Gmail Voice and Video Chat for Linux

Gmail Voice and Video Chat for Linux:

After two years of waiting, Gmail's plug-in for voice and video chat is finally available for Linux users. "Voice and video chat for Linux supports Ubuntu and other Debian-based Linux distributions, and RPM support will be coming soon," says Tristan Schmelcher, from Google.


Justin Uberti says that adding Linux support was really difficult. "This release required significant engineering to develop an all-new video rendering solution and an all-new PulseAudio-based audio handler, along with work to support 64-bit and countless webcam compatibility tests. We spent a lot of effort to make it fully feature-complete, with all the same goodies as the Windows and Mac versions, and we're happy to now support Google voice and video now on all major desktop platforms."

Now that video chat is available on Windows, Mac and Linux, when will it be ported to Android?

How Google Translate Works

How Google Translate Works:

Google uploaded a video that explains how Google's machine translation service works. It's fascinating to see how much Google Translate has improved in the past 4 years andhow many Google services use it.

Here's the full text of the video:

"Google Translate is a free tool that enables you to translate sentences, documents and even whole websites instantly. But how exactly does it work? While it may seem like we have a room full of bilingual elves working for us, in fact all of our translations come from computers. These computers use a process called 'statistical machine translation' -- which is just a fancy way to say that our computers generate translations based on patterns found in large amounts of text.

But let's take a step back. If you want to teach someone a new language you might start by teaching them vocabulary words and grammatical rules that explain how to construct sentences. A computer can learn foreign language the same way - by referring to vocabulary and a set of rules. But languages are complicated and, as any language learner can tell you, there are exceptions to almost any rule. When you try to capture all of these exceptions, and exceptions to the exceptions, in a computer program, the translation quality begins to break down. Google Translate takes a different approach.

Instead of trying to teach our computers all the rules of a language, we let our computers discover the rules for themselves. They do this by analyzing millions and millions of documents that have already been translated by human translators. These translated texts come from books, organizations like the UN and websites from all around the world. Our computers scan these texts looking for statistically significant patterns -- that is to say, patterns between the translation and the original text that are unlikely to occur by chance. Once the computer finds a pattern, it can use this pattern to translate similar texts in the future. When you repeat this process billions of times you end up with billions of patterns and one very smart computer program. For some languages however we have fewer translated documents available and therefore fewer patterns that our software has detected. This is why our translation quality will vary by language and language pair. We know our translations aren't always perfect but by constantly providing new translated texts we can make our computers smarter and our translations better. So next time you translate a sentence or webpage with Google Translate, think about those millions of documents and billions of patterns that ultimately led to your translation - and all of it happening in the blink of an eye."

Gmail's Streamlined Interface and Better Contact Manager

Gmail's Streamlined Interface and Better Contact Manager:

Google launched a slightly refreshed Gmail UI that hides unessential features and uses more screen estate to display your messages. Gmail's logo is smaller, the links to mail, contacts and contacts are grouped in a collapsible panel, while the options that let you select all messages, starred or unread messages are available in a drop-down.

"Overall, there's now a smaller header area that puts the first message in your inbox about 16 pixels higher on the screen than before," explains Google.


Gmail's contacts section has also been redesigned to better integrate with Gmail. The updated interface supports keyboard shortcuts, saves the changes automatically, adds structured name fields and lets you sort contacts by last name. The notes field is now really big, but I don't think it deserves so much attention.


These features will be rolled out today to all Gmail accounts. The new Gmail contact manager won't be available in Google Apps right now, but it will be released in the near future.

The Old Version of Gmail Will Be Discontinued in September

The Old Version of Gmail Will Be Discontinued in September:

When Google released a new version of Gmail, back in 2007, you could still switch to the old version by clicking on a link at the top of the page. At some point, the link has been moved to the bottom of the page, where it's still available.

3 years after releasing Gmail 2.0, Google decided to drop the old version, which doesn't include features like themes, Gmail Labs, Gmail Chat, Buzz, hiding labels or multiple file upload.

"You're using an old version of Gmail which will be retired in September. At that point, you'll be redirected to a basic HTML view. To get faster Gmail and the newest features, please upgrade to a modern browser," informs a Gmail message.

