Google Apps News

Google drawings enhancements

17-05-2010

Since we launched the new drawings editor, we’ve received lots of helpful feedback from you. Based on your comments, we’ve made some usability improvements to Google Docs drawings over the last week.

• Selecting shapes
• Press Alt (Option on Mac) and drag your mouse to select only those objects completely within the selection region (this is useful for selecting objects in a busy part of the diagram)
  


• Holding Shift while you drag now adds shapes to your current selection instead of creating a new selection
  




• Polyline improvements
• When you finish drawing a polyline by clicking on the end of the last segment, you remain in polyline mode so you can immediately draw another one. Hit Escape to return to selection mode.
• While drawing a polyline, press escape on your keyboard to cancel the last segment and return to selection mode
• Draw very small segments in a polyline more easily

• Word art
• Add word art directly from the insert menu
  
  

Let us know if you have more feedback and ideas for improvements.

Posted by: Chris Nokleberg, Software Engineer

Upgrading beyond documents, spreadsheets and presentations

13-05-2010

On Tuesday I shared some some thoughts on the choices businesses have as you consider upgrading Microsoft Office. This decision goes far beyond traditional productivity applications though; a new generation of workplace tools that reflect the collaborative nature of today’s work environment are becoming more essential to employees. Instant messaging accelerates information sharing between coworkers. Video chat lets people around the world meet face-to-face. Video and image sharing is becoming a critical form of communication. Companies develop passionate communities around blogs and other social media. Customers learn about businesses through online maps and search engine marketing.

Today’s workers need tools to facilitate all these activities, and traditional productivity software comes up short, even after “major” upgrades. Last week we announced that we’re working to make Blogger, Picasa Web Albums, Google Reader, iGoogle and many more Google services available soon to Google Apps customers. What will customers need to do to access all this new functionality? Simply refresh the browser. No 64-bit servers to purchase, no complex software prerequisites (28 of them for SharePoint 2010 alone!), no backup systems to install, no VPN connectivity issues to worry about. It’s an upgrade that will truly change the workplace.


By no means do we think that Google could possibly develop all the functionality that any employee might need, but at the same time, there’s real value in services that all connect to a common backbone for core systems like contacts, presence and user authentication. Businesses need specialized accounting tools, CRM systems, marketing automation capabilities, project management tools and much more. Through the Apps Marketplace and our developer tools, customers can integrate 3rd party cloud services with Google Apps and enhancements they develop themselves. The possibilities are limitless.


This new approach – the integrated combination of Google Apps, a broad array of other Google services, and complementary functionality built by developers and partners – will give your employees the tools they need to be productive in the modern workplace. I invite you to learn more about Google Apps and to start a conversation with our team about providing your employees with the best tools for their jobs.

Posted by Matthew Glotzbach, Google Enterprise Product Management Director

Drag images into messages

12-05-2010

Posted by Michael Davidson, Software Engineer

Recently, we launched a feature that allows you to drag an attachment from your computer right onto Gmail.

I've always been a fan of the inserting image lab, so I naturally wondered if it would be possible to combine the two.

Today we're launching a feature that allows you to drag images from your computer into a message. You don't have to have the insert image lab enabled for it to work. Just drag the image in, resize it if you want, and send.


Currently, this feature only works in Google Chrome, but will be coming soon to other browsers.

What’s different about the new Google Docs?

11-05-2010

Editor’s Note: This post is more technical than most posts on the Google Docs blog.

A month ago we introduced the latest version of the Google document editor. The new editor comes with features like a ruler, tabs stops, and floating images. Those features might seem pretty basic, but they’re nearly impossible to support in a regular online text editor. This post unwraps some of the core technical changes with the new editor to make this new functionality possible.

The old Google documents

As background, most online text editors (including the old Google documents) use an editable HTML element, which means the application tells the browser to make a certain string of text editable, and the browser takes care of letting the user edit that text. So when you type in the old Google document editor, the browser inserts the characters you type into the page’s HTML. Likewise, when you bold a word, the browser changes the HTML so that the word displays as bold.

Relying on the browser like this has several advantages:

1. Easy implementation -- Browsers know when a user triple clicks, they want to select an entire paragraph. The application doesn’t need to think about these basic text behaviors.


2. Easy to make it fast -- The browser (not the app) handles the most computationally intensive task: text layout. Since layout is a core component of browser functionality, you can trust that layout performance has already been heavily optimized.

