately, it's difficult to measure how effective Google's OneBox result is, since there's no link and you can't start the call directly from Google's search result page.

{ Thanks, John. }

I mentioned in some previous posts that Picasa Web Albums has many limitations: even though Google lets you buy up to 16 TB of storage, Picasa Web Albums was limited to 1,000 albums and each album could only include 1,000 photos. To make things worse, Google Buzz creates a new album every time you upload photos.

Google addressed this problem by raising the limit to 10,000 albums, but I'm not sure if that's the right solution.

"We want Picasa Web Albums to be a place you can share and store all your digital photos, regardless of how many you have. We recently made extra storage really affordable, but until now, Picasa Web accounts have been limited to a maximum of 1,000 albums. We heard that you needed more room, and because we want you to keep sharing your photos and posting them to Buzz, we've worked hard to now raise this limit to 10,000 albums."

Google could make these limitations less important by detaching photos from albums. Instead of uploading photos and adding them to a single album, Picasa could use labels to group related photos. Some labels could be created dynamically: place labels, date labels, people labels, while albums could be created manually or using filters.


{ Thanks, Dave. }

A recent Chromium build extended the synchronization feature to settings and autofill data. When you setup Chrome sync, you have to option to only synchronize bookmarks, settings or autofill data. Google stores your data online and links it to a Google account.


For some reason, Chrome settings and autofill data are saved in Google Docs, but the two files can't be shared or exported.


The nice thing about Chrome Sync and other similar services (Opera Link, Mozilla Weave, Google Toolbar) is that you can use any computer and keep your browser's data in sync. Mozilla Weave synchronizes more data: passwords, sessions, browser history, but it's likely that Google will add these features to Chrome. Google could also synchronize extensions and themes.

After months of experimenting with new layouts, YouTube launched a new design for video pages. YouTube's goal was to simplify "the look and functionality of the video page", so it replaced the rating system with two buttons (like/dislike), it combined the list of related video with the list of videos from the same author.

"Information about a video is now grouped together in one place and there's a consistent way to get more detail when you need it. This way, unless something's truly useful to you, it doesn't clutter up your page," explains YouTube.

Popular comments are now highlighted, buttons look slicker and playlists have a more intuitive interface. Unfortunately, the description of the video is too short, you need to click on a button to see the embedding options and it's difficult too spot low-quality videos without actually watching them. YouTube removed 5-star ratings, but it didn't find a good way to show if users like or dislike a video. In fact, to see the number of likes or dislikes, you need to click one of the two buttons.