Archive for October, 2008

In preparation for the Professional Developers Conference, the IE team recently authored some articles for a special issue of Code Focus magazine.  The articles cover everything from cross-version compatibility to performance, and include new sample code. You can read the articles online at the following locations: Welcome to CoDe Focus for Internet Explorer 8! What’s New in Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2? Making Your Web site Compatible Across Multiple Versions of Internet Explorer Introducing Compatibility View Create Your Own Web Slices Accelerators in Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 New Search Features in Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 Developer Tools in Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 Better AJAX Development with Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 AJAX Performance Measurement Methodology for Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 Performance Improvements in Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 Reliability and Privacy with Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 Secure Coding with Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 Internet Explorer 8 New Accessibility Features Or, if you’d prefer, you can also download the entire issue as a single PDF file.  Enjoy! Eric Lawrence Program Manager

Update 11:50 am - fixing a formating issue.

 

We are all passionate feed readers on the Google Reader team. For us, working on Reader is a dream job. Why? Because we have the perfect excuse when we're caught browsing feeds at work!

For a bit of fun, and to show you what we like reading, we've put together a bundle of our favorite feeds. After much deliberation, we've narrowed down our "Staff Picks" to the following:

• Cute Overload (view in Reader)
• Design Milk (view in Reader)
• Dinosaur Comics (view in Reader)
• Jake And Amir Dot Com (view in Reader)
• Just Bento (view in Reader)
• La Tartine Gourmande (view in Reader)
• MAKE Magazine (view in Reader)
• POPSUGAR (view in Reader)
• Rock, Paper, Shotgun (view in Reader)
• The Big Picture (view in Reader)
• The Kitchn (view in Reader)
• ThinkGeek (view in Reader)
• WebUrbanist (view in Reader)

Not only do these feeds capture the personalities on our team, they are mainly all "full text" feeds (i.e. containing the original pictures, videos and text).

If you want to subscribe to all of these feeds at once, head over to our discover page and subscribe to the "Staff Picks" bundle (English only).

If you haven't used Reader before, maybe these feeds might give you some ideas for websites you'd like to start tracking.

We hope you enjoy these feeds as much as we do!

MooTools v1.2.1 recently got released and we have received the thumbs up from the maintainers to host it, so the bits have been flipped and the pipes are ready to MOOve it over to you guys.

But wait!! Before you get started with 1.2.1, please note that the previous version we are hosting (1.11) and the new version (1.2.1) are incompatible. So as not to break anyone out of the blue (and put them in a bad MOOd) we have frozen the version "1" alias to 1.11. Here's what the aliases look like for MooTools:
google.load('mootools', '1') // gives you version 1.11
google.load('mootools', '1.11') // gives you version 1.11
google.load('mootools', '1.2.1') // gives you version 1.2.1
... you get the picture.

If you have some extra time, stop by the group and show us what you've been up to with MooTools. Happy grazing!

When we launched the Trends page last year, we wanted to visualize how we consumed data in Google Reader. One of the more interesting sections of the Trends page is the chart that shows items read by time. Spikes in the chart are a cool way of noticing patterns and possibly realizing that the reason we're less productive on Fridays is because of Reader. Some of us on the Reader team are obsessed with keeping our unread counts low so we wondered if we were being driven by the posting schedule of our subscriptions. We thought the chart might be more interesting if we showed when posts were coming into Reader, so we are now graphing published statistics on the same chart. For example, in my set of subscriptions, even though I'm reading the majority of items in the evening, new posts seem to arrive in the middle of the day.

We also wanted to expose more fine-grained data. While it's useful to know what your overall reading trends are, we thought it might be interesting to also display this data on a subscription by subscription level. If you've ever been curious about when your favorite subscriptions were publishing new posts or when you were reading them, click the "show details" link in the upper right corner of the viewer. It's a good way to peak into your personal habits as well as the posting schedule of your favorite blogs. While you're in there, check out the other details - we also display the last crawl time and any errors encountered during that crawl.

If you've been using our Checkout Buy Now buttons, you're aware that these buttons only allow your buyers to purchase one item at a time from your website. But what happens if buyers wish to purchase more than one item? This is where the new Google Checkout shopping cart comes in. With the Google Checkout shopping cart, your buyers can add multiple items to their shopping cart, change item quantities, and remove items -- all without leaving your site. When buyers are ready to check out, they can complete their purchases with Google Checkout. The cart is quick to load and snappy to respond, so your buyers will love it. To see the cart in action, check out the Demo Store. To learn more about the cart's features, visit the overview page.

