Google enhances and open sources its Update software

Google has both refreshed and open sourced its Google Update software, which is code-named Omaha. By making the software available under the open source Apache license, developers working on an auto-updater can use Google's code, which also enables Google to publish updates and plug security holes.

"Omaha allows us to add features seamlessly and address any bugs or security problems, all without concern that these updates will disrupt our users," wrote Myles Jordan of Google's software engineering team in a blog post on Friday. "Omaha allowed us to ship 12 versions of Chrome beta in 4 months, without requiring Chrome users to work hard to keep their browsers up to date. Such behavior is very useful for new features, but essential for security vulnerabilities."

Jordan explained that Google products, including Chrome and Google Earth, all use Google update as a shared infrastructure for keeping products up to date on users' PCs.

Sharing the source code will also provide transparency and give users more control over the whole process, Jordan wrote, since Google Update runs behind the scenes on a user PC and there is no easy way to stop it.

"Obviously, we understand that not everyone is both willing and able to read through our code, but we hope that those of you who do will confirm for the rest that Google Update's functionality serves well to keep your software up to date," Jordan added.
Source: http://www.techworld.com.au/index.php?q=article/299057/google_enhances_open_sources_its_update_software&fp=4194304&fpid=1

Microsoft revamps search engine, "Bing"

SEATTLE (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp is revamping its search engine to counter the dominance of Google Inc in the Web search and related advertising business.

The world's largest software company, which is still in talks with Yahoo Inc over a potential partnership, has long been determined to play a major role in the lucrative Web search market after watching upstart Google take a stranglehold.

Microsoft, which has been testing the search engine internally under the name Kumo for several months, plans to introduce the new service, re-christened "Bing," over the next few days, with a full launch next Wednesday. The service will be available at www.bing.com.

Advertising Age reported earlier this week that Microsoft was planning a $80 million to $100 million ad campaign to promote Bing. Microsoft declined to comment on the report.

"We'll have what I would call a big budget -- big enough that I had to gulp when I approved the budget," said Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer, who unveiled Bing at a technology conference in Carlsbad, California, run by the All Things Digital tech blog.

The Redmond, Washington-based firm has lots of ground to make up. Last month Google took 64.2 percent of U.S. Internet searches -- up half a percentage point from the month before -- handling 9.5 billion out of a total of 14.8 billion searches.

Yahoo was a distant second with 20.4 percent of searches and Microsoft third with 8.2 percent, both down slightly from the month before, according to data firm comScore.

Ballmer offered no quick turnaround in those numbers. "My timeframe is lots of years," he said at the conference. "I don't have a specific forecast, but this is lots of years."

The new name, Bing, is short, universal and can be "verbed-up," said Ballmer, a clear reference to the fact that 'to Google' has become the generic verb for searching the Internet for information.

http://www.reuters.com/article/businessNews/idUSTRE54Q0GE20090528?feedType=RSS&feedName=businessNews

Gmail Suffers Yet Another Outage

Gmail users were greeted with a "Temporary Error (500)" message today, making the service temporarily unavailable.

Calling the outage another Gfail, Twitter buzzed with complaints from all over the world, with some complaining that Google Apps too was down. The Google Apps page confirmed with a red cross against Google Mail, that there was downtime on Friday.

http://tech2.in.com/india/news/internet/gmail-suffers-yet-another-outage/67052/0

Power point and TIF in Gmail

A few months ago, we added fast online viewing of PDFs in your browser. As of today, that same viewer now supports TIFF and Microsoft PowerPoint document formats too: you can now view TIFF and PPT files online, directly in your browser, without having to save the files to your computer and without needing to buy, install, or wait for any special software to start up.

We've had a "View as slideshow" option for PowerPoint files for a while; now we've integrated this conversion technology into the same viewer that we use for PDFs and TIFFs.

his viewer provides a richer set of features than the old "View as slideshow" version: you can zoom in and out, select text to copy and paste, and "print" the presentation to a PDF document. And, unlike the old version, we no longer require you to have a Flash plugin installed on your browser.

Courtesy:

http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/04/powerpoint-and-tiff-file-viewing.html

Arial and Times new roman fonts in Google Docs

Arial and Times New Roman fonts are now available in the text editor in Google Docs for users who have these fonts locally installed on their computers.

Editions included:
Standard, Premier, Education, Team and Partner Editions

Languages included:
All languages supported by Google Docs

How to access what's new:
Arial and Times New Roman will appear in the font drop-down from the menu bar if these fonts are detected as being locally installed on your computer.

http://googleappsupdates.blogspot.com/2009/04/arial-and-times-new-roman-fonts-in.html

New in google Labs Gmail Features

Inserting images in Gmail:

Well, it's about time. You no longer have to use workarounds to put images into your messages or attach images when you really want to inline them. Just turn on "Inserting images" from the Labs tab under Settings, and you'll see a new toolbar icon like this:Make sure you're in rich formatting mode, or it won't show up. Click the little image icon, and you can insert images in two ways: by uploading image files from your computer or providing image URLs.

Source courtesy
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/04/new-in-labs-inserting-images.html