YouTube App, No Longer Included in Apple's iOS

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Starting with iOS 6 beta 4, the YouTube app is no longer bundled with Apple's mobile operating system. Apple "said Monday that its license for YouTube has expired, meaning the app will no longer be included in the next version of its mobile operating system, iOS 6. That version is expected to be released to the public this fall and developers are already using it," reports The Wall Street Journal.


Back in 2007, when Apple launched the iPhone, YouTube's video player required Flash, so YouTube videos couldn't be played without a special application. YouTube, which was acquired by Google in 2006, transcoded some of the videos to H.264 and allowed Apple to build a native YouTube application. "To achieve higher video quality and longer battery life on mobile devices, YouTube has begun encoding their videos in the advanced H.264 format, and iPhone will be the first mobile device to use the H.264-encoded videos. Over 10,000 videos will be available on June 29, and YouTube will be adding more each week until their full catalog of videos is available in the H.264 format this fall," mentioned a press release from 2007.

The app is no longer that useful, now that YouTube's mobile site has a great interface and more features than the native app. YouTube's HTML5 video player lets you play videos from Safari or any other browser, so many iPhone users don't even use the YouTube app. Just like the Maps application, the YouTube app was neglected by Apple, which didn't add many useful features. Google has constantly improved the YouTube app for Android and now will also develop a YouTube app for iOS.

Maybe Apple wanted to release a Google-free version of the iOS and the next step could be switching to Bing as the default search engine in Safari, but things are not that bad for Google. After all, YouTube is the most popular video sharing site and Google Maps is the most popular online mapping service. Google can develop its own apps, update them more often and add new features.

Even if YouTube's mobile site can replace the native app, there are two features that couldn't be added by YouTube: uploading videos and supporting the old embedding code. The good news is that both features are available in iOS 6 beta 4 and it's likely that the final version will continue to include them.

Google's New Favicon

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Google has a new favicon that looks like the icon from Google's mobile search apps for Android and iOS. The same icon was also used for the Google Search app from the Chrome Web Store.

Most likely, Google wanted to use the same icon irrespective of the platform so that it becomes instantly recognizable.

Here's the new favicon:


... and the old favicon, which was launched back in 2009:




This screenshot shows the first three Google favicons. As you can see, the new favicon has a lot in common with the second favicon used by Google. "We felt the small 'g' had many of the characteristics that best represent our brand: it's simple, playful, and unique. We will be looking to improve and enhance this icon as we move forward," said Google back in 2008, when it changed the favicon for the first time.


If you don't see the new favicon when you visit google.com, try clearing your browser's cache.

{ Thanks, Arpit Kumar. }

The "I'm Feeling Lucky" Easter Egg

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The "I'm Feeling Lucky" button from Google's homepage is no longer useful when Google Instant is enabled. When you click the button, Google usually sends you to the doodle gallery, but now the button is more special.

Mouse over the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button and you'll see one of these labels: "I'm Feeling Puzzled", "I'm Feeling Artistic", "I'm Feeling Playful", "I'm Feeling Hungry", "I'm Feeling Wonderful", "I'm Feeling Stellar", "I'm Feeling Trendy", "I'm Feeling Doodly". Each button sends you to a different Google site, so you can explore Google Trends, the Google Art Project, the World Wonders Project and more.





{ Thanks, Jérôme Flipo. }

When Web Apps Trump Native Apps

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And now, back to our regularly scheduled programming. It may seem counterintuitive, but sometimes web apps are better than native apps. Now that browsers are so advanced and powerful, web apps can integrate with the operating system, are fast and easy to update.

Take the new YouTube app for iOS. Now that Apple removed the YouTube app from iOS 6, Google had to develop its own app for YouTube. The application looks just like the YouTube for Android, but it doesn't properly integrate with the operating system. It doesn't support AirPlay, so you can't redirect videos to on an Apple TV or a computer. You can't close the YouTube app and continue playing videos in the background, which is especially useful for music videos. The new YouTube app doesn't let you switch to the low-quality video flavor, which is better suited for slow Internet connections.


Perhaps the most annoying issue is that the YouTube app doesn't buffer the video when you pause it and the unused buffer is discarded when you close the app. Let's say you start watching a 10-minute video and you close the app after 3 minutes (for example, you get a phone call). Even if the video has been completely buffered, the YouTube app will download it again once you go back and tap the "play" button. The same thing happens when you open the Notification Center or double-click the Home button.

What if you're trying to find a video and you enter multiple queries? How do you go back to the start page? Just the tap the "back" arrow for each query you've typed. That's really annoying.

