In what can be called as a very radical move, Google announced today that its pulling off the “beta” label from its Google Apps products including Gmail.

Gmail has been in beta since over more than 5 years now. There have been many speculations & debates around this topic and people have always wondered when will Gmail come out of beta. Well, the wait is over.

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Google has tuned up its Picasa web albums service to make it faster. This is great as I always get frustrated when an image takes forever to load from a web based album. That is why I usually keep my photos on my desktop. However, this nifty upgrade has changed things.

Now when you watch a slideshow in Picasa web albums, you will notice that the photos load much faster. There is no lag when the images are being loaded. The engineers optimized the service so that even large images load faster. So, even if you are watching a slideshow in full screen mode, you won’t have to wait !

Here’s an excerpt from the official Google blog:

We chose to show large images, the very biggest we can fit into your browser window. If you open up a slideshow or full-screen view, we can fill your entire monitor. But it wasn’t snappy enough for us, so we had a choice to make: either use smaller images, make the Internet faster, or make our code smarter. We think large images are important, because seeing a photo’s little details can make a big difference, and as much as we wanted to, making the whole Internet faster was a little impractical in the short term. So we went deep into the code and gave it a thorough tune-up.

Go, give it a try!

[via Official Google Blog]

Google Chrome is a nifty browser. I agree that its no Firefox, but you have to give it credit  for the super fast  loading time and the awesome address bar. Not to forget the cool front page and the perverty Incognito mode .

However, many people aren’t able to use Google Chrome on their work computers. They get the following errors when they start the browser:

The above error (0xc0000142 or 0xc0000005) is usually due to the anti virus software that might be installed on your system. Specifically Symantec products. However, this does NOT mean that Google Chrome is a virus or carries virus in any way.

There are 2 workarounds to fix these issues:

1. Disable Sandbox security – Sandbox security in Google Chrome prevents malwares from getting installed to your system. You can disable it by specifying –no-sandbox argument. However, you should do this only if you are confident that the sites you visit won’t infect your computer.
2. Enable in process plugins – By default, Google Chrome runs plugins in separate processes than the browser. This way, if a plugin crashes, the browser keeps running. You can enable the plugins to run in the browser process by specifying the –in-process-plugins argument. This option is suitable for most users.

How to apply the workaround:

1. Right click on the Google Chrome shortcut on your desktop, quick launch or start menu and select Properties.
2. Under the Shortcut tab, add the argument at the end of the Target field as shown in the screenshot below and click OK:
   

Now open Google Chrome using the modified shortcut. You won’t see 0xc0000142 or 0xc0000005 error anymore.

Google Chrome has been updated to a new version. Google calls it Chrome 2. In addition to the following nifty updates, the Chrome 2 is supposedly 30% faster:

• Improved New Tab Page: You now have the option to hide thumbnails from the new tabs page.
• Full Screen Mode: Press F11 to browse in full screen.
• Form Autofill: Saves commonly entered form data and autofills.
• Increased Stability: More than 300 bugs that caused crashes have been fixed.
• Increased Speed: a 30% hike in speed for extensive javascript based pages.

Chrome will be updated automatically for existing users. New users can go to google.com/chrome to download the latest version.

[via Official Google Blog]

Google is apparently trying to add high tech tricycles to its fleet of street view vehicles. The bike was spotted in a local San Diego bike shop:

The bike is carrying a generator and will arguably be pretty heavy. It might be difficult for people in the US to pedal this thing, however, it will not be a problem here in India. Thanks to already prevalent rickshaws on the Indian roads, there are a lot of men in India who can pedal this thing.

This makes me wonder when Google might be planning to launch the street view project in India. This thing might actually be pretty useful here.

[via Gizmodo]

Apparently, the Google mobile iPhone app has been updated recently. And it has some really weird updates. Have a look:

Amongst the list are “Longer version number” and “Ninja”. Not sure how these are supposed to help the customers, but this probably shows the slacky review process in the Google mobile development team.

[Via Gizmodo]

This is perhaps an extremely useful feature for almost everyone. Remember the time you wanted to show an image in your email inlined with the text but could not figure out how to do it? Maybe if you are a little techie/geeky, you know that you can drag n drop images or paste stuff off MS Word. But its clumsy & doesn’t seem to work all the time.

A new Gmail labs feature allows you to insert images in your emails inlined to the text. You will need to enable the feature under Labs tab in Settings.

Once enabled, while composing an email using the rich text box, you can click on the “Insert Image” button in the toolbar to insert the image. Gmail will attach the image to the message and show it inlined with the text. You can also specify an image URL from the web, however, the receiver will have to click ”Display images below” or “Always display images from …” to see images you embed using URLs. 

[via Official Gmail Blog]

Google has added color filters to their image search results. This means you can now select a color to further narrow your image search.

Let’s say you want to search for a yellow Dahlia. A normal search for Dahlia in the image search box will give you the following results page (click to enlarge):

Now click on the colors drop down and select yellow. Voila! this is what you get (click to enlarge):

Cool eh? Head over to http://images.google.com/ to try it out.

[Via Official Google Blog]

Google India has launched a portal for 15th Indian general elections to be held in the upcoming weeks. The elections, considered to be the largest democratic event in human history, will see more than 700 million voters from across India participate over a period of 4 weeks.

In collaboration with Hindustan Times, the new portal from Google aims at helping people become an informed voter. You can start by selecting your constituency and then get information like the latest election news, MP profiles, constituency statistics, candidate quotes, polling booth locations and more.

The site is available both in English and Hindi. Check out some screenshots (click to enlarge):

From the Official Google India Blog:

People from across India can use the centre to do the following:

• Confirm their voter registration status
• Discover their polling location
• View their constituency on a map
• Consume relevant election-related news, blogs, videos, and quotations
• Evaluate the status of development in their constituency across a range of indicators
• Learn about the background of their Member of Parliament and this year’s candidates

With still more features to be added during the election, we hope the site will be an ongoing resource for analysis, governance, and democracy in India after the election.

Head over to the site’s landing page in English or Hindi.

[Via Official Google Blog]

Google has launched a new version of Gmail for the iPhone. This new more Ajaxy version utilizes the HTML5 library in the latest Safari browser in 2.2.1 firmware. The new features are:

1. Faster interface
2. Offline support
3. Cool floaty bar (a hot bar which appears when you select a message)
4. Improved labels

According to the Google mobile blog:

All this is achieved with aggressive caching and by leveraging new browser technologies, like HTML5 and Gears. The full impact of this new architecture isn’t visible yet, but it will enable us to significantly improve performance and quickly roll out new features in the near future. We’re really excited about the potential impact this change can bring – so excited, in fact, that our VP of Engineering, Vic Gundotra, shared the news and demoed these new capabilities at the February 2009 GSMA Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona and last week at Web 2.0 in San Francisco.

The new interface is available for Android and iPhones with firmware >= 2.2.1. Other users will be redirected to the old interface. Currently, it is supported in English only. Google is rolling out this in phases, so in case its still not available for you, check back later.

[Via Google Mobile Blog]