Search Without Effort: The Quick Search Box

Monday, January 12, 2009 at 6:00 PM

By Nicholas Jitkoff and Dave MacLachlan, Google Mac Team

One of our goals at Google is to make your search experience as fluid as possible. While much of our work is focused on Google.com, we're trying to make it just as easy to search outside your browser.

For the last year, we have been working on a new, open-source quick search box. Today, we are releasing our first developer preview for the Mac.



This Mac version is much more experimental than its iPhone sibling, Google Mobile App, and through it you will be able to see many of the areas we are exploring: contextual search, actions, and extensibility. It is by no means feature-complete, but is a very good indication of things to come.

If you are interested in participating in our experiment, head over to the Google Code site and give it a try. We are eager to involve users in the development process and will be posting new builds frequently. Over the coming months we'll be posting a few articles about the architecture and interaction we are exploring, and we look forward to your feedback.

YouTube Upload Booth

Friday, January 09, 2009 at 11:58 AM

By Jason Toff, Google Mac Team

In addition to the Earth Surfer application, our Macworld booth also features a YouTube Upload Booth this year.  Several famed YouTubers stopped in the booth and used Quick Capture to upload their videos to the web.  For instance...

Ijustine jumped in the moment she saw it.

Chris Pirillo had some..ahem..difficulties at first but was able to make it work.

And there were many more excited people ready to try it out!  Check out the video below to hear more about the YouTube booth:

Surf Through Google Earth

Thursday, January 08, 2009 at 2:39 PM

By Jason Toff, Google Mac Team

This year for Macworld a Google engineer, David Phillip Oster, wrote a fun application that allows you to surf through Google earth.  Watch the video below and read more about it on the Google Lat Long blog.

Macworld Has Arrived

Tuesday, January 06, 2009 at 11:05 AM

By Jason Toff, Google Mac Team

After months of anticipation, Macworld is finally here!  We put the finishing touches on our booth yesterday and look forward to visits from many of the expected 40,000+ attendees.

More than 100 Googlers across several teams-- including Picasa, Mobile, Geo, & YouTube-- will be staffing our booth throughout the four days of the expo (from now until Jan. 9). We have plenty in store for our booth and plan to update this blog regularly-- so stay tuned.

If you're planning to attend, we hope you'll stop by to say hello! And for those of you who can't make it or aren't in the area, we invite you to visit google.com/macworld to explore Google's offerings for Mac and the iPhone.

Picasa's Macworld Debut

Monday, January 05, 2009 at 2:15 PM

By Stuart Morgan, Software Engineer

Last year we had a blast at Macworld demonstrating all our Mac products, but as Mac users, we also know that the best part of Macworld is new product announcements. This year, we're getting in the spirit by making a little announcement of our own: we're happy to say that Picasa, Google's photo management software, will be joining the ranks of the free Mac OS X applications from Google!

If you've never tried Picasa before, it's a program that helps you manage, edit, and share your photo collection. It works especially well with Picasa Web Albums, Google's free photo-sharing site, so it can help you manage the photo albums you've shared online with friends and family as well as the photos on your computer. In addition to photo editing tools, the Picasa client includes features like automatic web sync, fast and simple sharing, collage making, and simple movie editing. And on the web side, Picasa Web Albums offers unique features like name tags, which help you automatically organize your photo collection based on the faces in each picture.

You'll notice that Picasa for Mac is still in Google Labs and has a "beta" label attached—a few minor features like geotagging and webcam capture aren't functional yet, and we plan to sand and polish some parts of the user interface to make sure Picasa feels right at home on Mac OS X. Still, we think you'll find plenty to like in this first beta, and we're excited to get this release out into the hands of the Mac community at this year's Macworld! We're looking forward to making Picasa for the Mac even better, and to hearing what you think — Picasa engineers will be at the Google booth's demo stations throughout Macworld, and we always listen to the feedback on our Help Forum.

There's plenty more to say about Picasa on the Mac, so check out the video below, swing by the Google Photos blog to learn more and download a copy to play with—and of course, come see us at Macworld!