What if you want to see the most popular YouTube videos today and you're signed in to your Google account? Just scroll the entire list of subscriptions from the sidebar and you can finally see the "popular" section.

Surprisingly, none of these issues happen in YouTube's mobile web app available at m.youtube.com. Sure, the web app doesn't look so polished and you can't read the comments while watching a video (you're not missing too much), but it works pretty well. Google will probably fix these issues in the future releases, but for now YouTube's mobile site is better.


And speaking of mobile apps, if you have an iPhone 5 or you've updated an iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad to iOS 6, it's worth trying the mobile Google Maps available at maps.google.com and even adding a shortcut to the home screen. Google takes its time developing the Google Maps app for iOS.

YouTube's Updated Design Experiment

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YouTube tests yet another interface and this time it's both for the homepage and the video pages. For the first time, Google's navigation bar is added to YouTube. The sidebar from the previous experiment includes some options that used to be placed at the top of the page and used to be persistent. Now you have to click "My subscriptions" every time you go to YouTube's homepage if you want to remove reccomendations.

The upload button now has a drop-down that lets you go to the video manager and the analytics section, while the browse button has been removed. You can no longer go to the "inbox" from the homepage. When you click the button next to your Google Profile avatar (which is also new), YouTube sends you to the settings page, where there's a tab for the inbox.



Video pages have a button that toggles the sidebar, so you can quickly access the feed, your subscriptions, the history and other sections without having to visit the homepage. It's interesting to notice that most YouTube sections have a consistent feed-like interface, whether they're displaying videos from your subscriptions, recommendations, playlists or your history.



Here's how you can try the new interface. If you use Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari or Internet Explorer 8+:

1. open youtube.com in a new tab

2. load your browser's developer console:

* Chrome - press Ctrl+Shift+J for Windows/Linux/ChromeOS or Command-Option-J for Mac

* Firefox - press Ctrl+Shift+K for Windows/Linux or Command-Option-K for Mac

* Opera - press Ctrl+Shift+I for Windows/Linux or Command-Option-I for Mac, then click "Console"

* Safari - check this article

* Internet Explorer - press F12 and select the "Console" tab.

3. paste the following code which changes a YouTube cookie:

document.cookie="VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE=u8uWhAyPa3U; path=/; domain=.youtube.com";window.location.reload();

4. press Enter and close the console.

To go back to the standard UI, follow the same steps, but use the following code:

document.cookie="VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE=; path=/; domain=.youtube.com";window.location.reload();

You can also check the previous UI experiments for the homepage and "watch" pages.

{ Thanks, Pascal. }

Google Docs No Longer Exports Files in the Old Microsoft Office Formats

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Google Docs changed the Microsoft Office format for exporting documents and switched to Office Open XML. "The built-in exporting feature from Google Docs to Microsoft Office will now allow users to download Google documents as modern Office formats (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx), as opposed to the older formats (.doc, .xls, .ppt) that were standard in Office 97-2003. For users who still use Office 97-2003, we recommend installing the free compatibility plugin from Microsoft, which will allow them to open modern Office file types," informs Google. The same feature will be added to Google Apps on October 1st.


Google Docs can still import Office 97-2003 files, so it's not clear why the modern Office formats weren't included as an additional optional in the "download as" menu. For some reason, if you use the "email as attachment" feature and select "Microsoft Word/Excel/Powerpoint", you can still get the old formats.

The Register predicts that a lot of business users will complain. "The move is troublesome not only for stick-in-the-muds who haven't upgraded their Office installs: it's perfectly feasible that much of a large business' corporate memory will be in the old binary formats (along with spreadsheets containing large, custom macros that nobody's rewritten in the newer versions yet)." Google Docs will continue to import existing files and there's a compatibility pack for old Office versions, but that doesn't mean corporate users won't complain.

YouTube's Updated Design Experiment

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YouTube tests yet another interface and this time it's both for the homepage and the video pages. For the first time, Google's navigation bar is added to YouTube. The sidebar from the previous experiment includes some options that used to be placed at the top of the page and used to be persistent. Now you have to click "My subscriptions" every time you go to YouTube's homepage if you want to remove reccomendations.

The upload button now has a drop-down that lets you go to the video manager and the analytics section, while the browse button has been removed. You can no longer go to the "inbox" from the homepage. When you click the button next to your Google Profile avatar (which is also new), YouTube sends you to the settings page, where there's a tab for the inbox.



