Google Docs has been constantly updated since 2006, Writely and Google Spreadsheets have merged, but adding new features became increasingly difficult. Now that browsers are much better than they were four years ago and cutting-edge apps like Google Wave can run in a browser, it was time for a new beginning.

"We decided to rebuild the underlying infrastructure of Docs to give us greater flexibility, improved performance and a better platform for developing new features quickly. Today, we're pleased to announce preview versions of the new Google document and spreadsheet editors and a new standalone drawings editor, all built with an even greater focus on speed and collaboration," says Jonathan Rochelle.

The new versions of the Google Docs will be rolled out in the coming days and you'll be able to try them when you see a message at the top of the page: "New version".

Besides using a new infrastructure, the document editor and the spreadsheet editor will add many new features. The document editor has real-time editing, sidebar chat, a new commenting system, better formatting and an improved importing feature. The spreadsheet editor brings back auto-complete, adds a formula bar for editing cells and you can now drag and drop columns.

There's also an application for creating drawing collaboratively: Google Drawings. "The new standalone drawings editor lets you collaborate in real time on flow charts, designs, diagrams and other fun or business graphics. Copy these drawings into documents, spreadsheets and presentations using the web clipboard, or share and publish drawings just like other Google Docs."



Google Enterprise Blog says that the offline mode will be transitioned from Google Gears to the native HTML5 implementation. "The new Google Docs editors will take advantage of faster rendering engines in modern browsers as well as new web standards like HTML5. As a result, we need to temporarily remove offline support for Docs starting May 3rd, 2010. We know that this is an important feature for some of you, and we are working hard to bring a new and improved HTML5-based offline option back to Google Docs."

Google Docs really needed a major update, especially now when Microsoft Office's web apps are about to be launched.


{ Thanks, Jonah. }

Even though Google Docs lets you upload any file up to 1024 MB, the service still has a lot to improve when it comes to previewing your files. Try to upload a video and you'll notice that Google Docs doesn't transcode the video and you can't watch it online.

The good news is that Google is working to fix this problem. MP3 files already show song titles and album art, but you still can't play them.


Trey D., who sent this tip, found some other interesting details:

When I upload music files (.mp3) to my Google Doc's account, regardless of the filename, the Song Title (per ID3 tag) is what comes up on the list of uploaded documents.

For example, I have uploaded a song 'Beach Boys-Good Vibrations.mp3'. The title that comes up on Google Docs, once the file has been uploaded is "Good Vibrations".

This is a change from earlier behavior that listed the filename (rather than the track name) and is a bit of a nuisance when I am searching for artist names (there is no trace of the artist name remaining).

Despite it being a little annoyance, I am hoping that Google is developing a music storage service a la Grooveshark.

In November, Search Engine Land reported that Google started to test a new user interface that's more consistent. "I don't like jazz, because you never know what's going to happen next," explained Google's Marissa Mayer. "I've been calling this problem 'user interface jazz.' This result looks this way, and that result looks that way [something much different], and it really does slow you down."

Instead of switching to an entirely different interface when you go from the standard search results to Google Image Search, Google Video or Google Book Search, you'll see the same interface. There's a new left-hand column that replaces the expandable "search options" sidebar. It looks like a vertical navigation bar and it shows the most relevant specialized search engines and the most useful filters that help you refine your query.

Since November, Google has tested many versions of the interface and added features like location detection and "not entirely unlike" search suggestions. Lately, a lot of users started to see the new interface and that's a clear sign that Google will release the UI soon.















{ Thanks, Richard, Dan, Kherlen, Mike, Travis, Victor, Pal, Rami, Luka and everyone else who sent a tip at gostipsATgmailDOTcom. }

Steve Rubel spotted a feature recently added to Google's real-time search engine. If you Google a popular query and go to the "updates" section, you'll see see a list of web pages frequently linked from messages posted on services like Twitter, Google Buzz, FriendFeed etc. Try one of the hot topics from Google Trends and you'll certainly get a list of popular links.

There's also a way to find all the messages that link to a web page using the link: operator. Here's a list of messages that link to the New York Times website. Google will certainly add feeds for real-time search results and you'll be able to monitor all the links to your sites.

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. }