How do you get started? If you have an account, all you need to do to set up the shopping cart is visit the Google Checkout shopping cart page located under the Tools tab in the Google Checkout Merchant Center. Just enter your product information, price, and image location. The page will generate an HTML snippet that you can insert on your product web pages. To test that your button is working, just click it. A shopping cart should appear in the upper right hand of your browser window. If you want to customize the cart's look and feel or use more advanced options, you can do that too with this developer's guide.

We hope you enjoy this new feature.

Posted by Boris Mizhen, Engineer, and Heather Folsom, Product Manager
Google Checkout Team

Name: Radio Energy Zürich
Author: Andreas Horlacher
Description: Listen to online radio from Energy Zürich

More information | Download gadget

Each week this blog features a recently added Google Desktop gadget that looks promising. If you'd like to see all new Desktop gadgets as they're published, subscribe to the RSS feed.

Posted by Kathy Walrath, Technical Writer

 posted by Sameer.

Some beta users seem to be getting an error 810003c1 when they try to login to Messenger. This error can be caused if the region setting for your account is not set. If you are seeing this error, please go to https://account.live.com/EditProf.aspx and make sure the Country/Region field is set correctly to your own country.

Thanks and have a great weekend!

  posted by Ellen

Hi Messenger Friends,

Let me introduce myself, I’m Ellen and I work in the Windows Live Marketing team. As you can imagine, I’m one of several lucky people that get to work on promoting a really fun product. And today, I get to talk about one of the great things on Messenger by being a guest blogger.

One of Messenger’s features is back - you can now call your contacts on their landline and mobile phones from your PC using Telefonica’s Voype Web Calling Service. Telefonica is one of the largest telecommunication companies in the world. And by partnering with them, we’ve been to obtain a great deal for you and provide you with really low phone rates. In the coming weeks, we will also be launching this feature in the following countries for the first time: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Peru and Venezuela.

You can now call all your friends and family globally at really low rates. It’s approximately a penny to China, 2¢ to the UK, 5¢ to Canada, or 10¢ to Mexico per minute when calling landlines. So when your friends are offline and you really need to have a conversation with them or just need to hear their voice, you don’t even need to think twice and worry about the cost.

I’m pretty excited to try this feature out next week. My friend Heather is leaving this weekend to go backpacking around Asia. I’m already planning to call her using Messenger so that I can hear her stories as they happen. I can call her on her mobile phone and I don’t have to worry about my phone bill or using my cell phone minutes! Actually, you can call anyone – they don’t have to be a Messenger contact – you can call your grandma to say hi, call into your conference call meetings, or just even order pizza! Maybe not from China but you get the point! J

All you have to do is sign-up for an account here, a microphone & speakers or headset and broadband connection. And buy credit in amounts of $5, $10 or $20.

To make a call in Messenger, it will depend on what version you have.

If you are using Windows Live Messenger 8.0, 8.1 or 8.5, just click on the phone icon either in the main window or choose a contact and click on the phone icon. From the drop down menu, select ‘Call a phone’. Add a phone number, click on enter and start talking! You’re all set. It’s that easy.

If you are already using the new Windows Live Messenger beta, there are a few of ways you can make a call. You can hover over a contact and if you have a phone associated with that contact, just click on ‘call work’, ‘call mobile’, etc. You can also open up a conversation window with that contact and click on the phone icon and enter their telephone number. For ad hoc calls, you can launch Windows Live Call from the start menu under All Programs > Windows Live Call beta, enter their telephone number and click Call. Choose whichever way is most convenient for you!

 posted by Sameer.

Some beta users seem to be getting an error 810003c1 when they try to login to Messenger. This error can be caused if the region setting for your account is not set. If you are seeing this error, please go to https://account.live.com/EditProf.aspx and make sure the Country/Region field is set correctly to your own country.

Thanks and have a great weekend!

We've always used Reader to keep up to date on news and current events and today it just got a little easier: The Guardian just moved all of their RSS feeds from partial to full-text. They are the first major newspaper in the world to do so, and this is, well, great news.

Over on their blog, they talk about making sure people can "get the guardian.co.uk experience in whatever context is most useful to them," and now whether you're interested in just the top stories (subscribe in Reader) or music album reviews (subscribe) or just articles on politics by Marina Hyde (subscribe), you can read them in their full-text form, here on Reader.

This is a huge first step in making more content available in more places, and we applaud the Guardian for taking it.