Video pages have a button that toggles the sidebar, so you can quickly access the feed, your subscriptions, the history and other sections without having to visit the homepage. It's interesting to notice that most YouTube sections have a consistent feed-like interface, whether they're displaying videos from your subscriptions, recommendations, playlists or your history.



Here's how you can try the new interface. If you use Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari or Internet Explorer 8+:

1. open youtube.com in a new tab

2. load your browser's developer console:

* Chrome - press Ctrl+Shift+J for Windows/Linux/ChromeOS or Command-Option-J for Mac

* Firefox - press Ctrl+Shift+K for Windows/Linux or Command-Option-K for Mac

* Opera - press Ctrl+Shift+I for Windows/Linux or Command-Option-I for Mac, then click "Console"

* Safari - check this article

* Internet Explorer - press F12 and select the "Console" tab.

3. paste the following code which changes a YouTube cookie:

document.cookie="VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE=u8uWhAyPa3U; path=/; domain=.youtube.com";window.location.reload();

4. press Enter and close the console.

To go back to the standard UI, follow the same steps, but use the following code:

document.cookie="VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE=; path=/; domain=.youtube.com";window.location.reload();

You can also check the previous UI experiments for the homepage and "watch" pages.

{ Thanks, Pascal. }

Google Contacts Sync Using CardDAV

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CardDav is an open standard for syncing contacts and it's closely related to CalDAV, a standard for synchronizing calendars. Google Calendar already supports CalDAV and now it's time for Google Contacts to add support for CardDAV.

If you have an iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad and you want to sync your data with a Google Account, you probably select "Gmail" from the list of accounts and you're disappointed to find out that you can only sync your mail, calendar and notes, not to mention that there's no push support. What about your contacts? A better option is to add a new account that uses Microsoft Exchange to sync. You can also manually add a CardDav account using these instructions, assuming that your device uses iOS 5 or iOS 6. If you need push support, the only option is to use Exchange.


"By supporting IMAP, CalDAV, and CardDAV together, we're making it possible for 3rd parties to build a seamless Google Account sync experience," says Google. There are many applications and services that support CardDav: Apple's Address Book from Mac OS X, Atmail, CardDAV-Sync for Android, Apple's iOS.

The New Google Trends

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Google Trends is one of the small services that haven't been discontinued by Google. It uses data from Google search to show information about the popularity a query. A few years ago, Google also launched a more advanced version of Google Trends called Insights for Search and now the two services have been merged.


"We've updated the line chart and map using HTML5 based Google Chart Tools so you can now load the page on your mobile devices, visualize the results without scrolling, and get Hot Searches not just for the U.S., but also India, Japan, and Singapore," informs Google.

There are some casualties: Google Trends for Websites is no longer available, headlines are no longer displayed next to the chart (you can still find them when you mouse over the chart). Basically, the new Google Trends is a simplified version of Insights for Search, so you'll see many cool features like predictions, comparing locations and time ranges, finding the most popular queries from a region, restricting results to a category or a date range, checking results from specialized search engines like Image Search, Google News or Google Shopping.

Apple Drops the “Most Powerful Mapping Service Ever” Claim

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→

Apple’s CEO Tim Cook has honestly admitted that Apple Maps isn’t as good as competing mapping services but the Apple website made a slightly contradictory claim. It said:

Designed by Apple from the ground up, Maps gives you turn-by-turn spoken directions, interactive 3D views, and the stunning Flyover feature. All of which may just make this app the most beautiful, powerful mapping service ever.

Apple Maps may be beautiful for some regions (where they exist) but the other claim isn’t quite true. I was checking the Apple website this morning and looks like they have changed the wording and are no longer referring to Apple Maps as “the most powerful mapping service ever.” The website now reads:

Designed by Apple from the ground up, Maps gives you turn-by-turn spoken directions, interactive 3D views, and the stunning Flyover feature. All in a beautiful vector-based interface that scales and zooms with ease.

Apple executive spent around 8 minutes to demo the Apple Maps application at the WWDC conference, calling it a “worldwide effort,” but not once did they mention that the service had any limitations or problems.

The mapping service would not have become such a laughing stock worldwide had they set the right expectations in the first place. In case you haven’t seen it before, here’s the keynote video where Apple first showcased the Maps app in iOS 6.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0V5BQFn0wcE

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This story, Apple Drops the “Most Powerful Mapping Service Ever” Claim, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 29/09/2012 under Apple, Internet.

The Best Tools for Uploading Files to Amazon Glacier

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This article was recently updated to include some new Glacier clients.

