If you visited the Gmail log-in page recently, you may have noticed that things looked a wee bit different. Gmail Team decided to give the page a bit of a facelift and updated a few of Gmail’s other pages. Also they cut out over 250 words in the process.
Here’s a before & after of the log-in page:
Gmail Team also updated the Gmail logo, brightening the colors and making it more in line with the latest Google logo:
Whenever an account that you follow mentions you, you’ll immediately receive a notification. You’ll know who is talking to or about you on Twitter, and you’ll be able to continue the conversation in real-time. Notifications for @mentions will initially be available on SMS.
To turn on SMS notifications, go to twitter.com/devices and check the boxes under “Text message notifications”. You can change your notifications settings at any time. For example, text “set mentions all’ to turn on notifications for @mentions from everyone, rather than just those whom you follow, and ‘set mentions off’ to turn off @mentions notifications.
Yahoo! Messenger remains one of the most popular desktop IM clients around, and its users are now able to get a taste of what's coming in version 11.
Yahoo's new Rich Search Assist will provide some new functionality to its users. It's a bit like Google Suggest meets Google Instant Previews.
Yahoo's contextual customizations still appear in the previews. Rich Search assist is currently only available to a small number of testers, but it should be rolling out to all Yahoo! users in the very near future.
Voogle supports all the important Google Voice features. You can make voice calls, send text messages, playing recorded calls, and check voice mail. If you so desire, you can even use Voogle to replace your carrier's built-in voicemail with your own from Google Voice. Future plans include the addition of MMS support and real-time notifications.
Voogle: [via PreCentral]
Oracle announced that the Java Development Kit (JDK) 7 will be generally available on July 28, 2011. The company submitted the specs for Java 7 and 8 to the Java Community Process Executive Committee for approval.
According to Java Chief architect Mark Reinhold's blog, the "results should be available in two weeks." However, as we reported recently, the Apache Software Foundation is threatening to vote against the approval of Java 7.
Facebook's domination of the Internet continues, as evidenced by numbers released today by Experian Hitwise today that find Facebook accounting for nearly 1 in 4 page views in the United States.
In March the intelligence company found that visits to Facebook had surpassed those to Google. And since then, Facebook's growth has continued.
25 years ago today, Microsoft released the very first version of the operating system which now powers around 90% of the personal computers in the world.
Developer Daniel Fischer wrote a VIM tutorial for TextMate users. Fischer, a long time TextMate user, decided it was time to make the jump to a more advanced editor. Fischer wanted to take advantage VIM features like split-windows, and the many plugins available.
What the tutorial covers:
Do you know what information is being sent through the air from your phone? According to research done by Lookout Inc, a quarter of free iPhone apps, and half of free Android apps contain code that deliberately collects sensitive information from users.
Microsoft developers planned "industry-leading" privacy features in Internet Explorer 8 that would have automatically blocked third-party tracking tools, but one feature was scaled back and another was dropped because they went against the interests of advertisers.
A senior executive in Microsoft's web advertising division became angry when he heard about the privacy features and complained that the plan would disrupt ad sales by Microsoft and other companies. Microsoft said it weighed considerations like ad revenue for free sites before deciding to scale back the plan.
Internet Explorer is used by more than 60 percent of all worldwide users, according to Net Applications, a web analytics company that tracks browser market share. Firefox is in second place with almost 23 percent and Chrome is third with about 7 percent.
Source: ReadWriteWeb
With more than a hundred million users on Twitter, there are sure to be at least dozens of accounts out there that will reflect your interests. The trouble is finding all of them. twitter is rolling out a simple, but powerful new feature to help address that -- "Suggestions for You".
The algorithms in this feature, built by our user relevance team, suggest people you don’t currently follow that you may find interesting.
The suggestions are based on several factors, including people you follow and the people they follow. You'll see these suggestions on Twitter.com and the Find People section. If you like a suggestion, click "follow"; if you don't, click "hide".
In addition, you will begin to see recommendations for similar users when you view another account’s profile.
Following a closer look at the circumstances, Google has said the problem was not related to A fault or defect in a computer program on its part but instead must be the result of some changes to China’s censoring system, called the Great Firewall.
Source: ZDNet Community
Google dropped the need for a command line switch to activate the internal PDF plug-in, enabling it by default for users of the dev channel build. However, another update was pushed and the plug-in has once again been switched off.
You can still enable the plug-in if you wish -- just visit chrome://plugins and click enable underneath the Chrome PDF Viewer.
Source: Download Squad
As the new Hotmail continues to roll out -- it's now in use by more than 100 million people and headed to all remaining users soon. With loads of new features, improved performance, and no more text promotions in your message footers, Hotmail is now a strong alternative to Gmail.
One thing you might not like is the big vertical billboard on the right-hand side of your inbox. Just like Gmail's block of text ads, it's easy to hide. All you need is the Windows Live Ad Remover Userscript.
Chrome users can simply click the install button at the top of the page. Firefox users will need to install the Greasemonkey add-on first and Safari users need Greasekit. Opera users who aren't sure how to install Userscripts can check this post for help. Internet Explorer users can try either Trixie or IE7Pro.
Source: Download Squad
Apple has just published the latest upgrade to Safari,version 5.0.1, which includes a whole new feature called “Extensions Gallery,” as well as a number of other interesting fixes.
The Extensions Gallery is essentially a center for add-on features and toolbars for a variety of different web programs and services
All of them are built using HTML5, CSS or Javascript technologies. You can get a full look at the Extensions function before downloading on Apple’s site.
