Google Toolbar 7

Today Google is bringing the speed of Google Instant to the latest version of Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer, with a fresh, clean look that personalizes Toolbar with the tools you use most.

Toolbar Instant
If you’ve used Instant on google.com or in Chrome, you’ll be right at home with Toolbar Instant. Just start typing in the search box and search predictions and results will appear instantly as you type, getting you the results you want faster.



You can also type Alt+G to get to the Toolbar search box more quickly.

To enable Toolbar Instant, visit Toolbar Options and click “Enable Instant for faster searching and browsing.” Toolbar Instant works on IE8 and IE9; if you’re on an older browser, you can either upgrade your Internet Explorer version or try Instant in Chrome, which includes many of the same tools you’re familiar with in Toolbar.


Personalized Toolbar
This new version of Toolbar is simpler, cleaner and emphasizes what’s important to you. The tools that you use most will remain visible on the toolbar, while buttons that you haven’t used recently will be moved to the new “More” button.

From Pawgang's news

As you discover and use particular tools that help your browsing experience, like Share or Translate, they’ll automatically appear on the toolbar, making your most relevant tools easy to access. This personalization is stored only on your computer, so no information is sent to Google unless your usage statistics are enabled. You can learn more about this personalization at the Help Center.


Making Toolbar work for you
Some Google Toolbar features, such as PageRank and spell check, require sharing some information with Google in order to function properly. With Google Toolbar 7, it is easier for you to control your privacy settings. From a single settings menu, you can decide which of these features you'd like to enable and which ones you'd like to stay off.

From Pawgang's news

Google also continued to improve the performance of Toolbar 7 without slowing down your browser, making it one of the fastest add-ons you can use in Internet Explorer.

Google Toolbar 7 is available in English on the download page and will be coming to other supported languages over the next week. If you’re already using Toolbar, you’ll automatically be updated to the new version over the next few weeks. You can also find out more about Toolbar on the features page.

source cited: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/04/google-toolbar-7cleaner-fresher-and.html

Google Doodle honoring Charlie Chaplin

Charlie Chaplin wasn’t just the greatest star of the silent film era; he also wrote, directed and produced more than 80 movies in a career that spanned decades and included such masterpieces as The Kid, The Gold Rush and Modern Times. He scored many of his pictures as well, and on at least one occasion served as an on-set hairdresser.

Chaplin is also one of my creative heroes. Despite being an art-obsessed high schooler preemptively bored by anything in black and white, I borrowed a VHS tape of Chaplin’s work from the library on a lark. It’s not an exaggeration to say watching it changed my life. I laughed, I cried—I cried from laughter. For the first time I realized the power of visual storytelling.

We sometimes tell small stories with Google’s logo, but for Sir Charles Spencer Chaplin’s 122nd birthday tomorrow, April 16, the Doodle team created something extra fun. For the next 36 hours the Google homepage will pay homage to Charlie Chaplin’s creative legacy with our first-ever live action video doodle.

The simple, silent short film stars the entire Doodle team (with fellow doodler Mike Dutton sporting that famous mustache, hat and eyeliner) and was shot on location in Niles, Calif., the setting of several of Chaplin’s early classics including The Tramp. Niles is also home to our advisers for this doodle, the ever-helpful Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum.

True pieces of art, Chaplin’s films still feel fresh today even though some of them are nearly a century old. We hope that our homage gets people talking about his work and the many virtues of silent film.



As a bonus, check out some of these fun behind-the-scenes shots:


source cited: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/04/lights-camera-doodle.html

Gmail customized with a background image of your own

Precustomized themes in Gmail are nice to give your inbox a more personalized look and to distinguish the gmail-accounts from each other in case you have more than one gmail.

The more recent option to create your own theme with the colors of your choice I loved even more.

Now it's possible to even add your own background image:

From Pawgang's news

how to?

go to the Themes tab in Settings and choose “Create your own theme.” There, you can select background images for the main area and the footer. You can pick from any of your Picasa images or upload a new one. It's fun, isn't it?

From Pawgang's news

source: Custom background image themes - Official Gmail Blog

“Don't forget Bob” and “Got the wrong Bob?” graduate from Labs

“Don’t forget Bob” and “Got the wrong Bob?” are two Gmail Labs features that help prevent you from making two common mistakes: forgetting to include someone on an email, and sending a message to the wrong person with a similar name to the person you meant to email — like emailing Bob (your boss) instead of Bob (your friend).

We’ve received quite a bit of positive feedback from people who avoided some embarrassing situations thanks to these features. And today, we’re excited to graduate them from Gmail Labs and start turning them on for everyone (they should start working in all Gmail accounts over the next day or so). Once that happens, as you type in your recipients, Gmail will automatically make suggestions based on the groups of people you email most often. When you see a suggestion to add a person you’ve forgotten, all you have to do is click on their name to add them.

From Pawgang's news

Similarly, if you click on a suggestion to replace a mistakenly added recipient, the proverbial “wrong Bob” will be replaced by the right one.

From Pawgang's news

We hope these suggestions help you avoid some sticky situations — before you hit send. As you compose messages and see these features in actions, let us know what you think by tweeting @gmail with your ideas and impressions or leaving a message in the Gmail Help forum.

source cited: http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2011/04/dont-forget-bob-and-got-wrong-bob.html

Gmail Lets You Disable Auto-Adding Contacts

As previously announced, Gmail added a setting that lets you disable automatically saving email addresses to your contacts. Go to the Settings page, find the section "Create contacts for auto-complete" and you'll notice that the following option is enabled by default: "When I send a message to a new person, add them to Other Contacts so that I can auto-complete to them next time". Now you can disable this feature and select "I'll add contacts myself".



This is one of the features from a long changelog of small improvements. "Refresh" is now a button, the keyboard shortcuts guide is now available even if keyboard shortcuts are disabled (just press Shift+?), Gmail shows more useful warnings when you leave out the "." in ".com" from an email address and there are fewer warnings when you reply to a message in the Trash.

source cited: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2011/04/gmail-lets-you-disable-auto-adding.html

Comic Sans MS as standard font in Google Chrome

I always was a little bit unhappy, that it was a bit tricky to set Chrome to my preferred reading font "Comic Sans Ms":
goto:
Options > Under the Hood > Web Content > Customize Fonts...
and
at the page Fonts and Encoding set your standard font to Comic Sans MS
and this (on my laptop at least) didn't work out for all pages with a standard font set by the page itself...

BUT a few days ago I stumbled upon this:

Comic Sans for Everyone

"""Here at Google, the Webmaster Team is always running experiments and conducting research to improve user experience and increase conversion rates across our websites.

Following some rigorous user testing of 41 different fonts, investigating how each affected user experience, we discovered one font consistently outperformed all others when it comes to user satisfaction, level of engagement, understanding web content, productivity, click-through rates and conversion rates: Comic Sans.

We’ll therefore be rolling out Comic Sans as our default font across all Google products on April 4, 2011.

For today only, we’re inviting a limited number of lucky Google users to take part in our Google Labs Trusted Tester Beta Preview Sandbox program. To participate, follow these easy steps:

• If you haven’t done already, install Google Chrome.
• Open Google Chrome and install the “Comic Sans for Everyone” extension from the Chrome Web Store.
• Your account will be automatically activated once the extension is installed, allowing you to browse the entire World Wide Web using Comic Sans. In the extremely unlikely event that you decide to opt-out of the preview, you can simply disable or uninstall the extension by visiting your Extensions page.

For the latest news and updates, be sure to follow @GoogleWebTeam on Twitter.""""

worked like a charm and now I'm happy :-)