Most likely, Google continued to offer to the old version of Gmail because the new version doesn't work well in Internet Explorer 6. If you visit Gmail in IE6 and you haven't installed this patch, you can't switch to the new version, even if you manually change the URL. Staring from next month, IE6 users will be redirected to the "basic HTML" interface, used for outdated browsers.

Google rarely provides the option to switch to an old version of an application or a feature. For example, you can still switch to the old image search interface, to the old Gmail contact manager and you can still use the classic Blogger editor (an option that will be removed soon). Preserving the old version of a service could be helpful to determine if users like the new version, but it's not a good idea to keep an interface that's no longer maintained. Some users might never try the new version of the application because it doesn't look familiar, while other users might never notice that the initial bugs have been fixed.

Search Google Docs and Google Sites in Gmail

Search Google Docs and Google Sites in Gmail:

Gmail Labs has a new feature that extends Gmail's search by showing results from Google Docs and Google Sites. If you enable Apps Search, you'll see a list of results from Google Docs and Google Sites below Gmail's search results. For some reason, Apps Search has a bug and returns incorrect URLs for Google Docs results, but I'm sure this will be fixed.


It's interesting to see that the Gmail Labs feature has been developed by the Apps Search team, which suggests that it's part of a bigger project. Most likely, Google will let you search all your data stored in a Google account from a single search box. If Google's universal search can combine images, videos, books, tweets, news articles in a single search results page, why can't Google develop an unified search service for Gmail messages, Google Calendar events, Google Reader subscriptions, Blogger posts, Picasa Web photos, contacts, tasks, Google Voice history and more?


Tip: If you want to search Google Docs and Google Sites, without displaying Gmail results, add -type:mail to your query.

Unexpected bonus feature: After enabling Apps Search, Gmail will show a "did you mean" message if your query includes misspellings:

Google Spreadsheets Spell Checking

Google Spreadsheets Spell Checking:

Google Spreadsheets added spell checking, but it doesn't find misspellings automatically, like in Google's word processor. You need to click on the Tools menu and select Check spelling. Google starts to find mistakes and suggests corrections from the dictionary. Unfortunately, you can't add words to the dictionary yet and Google's suggestions are sometimes terrible.

"The tool will go through all the cells on your sheet, highlighting each cell which has a misspelled word in red. Words that might be misspelled in each cell are underlined in red and can be changed by clicking on them and selecting the right spelling," explainsGoogle Docs blog.


Google should replace the dictionary-based spell checker with the context-sensitive spell checker that's already used in Google Wave and Google Search. Instead of using a dictionary, this spell checker extracts data from web pages and Google searches to find a statistical language model, much like Google Translate. This model allows Google to predict mistakes and to determine the most likely corrections.

On Gmail's Widget for Selecting Messages

On Gmail's Widget for Selecting Messages:

Gmail updated the interface last week and many people complained about the changes. Some didn't like Gmail's new hybrid button for selecting messages. To select unread messages or starred messages, you need an extra click. Apparently, many Google employees hated this change, as well.


Michael Leggett, Gmail's lead user interface designer, explains how he came up with this widget:

It IS odd. And yet, both the checkbox and the menu part tested very well in the lab. The people who hated the widget outside the lab also understood how to use it but promised others wouldn't b/c it was so "weird."

We tried a few things (like putting the select actions under "More actions") but I didn't have high hopes for any of them except the widget that launched. It tested better than I had hoped (all of the participants in the usability study were able to select all, unread, and none). We launched it to all Googlers months ago and listened to feedback (everyone was able to figure it out... some just hated the change).

More about why the change: The "Select all" link is used by <1% style="font-weight:bold;">I wanted to simplify the interface and give back that space to users.

Since features like "select unread" or "select starred" were used by a lot less than 1% of the users, it made sense to hide them. Power users can always learn how to usekeyboard shortcuts and an extra click doesn't mean too much for a feature that's rarely used.

Michael Leggett also says that the link to Buzz will be added at the top of the page, next to Contacts and Tasks, and users will be able to hide the links to service they don't use.