But using the browser’s native text editing means less control over how the document behaves: if one browser has a bug in its list behavior, people using that browser will have trouble working with lists in Google Docs and we won’t be able to fix the behavior for them. It also means we can support only the least common denominator of features: if inserting tabs works in some browsers but not others, we can’t really support it because the doc won’t look right if you open it in a browser that doesn’t understand tabs.

The new Google documents

To get around these problems, the new Google document editor doesn’t use the browser to handle editable text. We wrote a brand new editing surface and layout engine, entirely in JavaScript.

A new editing surface

Let’s start by talking about the editing surface, which processes all user input and makes the application feel like a regular editor. To you, the new editor looks like a fairly normal text box. But from the browser’s perspective, it’s a webpage with JavaScript that responds to any user action by dynamically changing what to display on each line. For example, the cursor you see is actually a thin, 2 pixel-wide div element that we manually place on the screen. When you click somewhere, we find the x and y coordinates of your click and draw the cursor at that position. This lets us do basic things like slanting the cursor for italicized text, and it also allows more powerful capabilities like showing multiple collaborators’ cursors simultaneously, in the same document.

A new layout engine

By far the most difficult thing the editor does is figure out where to draw text. For this, we built a new layout engine. Here’s an example of how the new engine works: say you type the letter ‘a’. We notice you pressed the ‘a’ key and respond by drawing a single ‘a’ off-screen. We then measure the width and height of that ‘a’, combine those measurements with the x and y position of your cursor, and place the ‘a’ at the correct spot on the screen. If you’re in the middle of a word, we push the characters after your cursor over. If you’re at the end of a line, the editor moves your word to the next line and pushes any overflow to the lines after it.

Tab stops and other basic features are impossible to support if you’re using the browser’s HTML layout engine for your text. That’s why we wrote our own engine: once we tell our layout engine how to draw a feature, we don’t have to worry about which features browsers support.

The formatting in this basic menu couldn’t be supported without writing a new layout engine

Improved collaboration

What I’ve just described is pretty standard architecture for a desktop word processor. But the new Google Docs isn’t just an online version of existing desktop software: it’s designed specifically for character-by-character real time collaboration. That kind of collaboration is only possible because we built the editor around a technology called operational transformation. It’s what lets multiple people edit the same area of a document at the same time without needing to wait for the server to say a particular edit is okay.

Building an extensible, fully collaborative online word processor required rewriting every part of the document editor from scratch. We’re still adding more features and polish before turning it on for everyone, but for an early peek, you can opt-in by visiting the Editing tab in the Google Docs settings.

Posted by: Jeff Harris, Product Manager, Google Docs

Comment via email and view entire photo albums in Google Buzz

07-05-2010

Posted by Henry Wong, Software Engineer

One of the things people like best about Google Buzz is the ability to have conversations in the comments. But until now, if you were reading a post in an email client (like the native mail app on your phone or Outlook), you couldn't easily join in on the conversation -- you could only email the original poster. Today, we rolled out a new Google Buzz feature for you to try out: comment via email. Now, you can comment on the post simply by replying to the email message.


Plus, last week we made it possible to view entire photo albums in Buzz (rather than the handful of photos from a given Flickr or Picasa album you could see before). So if you share an album with tons of photos, people can now click through all of the photos in the Buzz photo viewer.

We're chipping away at the feature requests we've been receiving, so keep them coming. And if you want to keep up with everything Google Buzz related, follow our team at buzz.google.com/googlebuzz.

Google Apps Marketplace highlights – 5/7/2010

07-05-2010

Rapid wireframe sketching in Google Docs

06-05-2010

Guest post: Morten Just is a product manager in Vodafone. Based in Copenhagen, Denmark, he spent most of his career as an interaction designer churning out wireframes and diagrams, and also co-founded Imity, a Bluetooth-enabled social network for mobile phones in 2006. On his personal blog he writes mostly about user experience.

When I saw Google drawings on a Twitter update a few weeks ago, I didn't really think about it until I got a feeling I might not have understood a rather complex problem at work. I drew a diagram and asked my colleague to edit it in case I had misunderstood him. It worked out well, we're still using the drawing as a basis for discussion, and it is constantly being refined as we go along. So taking the next step and trying out a wireframe was an obvious decision.

