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Google Operating System

Unofficial news and tips about Google. A blog that watches Google's latest developments and the attempts to move your operating system online.

Mobile Gmail 2.0 for BlackBerryToday

Gmail's mobile client for BlackBerry has been updated and you can now download version 2.0.5 at http://m.google.com/mail. One of the most important changes is that you can add the credentials for multiple accounts and switch between them without entering the password. There's also support for Google Apps accounts, which previously required a separate application.

Users from the PinStack forums report that the application lets you copy-paste text when composing messages, it saves more than one draft message and there's a new option to preload the archived messages.

Gmail's help center mentions that "the Gmail application will run in the background, periodically checking for new email. This uses data. If you do not want Gmail to run in the background, you must explicitly quit the program by going to Menu > Exit Gmail".

YouTube Toolbar for PlaylistsYesterday

YouTube shows a small toolbar at the bottom of the page that lets you manage the videos from a playlist, more like the controls from a media player. The toolbar has options for pausing and muting the active video, buttons for playing the next video from the playlist and for automatically playing videos. All of these options were already available in the sidebar, but the new toolbar makes them more visible and it follows you in any YouTube page.



The excellent music sites The Hype Machine and thesixtyone have similar toolbars, but I'm not sure if the concept works well for videos. I can only see the new feature in Firefox, so I assume this is yet another experimental feature.

Gears for SafariYesterday

Google posted a link to a beta version of Gears for Safari: http://dl.google.com/gears/current/gears-osx-opt.dmg. The minimum system requirements are: Safari 3.1.1 on Tiger 10.4.11 or Leopard 10.5.3, although Gears is likely to support other WebKit-based browsers in the future.

"This is BETA, it is not an official release, it might break your browser. Chances are it will break your browser. Please proceed with caution," warns Jeremy Moskovich from Google.

If you find bugs, post them at Google Code. The list of issues includes interesting details about the upcoming offline version of Gmail:

"After viewing Install offline access for Google.com Mail, I click Next and the installer window disappears. Is it telling me that initialization is not needed? Hard to say. It appears that I now have an Offline settings tab, so I guess it is initialized."

Hint, hint! If you install Gears for Safari, it would be nice to post some screenshots in the comments. You could use Gears to enable offline access for

Google Suggest, Enabled by DefaultYesterday

As anticipated, Google Suggest will be finally available at google.com. "Today we're excited because Google Suggest will be graduating from Labs and available by default on the Google.com homepage. Over the next week, we'll be rolling this out so that more and more of you will start seeing a list of query suggestions when you start typing into the search box," says Jennifer Liu from Google.

Launched in 2004 as part of the Labs, Google Suggest is an innovative feature that auto-completes a query using a dynamic list of popular queries. "As you type into the search box, Google Suggest guesses what you're typing and offers suggestions in real time. This is similar to Google's Did you mean? feature that offers alternative spellings for your query after you search, except that it works in real time. For example, if you type bass, Google Suggest might offer a list of refinements that include bass fishing or bass guitar. Similarly, if you type in only part of a word, like prog, Google Suggest might offer you refinements like programming, programming languages, progesterone, or progressive. You can choose one by scrolling up or down the

Response Summary for Google FormsAugust 25

Google Docs experiments with automatically generating response summaries for forms. If you edit a form and click on "View responses", Google shows charts for questions with multiple choices and lists the first answers for free-style questions.


The summaries are pretty basic but they reveal more information than the raw data. Hopefully, until the feature is officially launched, Google will make the summaries interactive and customizable and users will be able to publish them.

To see all the spreadsheets from your Google Docs account that include forms, go to http://docs.google.com/#forms.