Walk for Good

Change yourself. Change the world. Get your walk on.

Be good to yourself and add the Cleveland Clinic walking program to your iGoogle page. Use the Walk for Good gadget to track your progress and stay motivated. If you complete at least half of the 15-week program by October 25th, you can help choose a health charity to receive a donation from Google.

Read more: Go for Good 

Labels: Cleveland Clinic, health, iGoogle, Walk for Good

Boston (dbTechno) - Google announced on Monday that they are doing a major upgrade to their Web services offered to Apple iPhone users, just one day before the big Macworld keynote speech by Apple’s Steve Jobs.

Google stated on Monday that they are releasing improvements to the entire interface of the iPhone, which should upgrade it quite a bit and give it features it never had before. Google stated that the enhancements to the user interface are to allow for better response to touch-screen input.

Read more: dbtechno.com 

Labels: iGoogle, iPhone, Macworld, mobile, phone

Spotted by Google Operating System is a new iPhone specific interface for Google’s personalized webpage product iGoogle. The page can accessed directly from http://google.com/ig/i, although iPhone users should be immediately redirected to this page when trying to access iGoogle.

The new iPhone interface is a step up from Google’s previous offering of a mobile specific page at google.com/m which only offered limited customization options.

Read more: techcrunch.com 

Labels: iGoogle, iPhone, mobile, phone

Another day, another Google announcement, and this one fits right in to the silly season. Google is offering Christmas themed gadgets for Google Desktop and iGoogle users who want to spruce up their desktops with holiday kitsch.

Read more: techcrunch.com 

Labels: Christmas, Desktop, Gadgets, iGoogle, Sidebar

Google earlier this month announced they’ll stop allowing new gadgets for iGoogle which are using the “html-inline” functionality. An inline gadget, as opposed to a normal gadget, can have more control over the full iGoogle page as it is not wrapped in an inline frame. Typical uses of an inline gadget may be changing the Google logo, creating a themes directory gadget, or uncluttering the iGoogle homepage by removing certain links... in other words, all the kind of stuff you need to do when you want to “break out” of your iframe. As you can imagine, this may pose security risks, in particular when it comes to Google account kidnapping (even though Google did have some preventions against that).

Read more: blogoscoped.com 

Labels: Gadgets, iframe, iGoogle, security

In Google's never-ending quest to collect and utilize the world's information, the company today introduced a new translation feature to its Google Talk chat client. Delivered as a series of chat bots, these tools can quickly translate a phrase or paragraph for you, and they can even be added to group chats to act as real-time translators. The inaugural attempt is certainly a big step in the right direction, but as with any attempt to bridge language barriers with automation, things sometimes get lost in translation.

Google lists out about 30 total language bots in the announcement post on the Google Talk blog. The bots are all logically named according to their translation duty, such as en2ko@bot.talk.google.com, signifying an English to Korean translation. Just like Google's other language services, English is the dominant language across the translations, though some non-English bots such as fr2de do exist. Users must add a bot to their Gmail contact list in order to communicate with the bot or use it in a group chat. Once added though, these bots will do their job both in Gmail and other Google Talk implementations like the iGoogle start page, but group chats don't appear to work in third-party clients such as Apple's iChat.

Full article: arstechnica.com 

Labels: iGoogle, instant messaging, Talk, translate