For quite a while I’ve been wanting a simple and fast way to burst out interface ideas, and then quickly share them with my colleagues in Düsseldorf and London. Since a relatively large portion of a wireframe looks like something I’ve sketched out before, I figured modifying a template like a list view or a landing page would speed things up.

In fact, I wanted to speed it up to the point where I all I had to do was to add a few words before I had a wireframe.

From the templates I extracted the scroll bars, buttons, and sliders and put them in the gutter outside the drawing’s canvas, ready to be duplicated and dragged onto the wireframe.

Here's a generic page displaying product details:


... and a typical mobile phone drill-down of items in groups:


To begin working on a wireframe

1. Open the template you want to use
2. Click 'Sign in' in the upper right
3. Choose file > make a copy
4. Make your wireframe

Packing it up

More Google applications coming for Google Apps customers

06-05-2010

9 of the top 20 requests from Google Apps customers are for their accounts to work with more services from Google, not just for the core suite of messaging and collaboration applications. Later this year we’ll dramatically accelerate customer access to innovation, and give users the convenience of using any Google service allowed by their administrator from a single account affiliated with their organization.

For example, coworkers will be able to publish their organization’s blog on Blogger, share project images with Picasa Web Albums, track industry news in Google Reader, advertise online with AdWords and much more, all without switching back and forth between multiple accounts. While these additional applications won’t initially be covered by the core suite’s support and service level agreement, this change will open up the spectrum of Google’s functionality to businesses, schools and organizations using Google Apps and we’ll evaluate future support options.


We intend to have all Standard, Premier and Education Edition customers moved to the new infrastructure that enables this change in the fall, and customers who would like more control over the timing of this change will be able to make the switch voluntarily during the summer.

This will be a significant overhaul to our underlying systems and we want to make this transition as seamless as possible for customers. We’ll be sharing information in advance so Google Apps admins can plan ahead which additional Google services users can access with their accounts and other aspects of this roll-out. Stay tuned here for further updates in the coming weeks and months, and visit our Help Center for more details.

Posted by Dennis Troper, Product Management Director, Google Apps

Answering your FAQs about the New Google Docs

05-05-2010

We’ve been excited by how many of you have chosen to try the new Google documents, spreadsheets and drawings editors over the last month. We’ve received a lot of great questions in our forums, in blog comments, on the ideas page, and through webinars.

In fact, at a webinar two weeks ago hosted by members of the Google Docs team (watch the video), we ran out of time before we could answer all the great questions people had. A lot of the questions echoed ones we’ve seen from many of you, so we wanted to post those questions -- and the answers to them -- online for everyone.

Check out a couple of answers below, or see the full list in the Google Docs Help Center.

Q: ­Do all the features work with IE8?

Almost. Google documents, spreadsheets, and presentations should work in IE8. If you’d like to use the full Google drawings tool in Internet Explorer, you can install Google Chrome Frame. The embedded drawings editor (i.e. ‘Insert > Drawing’) in documents, spreadsheets and presentations works in IE7 and IE8.

Learn more about the system requirements for Google Docs in the Help Center.

Q: Where is the web clipboard in the new docs editor?

We released the documents editor as a preview so we could get your feedback early in our development process. As you can tell, there are still some features, like the web clipboard, which aren’t yet ready in the new version. The web clipboard will definitely be available before we take the new editor out of preview.

Q: When will gadgets work with the new version of Google spreadsheets?

Very soon! This has been one of the most common pieces of feedback from users, and it’s high on our list of priorities.

Want more Q&A? Check out the full list of questions. Have a question that’s still not answered? Visit the Google Docs Help Forum.

Posted by: Ben Softness, Google Docs Operations Strategist

Copy sheets from one spreadsheet to another

05-05-2010

A few weeks ago we introduced a new version of the spreadsheet editor in Google Docs.

Today, we’re adding the ability to copy a sheet from one spreadsheet to another in the new version. To start, simply click on the sheet tab at the bottom of the page and select “Copy to...”.



You’ll see a pop-up dialog box where you can search for the destination spreadsheet. You can choose any spreadsheet you own or have editing access to:

Once you’ve selected a spreadsheet, you can open it to find that the sheet has been copied.

To give the new spreadsheet editor a try, click the New version link in the top right corner of any spreadsheet. There’s more info about this feature in the help center and let us know what you think in the forums.

Posted by: Josh Danziger, Software Engineer