Amazon Glacier is the most cost-effective online backup service ever and, sensing a strong demand, developers have been busy writing tools (or clients) that will allow users to easily upload files from the computer to Amazon Glacier vaults for backup. The first batch of these Glacier Clients is now available and some of them are pretty impressive. →

Before we explore the tools, let’s quickly recap some essential Glacier jargon:

• Vaults – A Vault is like a main folder where you store your files and folders. You may create multiple vaults (like HomePC or MyPictures) in your Amazon Glacier account for better organization.
• Archives – The stuff stored inside your Glacier Vaults are called Archives. You can zip multiple files and folders on the computer and upload them to your Amazon Vault as a single archive. Consider encrypting files for improved security.
• Region – This is like a physical data center where you would like Amazon to store your files (or vaults). The storage costs (see pricing) for Amazon’s US East data center is lower than Tokyo so you may want to keep this in mind before picking a default region for your Glacier Vaults.

Amazon Glacier Clients

To get started, sign-up for Amazon Glacier - you’ll need a credit card for completing the sign-up process though you won’t be charged at this time. Next go here  to generate your secret Access Keys – all clients will need these for interacting with your Glacier Account.

Now that you have all the required information, let’s explore the various Glacier Clients:

1. Fast Glacier – This is the first Glacier client that hit the shelves almost a week after Amazon released Glacier and since then, this Windows-only tool has been updated to support multi-part uploads (for uploading large files). Fast Glacier has an easy UI and it can upload individual files as well as full folders. The tool is free for personal use while a commercial licence is available for $29.95.

Fast Glacier is free and allows you to backup individual files as well as folders

2. Glacier Uploader - A Java based client for Amazon Glacier meaning you will need JRE on your computer to get this to work. The upside is that since it uses Java, Glacier Uploader will work on Mac, Windows and Linux machines. The name is “Glacier Uploader” but the same tool may also be used for downloading your archives.

3. S3 Explorer – This is one of the most popular Amazon S3 Client for Windows and the new version supports Amazon Glacier as well. CloudBerry Explorer offers a 2-pane view where one side lists you local computer files while the other pane lists files that are in the Amazon Cloud. You can simple drag and drop folders to copy files from the computer to Glacier Vaults or vice-versa. There’s also an option to setup sync folder so that you local folders and Glacier folders are always in sync.

4. CloudBerry Backup - If you are looking for a tool to continuously backup your files and folders to Glacier at set intervals, CloudBerry Backup is a good choice (15-day trial, $29.99). In addition to Amazon Glacier, the same tool can also be used for backing up your files to Amazon S3, Google Storage and Microsoft Azure. It offers a wizard based approach making it easier for anyone to create backup jobs.

A proper backup client for Amazon Glacier that watches your files and folders and automatically uploads them to Glacier.

5. Cloud Gates – This is not exactly a “client” but with Cloud Gates, you can use Amazon Glacier from any FTP software (like CyberDuck or FileZilla).

Cloud Gates transforms your Glacier (and Amazon S3) storage into an FTP server which you can also mount in your Windows Explorer (or Finder in Mac) as a new drive and upload files with easy drag and drop. The service is free and there are no limits on the file size that you can upload to Glacier via Cloud Gates but eventually, they do plan to charge for the service.

Please do note that once you upload your files to Glacier, they are not immediately available in your AWS console and may take couple of hours to show up. The service is mostly designed for storing files that you don’t need frequently.

Update: The Arq Backup client is extremely popular among Mac users for storing files in the Amazon S3 and the developer has recently confirmed in a tweet that they are working to including support for Amazon Glacier.

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This story, The Best Tools for Uploading Files to Amazon Glacier, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 20/09/2012 under Amazon S3, Internet.

How to Embed Large Panoramas in your Website

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The iOS 6 software update adds a new Panorama mode to your iPhone’s camera. Just tap the camera icon, choose Panorama under Options and pan the camera slowly from one side to another to create a high-resolution panoramic photograph. Here’s a sample panorama of my office captured* with an iPhone camera. →

Embed High-Resolution Panoramas without Resizing

These panoramic images are around 8640 x 1881 pixels in size and thus too big to fit into regular websites. You can either resize the images for embedding or use one of the following techniques to embed them the panoramas at their original resolution:

Option #1: Upload your panorama image to Flickr (or Dropbox or SkyDrive) and paste the image URL inside zoom.it. This is a Microsoft service that adds a beautiful viewer to any high-resolution image that you can easily embed into other websites. The viewer has a full-screen mode and is also compatible with mobile and touch-screen devices. See demo:

Option #2: You are very familiar with Google Maps and wouldn’t be nice if you can use the same interface to embed panoramas instead of maps? Fortunately, the Google Maps API allows such creative uses and you can build a Google Maps based viewer for your panorama in seconds – refer to this detailed tutorial.

