Google's HTML 5-based Web version of Gmail shown on an Android phone
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)SAN FRANCISCO--What Google did with Gmail in conventional browsers five years ago it is expecting to do again with a new mobile version of its Web-based e-mail service.
Vic Gundotra, who leads Google's mobile software and developer relations efforts, showed off the Web application "technical prototype" Friday in an onstage interview here at the Web 2.0 Expo. Google offers Gmail applications that run natively on BlackBerry and Android mobile phones, but the company clearly has high hopes for a Web-based version as well.
Building a Web interface means Google can reach more phones more easily, Gundotra said, as phone browsers get more sophisticated and their Internet connectivity gets better. "Imagine if you could build apps that ran across all these phones," Gundotra said.
As he did in a similar demonstration in February, Gundotra showed a version running on an iPhone and on a phone using Google's Android operating system--apparently the HTC Magic.
The software relied on features in HTML 5, the still-under-development version of the technology that underpins Web site design. Specifically, it used offline data access so the application could read e-mail even while there was no Internet connection.
"When we make it broadly available, people are going to see this as the first HTML 5 mobile application," Gundotra said, declining to say when it would become available. "It'll be like Gmail in 2004. It was a great watershed moment for Ajax apps," which employ JavaScript for relatively sophisticated browser-based interfaces.
Vic Gundotra, head of Google's mobile sofware and developer work, speaking at Web 2.0 Expo.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)The mobile Gmail application also featured a floating toolbar that stayed perched at the top of the inbox, offering constant access to delete and archive buttons and a menu of further options.
Mobile is central to Google's work. The company already offers a search application for the iPhone and some other models that lets people issue queries by speaking rather than just typing. The accuracy of the speech recognition has improved 15 percent in the last quarter, Gundotra said, and usage of the service is growing fast.
Gundotra previously worked at Microsoft, but it was a few words from his then 4-year-old daughter that led him to Google. He'd told a friend he didn't know the answer to a question, and his daughter, overhearing, asked him, "Daddy, where's your phone?"
"In her brief four years of life, she assumed any time you didn't know the answer to a question, you brought out your phone. For her the phone was the ultimate answering machine," something that answered questions. That helped him realize that Google's mission of organizing the world's information and presenting it to people would happen in mobile phones, too.
Google likes HTML 5, but it'll take time for it to become adopted broadly. In the meantime, other alternatives exist for richer Internet applications, notably Adobe Systems' Flash. Also up and coming are a browserless relative of Flash from Adobe called AIR and a Flash rival from Microsoft called Silverlight.
Google showed off a better browser version of Gmail on the iPhone.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)Asked about AIR, Gundotra said, "I think Adobe has got some great products," mentioning Google's use of Flash to power video streaming at YouTube. "There's also Silverlight from Microsoft. I am biased toward open Web standards," Gundotra said.
And he touted another HTML 5 feature: "I predict we will see video tag become broadly adopted," a technology that could enable video streaming without a Flash player, similar to the way Web browsers can show graphics without requiring separate plug-ins.
Gundotra also had words of praise for Google App Engine, a year-old service that can be used to run Web-based applications. One such application hosted on Google App Engine is Google Moderator, which lets people submit questions and rank which ones they want to hear answered. Moderator originated as a way for Google employees to ask questions of co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin during weekly employee meetings, Gundotra said.
Google was excited but scared when the White House said it planned to use Google Moderator for an online town hall meeting with President Barack Obama, Gundotra said.
But it held up under the load, and "the 45,000 other apps (on Google App Engine) were totally unaffected by this much scale," Gundotra said.
The town hall moderator system handled nearly 700 queries per second at its peak, with 3.6 million people voting on the questions they wanted to hear answered, he said.
Traffic spiked at Google Moderator when the White House used it to handle questions.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)Even if you're not one to trust a groundhog's shadow as your weather vane, watching a pet rodent emerge from a hole before hundreds of onlookers is a fascinating North American ritual. The rest of us may not have the prognosticating meteorological savvy of a Punxsutawney Phil, Buckeye Chuck, or Shubenacadie Sam, but on February 2, we can have the next best thing--weather widgets and applications.
Here are some of our favorite ways to read the mercury on our Windows PCs.
Weather Watcher Live
A full, but well-ordered display, detailed forecast, animated map, and severe weather alerts are just a few reasons to download this free, longtime favorite. Hour-by-hour forecasts, wind, rain, and dew point particulars, plus a ticker of weather-related news stories, are a handful more.
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CNET)
Yahoo Widgets Engine
Small, light on resources, slickly designed, and persistent, Yahoo's attractive, free weather widget gives you a basic reading of current conditions at a glance. Another click brings you a multiday forecast for any city of your choice, and a swelling gallery of user-generated widgets gives you greater weather widget alternatives online.
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Yahoo)
Google Desktop
What's true for Yahoo Widgets hold for Google's version of its desktop software, which throws a search bar in with its free desktop enhancer. Google supplies its own weather widget, with several user-submitted widgets, such as a weather globe.
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CNET)
Weather Depot
For U.S. residents, the free version of Weather Depot provides plenty of maps and current temperatures for five saved locations. An hour-by-hour planner and 7-day planner round out the tools. The premium version gives you a 14-day look ahead and detailed conditions for everything ranging from soil temperature to severe weather forecasts.
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Weather Depot)
The in-browser search box is now ubiquitous. It can be found in every major browser, and some--like Firefox and IE, allow you to both change which engine you want to search with (from a drop down list), and add more engines from a large directory.
It's fast and easy, but a new Firefox extension called Lookpicking goes one step further, essentially giving you little packs of search engines that you can call up like bookmarks and share with others. More importantly, it lets you swap back and forth between your entire collection by typing in just the first letter or two of the engine you want. If you've ever used Launchy, QuickSilver or any other desktop application launcher, the idea is similar.
This has many potential uses, with the single most one being a shared home computer. If you're on a machine with several people sharing one user account you can have multiple sets of search engine packs loaded up, and whoever is using the browser can simply use their selections.
It's also useful in academic environments. If you're doing Web research in several different disciplines you can swap back and forth between a huge list of search engines. Lookpicking lets you pick from any of the ones you've added once you start typing in the query. Then, once you're on that page you can continue to search from its index before switching off to another site's search.
One thing to note is that this has been classified as an "experimental" Firefox add-on, so if you want to skip the Mozilla user registration to download it, you can grab it here (firefox 2 users click here).
[via Ehub]
Do-it-yourself magazines like MAKE and basement-brewed steampunk anachronisms might be at the forefront of home engineering projects, but 50-year-old Lego is still the name builders know best. Now you can play with them on your computer in the official freeware program Lego Digital Designer, available for both Windows and Mac.
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