Source: ZDNet Community
This isn't the final SP1 code & there's not much going on in SP1 to get excited about, so if you're happy with the way your Windows 7 system is running you may as well hold off until the service pack is available via Windows Update.
Download the beta 
Source: Download Squad
Social Translate is a new open source extension for Google's Chrome browser that translates updates on social networking sites into your native language using Google Translate.
You can choose between "reliable," which appears to attempt fewer translations, or "aggressive," which is less accurate but attempts to guess at more words.
It detects languages correctly on Twitter and translates acceptably. On Facebook, the extension is measurably less useful. It only translates status updates as they appear in your News Feed - not in comments on updates, in profiles or on users' walls.
Source: ReadWriteWeb
Google has decided that they're going to update Chrome twice as often. Apparently the longer release schedule put too much pressure on developers to get new features ready on time, because if they didn't, they'd have to wait three months before the next update.
Now, they're going to release a new stable version every six weeks, meaning we get to see those features sooner.
Source: Google Blog
The battle between Adobe Flash and HTML5 will extend into YouTube video players embedded around the web, now that Google has announced a developer preview of video iFrames that use HTML5 when viewed in a browser that supports it.
Google began experimenting with HTML5 players on the YouTube site itself in January, but offering HTML5 for the embedded players all over the web is a big step.
Source: Youtube Blog
Facebook adds a writable comment space inside the pop-up that appears when visitors Like something out around the web.
Messages sent with personal comments tend to get more click. These messages will now also include a longer description of what's being liked.
Now, when a user adds a comment to the iFrame version of the Like button, a larger, more prominent story will be shared with the user’s friends.
Source: Facebook Blog
Microsoft learns from Google and gives employees Windows Phone 7 devices. Back in December 2008, Google handed out G1’s as a holiday bonus. Now Microsoft is handing them out, not as a bonus but probably as a way to get everyone excited about the company’s latest version of its mobile OS.
What’s the best way to generate some positive hype? To seed the device with all of its employees.
Source: ZDNet Community
What are you doing today? Something routine like cooking breakfast or taking the dog for a walk? Or is it something extraordinary like your child's first soccer game or your wedding day?
Whatever it is, big or small, we hope you’ll capture it on video and take part in "Life in a Day," a user-generated documentary that will tell the story of a single day on Earth, as seen through your eyes. You have until 11:59 p.m. local time to film something, so get going. For more information, visit the Life in a Day channel.
Get out those cameras and let's make film history!
By: YouTube Blog
Apple recently revealed the preview of its Xcode 4 programming environment to the public.
Xcode is the complete toolset for building Mac, iPhone, and iPad applications - and with Xcode 4, the tools have been redesigned to be faster, easier to use, and more helpful than ever before. The Xcode IDE understands your project’s every detail, identifies mistakes in both syntax and logic, and will even fix your code for you. Quite simply, Xcode 4 will help you write better code.
Xcode 4 has a brand new user interface, built upon proven technologies that Apple itself uses to build Mac OS X and iOS.
Here are some additional new features:
Source: Apple dev center
Here are my top 10 features and functions found in the current Technical Preview of Windows Phone 7:
Source: ZDNet Community
Since the YouTube Play project was announced last month, more than 6,000 videos have been submitted from 69 countries, and the YouTube Play channel has received over 2 million views. Today “23/7/2010”, they are unveiling the jury for YouTube Play.
YouTube Play jurors
- Musician and performance artist: Laurie Anderson
- Musical group: Animal Collective
- Visual artists: Douglas Gordon, Ryan McGinley, Marilyn Minter and Takashi Murakami
- Artists and filmmakers Shirin Neshat, Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Darren Aronofsky
- Graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister, with Guggenheim Chief Curator and Deputy Director Nancy Spector serving as jury chairperson.
Over the course of the next few months, these jurors will watch countless hours of videos submitted by the international YouTube community and select the most creative and inspiring work to showcase at the Guggenheim museums in October.
For more information about the jurors and to learn more about how to participate, check out youtube.com/play.
Translation is key to mission of making information useful to everyone. For example, Wikipedia is a phenomenal source of knowledge, especially for speakers of common languages such as English, German and French where there are hundreds of thousands—or millions—of articles available. For many smaller languages, however, Wikipedia doesn’t yet have anywhere near the same amount of content available.
To help Wikipedia become more helpful to speakers of smaller languages, They’re working with volunteers, translators and Wikipedians across India, the Middle East and Africa to translate more than 16 million words for Wikipedia into Arabic, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Swahili, Tamil and Telugu. They began these efforts in 2008, starting with translating Wikipedia articles into Hindi, a language spoken by tens of millions of Internet users. At that time the Hindi Wikipedia had only 3.4 million words across 21,000 articles—while in contrast, the English Wikipedia had 1.3 billion words across 2.5 million articles.
They selected articles using a couple of different sets of criteria.
- They used Google search data to determine the most popular English Wikipedia articles read in India.
- Using Google Trends, Wikipedia found the articles that were consistently read over time—and not just temporarily popular.
- Finally using Translator Toolkit they translate articles that either did not exist or were placeholder articles or “stubs” in Hindi Wikipedia.
Number of non-stub Wikipedia articles by Internet users, normalized (English = 1)
Wikipedia also found that there are many Internet users who have used their tools to translate more than 100 million words of Wikipedia content into various languages worldwide. If you do speak another language we hope you’ll join Wikipedia in bringing the content to other languages and cultures with Translator Toolkit.
