• Google ‘Instant Previews’ come to iOS Safari

    // Gradly // Apple, blog, google, iPhone, News No Responses

    Google has finally brought their helpful ‘Instant Previews’ feature from the desktop browser, down to the mobile experience. ‘Instant Previews’ lets you tap the accompanying magnifying for a pop-up preview of the website. This saves you time, as now you can get a quick glance at the site without actually having to load up the page. The neat part about Google’s implementation in iOS Safari is that you can flick through the previews of a particular search query, like you flick through iOS’s native Safari tabs function.

    At this time it does not look like the new Google ‘Instant Previews’ feature for iOS has hit all user devices, as the feature is yet to appear on our iPhone 4 or iPad. Google has yet to announce the ‘Instant Previews’ feature for mobile, so this could be an early and/or limited rollout. Google has been rolling out new features for the Google mobile website, with the most recent additions being ‘Google Instant’ and enhanced Google Docs editing on the iPad Safari browser.

  • Google Voice Number-Porting is Now Live

    // Gradly // blog, google, News, Rants & Raves 1 Response

    Google Voice users are now free to turn their current cellphone number into their main Google Voice number, the company announced Tuesday, bringing the much-requested feature to all users after a short, but very public, testing period.

    For many porting will bring joy. For others, expect hours of pain — on hold with your mobile carrier.

    Porting, which costs $20, allows users to turn their mobile number into a Google Voice number, obviating the need to try to spread a new number to your contacts.

    For those not clear on how Google Voice works, the company issues you a new phone number — your Google Voice number. It becomes your master number and when someone calls it, it rings some or all of your other phones and your Gmail/Google Talk account.

    This can include your mobile phone, your home phone, your work phone and your computer, if you have Gmail open. Additionally, Google lets you screen callers and set rules per caller — even blocking and diverting individual numbers to voicemail, which no wireless carrier does.

    Google Voice also transcribes your voicemail and sends your the transcript to your e-mail address. You can make and receive calls from your GV number from your computer, without affecting your mobile-phone minutes. From your computer, domestic calls are free, and internationals are cheap.

    Which all sounds great. And for new users, being able to port your existing mobile-phone number makes switching to Google Voice very easy, since all the people that know your cell number won’t even notice a change. Current users have had to get a new number and then publicize it, and spend months trying to wean people off the old number.

  • Larry Page to replace Eric Schmidt as Google CEO

    // Gradly // blog, google, News 1 Response

    As part of its quarterly earnings release issued today, Google announced changes to its top-level management structure, with the most high-profile change seeing co-founder Larry Page replacing Eric Schmidt as CEO as of April 4th. Page will take charge of day-to-day operations at the company, while Schmidt will become Executive Chairman and focus on business deals, partnerships and outreach.

    – Starting from April 4, Larry Page, Google Co-Founder, will take charge of Google’s day-to-day operations as Chief Executive Officer.
    – Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder, will devote his energy to strategic projects, in particular working on new products.
    – Eric Schmidt will assume the role of Executive Chairman, focusing externally on deals, partnerships, customers and broader business relationships, government outreach and technology thought leadership–all of which are increasingly important given Google’s global reach. Internally, he will continue to act as an advisor to Larry and Sergey.

    Commenting on these changes, Eric said: “We’ve been talking about how best to simplify our management structure and speed up decision making for a long time. By clarifying our individual roles we’ll create clearer responsibility and accountability at the top of the company. In my clear opinion, Larry is ready to lead and I’m excited about working with both him and Sergey for a long time to come.”

  • Simple Questions for Google Regarding Chrome’s Dropping of H.264

    // Gradly // blog, google, News, Rants & Raves 5 Responses

    Google Chrome

    Regarding Google’s stated explanation for dropping H.264 support in Chrome:

    Though H.264 plays an important role in video, as our goal is to enable open innovation, support for the codec will be removed and our resources directed towards completely open codec technologies.

    These changes will occur in the next couple months but we are announcing them now to give content publishers and developers using HTML an opportunity to make any necessary changes to their sites.

    1. In addition to supporting H.264, Chrome currently bundles an embedded version of Adobe’s closed source and proprietary Flash Player plugin. If H.264 support is being removed to “enable open innovation”, will Flash Player support be dropped as well? If not, why?
    2. Android currently supports H.264. Will this support be removed from Android? If not, why not?
    3. YouTube uses H.264 to encode video. Presumably, YouTube will be re-encoding its entire library using WebM. When this happens, will YouTube’s support for H.264 be dropped, to “enable open innovation”? If not, why not?
    4. Do you expect companies like Netflix, Amazon, Vimeo, Major League Baseball, and anyone else who currently streams H.264 to dual-encode all of their video using WebM? If not, how will Chrome users watch this content other than by resorting to Flash Player’s support for H.264 playback?
    5. Who is happy about this?

    [via: daringfireball]