To give you an idea, here’s the same panorama image embedded inside Google Maps:

Option #3: You can also embed panoramas in your web pages using jQuery. Before you skip this technique assuming it to be too technical, take a look at this online demo – this is done in jQuery and if you were to put this into your own blog or website, all you have to do is unzip this file and replace the image URL with your own.

Here are some good Javascipt based techniques (no Flash required) that will let you embed panoramas in web pages:

• Panorado JS – This is an HTML5 Panorama viewer with tons of options to customize the viewer. Free for personal use.
• Cyclotron – Simple jQuery plugin for adding panoramas with support for horizontal dragging but no on-screen controls.
• TouchPanView – Lets you fit any large image into a giving div and visitor can use the mouse or touch gestures to interact with the panorama. IE and mobile friendly.
• Panorama Viewer – Another jQuery based panorama viewer but one offers auto-scroll in the horizontal direction. No option for vertical dragging.

Overall, I would give Zoom.it the maximum points. It supports high-resolution images of virtually any size, there are no licensing restrictions, the panorama viewer is quite beautiful and its bandwidth friendly too.

[*] While iOS 6 is available for the iPad as well, the Panorama mode is only available for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

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This story, How to Embed Large Panoramas in your Website, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 20/09/2012 under Embed, Internet.

Google Engineer Develops Tool for Generating RSS Feeds from Google Plus

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Google Plus does not offer RSS Feeds but you can easily generate feeds on your own using a new Chrome app developed by Eric Koleda, an engineer working with the Google Apps Script team. Here’s a  sample Google+ Feed create using this tool. →

Follow Google+ Profiles and Pages via RSS Feeds

Create RSS Feeds for Google Plus

To get started, open Feed+ inside Chrome and it will request access to some of your Google services. Say yes and you are all set to create RSS feeds from Google Plus. You can generate RSS feeds for individual profiles, business pages and for search results on Google Plus.

The generated RSS feeds are public and thus you, or anyone else, can subscribe to these feeds in any news reader. FeedBurner, for some reason, does not recognize these feeds as valid though I could easily subscribe to them in Google Reader.

And now that you have an RSS Feed for your Google Plus profile, you can easily cross-post updates to Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, LinkedIn and everywhere else using the IFTTT service. You may also refer to my previous tutorial on how to publish RSS feeds to Twitter for more options.

If you are to ever disable a particular Google Plus feed, simple delete it from the Feed+ app inside Chrome. Also, you only need the Chrome app for managing the feeds – the Google Plus to RSS conversion happens in the cloud.

Google Plus APIs do not include details about Circles else it would have been more convenient to have a single RSS feed per Google+ circle rather than having to generate separate feeds for every member of a circle.

Also see: RSS Feeds for Google Search

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This story, Google Engineer Develops Tool for Generating RSS Feeds from Google Plus, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 21/09/2012 under Google Chrome, Google Plus, Rss, Internet.

Download your YouTube Videos in their Original Resolution

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While there are quite a few software tools and apps available that let you download videos from YouTube for offline watching, you don’t really need them anymore if you are looking to download your own videos from the YouTube website. →

The easiest way to download an individual YouTube video click is through the Video Manager. Click the Edit button next to a video that you wish to download (see screenshot) and choose “Download MP4″ from the dropdown.

Download your YouTube Videos, legally

This method has been around for a while now but the one big limitation is that the quality of the downloaded videos isn’t the same as your original clips. Your 720p and 1080p HD video will be saved at 480p.

If this lone limitation has been keeping you from hosting any of your videos on YouTube, worry no more. You now have an option to download all your YouTube videos in their original resolution. Here’s how:

1. Go to google.com/takeout and click the Create Archive button. Google will now create a zipped archived with all the videos that you have ever uploaded to YouTube.
2. Once the archive says 100%, proceed to the Downloads tab to grab the actual files. If the archive is large, Google Takeout will split them into individual files of 2 GB each.

The downside is that you have to download the entire archives – there’s no option to download individual video in high resolution.

That said, if you are planning to copy videos from YouTube to Vimeo or another video hosting service but don’t have access to the source video files, you’ll find this new option extremely handy.

HRelated reading: How to Embed YouTube in PowerPoint

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This story, Download your YouTube Videos in their Original Resolution, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 27/09/2012 under YouTube, Internet.