When it first arrived in iPhone apps, the simple “pull to refresh” action was instantly hailed as a genius bit of user interaction engineering.
It’s an ultra-intuitive way of refreshing the displayed page content by simply pulling the page down with your thumb, then releasing it — sort of like pulling a lever on a slot machine. The official Foursquare and Twitter (nee Tweetie) apps use it, so if you’re into social networking, you’re already familiar. But so far, its use has been limited to native apps.
Now developer Wayne Pan has created the same behavior in JavaScript for use in web apps. It’s just a proof of concept implementation at this time, and he’s found some of the limitations.
Point your mobile browser at waynepan.com/s/pull to test it. It’s a little jerky, but it does work. And his code doesn’t rely on any JavaScript libraries, so with a little tweaking, this behavior can be integrated into any web app and will work on Android and iOS devices. Nice work!
Google launched a new web-based tool Wednesday that helps you configure, test and easily embed one of the company’s free fonts into your web pages.
The Font Previewer lets you pick one of the open source fonts from Google’s Font Library, then tweak the size, spacing and decorations using simple sliders and buttons. Once you have the type the way you like it, just copy the provided code and paste it into the CSS.
It’s so ridiculously easy, even I was able to use it to change the h1 style on my personal site in about 2 minutes. I chose Pablo Impallari’s Lobster.
Google first took the web font plunge back in May by releasing the Google Font API and publishing a collection of free, open source fonts anyone can use in their designs for free. It also joined up with Typekit (who released an API today) to put together a JavaScript library for designers to control how and when their fonts are loaded.
The fonts in the Font Previewer are the same ones available through the Google Font API. They are quite nice, with a range of script, serif, sans-serif and monospace typefaces. The various typefaces used on the Android devices (Droid), and the old-timey one from Mark Pilgrim’s Dive Into HTML5 site (IM Fell) are part of the package.
You might remember this post three years ago in which I laughed at a woman on a Segway pushing a baby stroller for being lazy. Well, I’m a giant asshole, and I want to apologize to Melissa Hofstetter. I’m sorry Melissa. More »
When the World Trade Center collapsed, it took out a critical AT&T switch, crippling service. It was restored in 52 hours—including the time to drive a caravan of eighteen-wheelers from Atlanta to a lot in Jersey City. More »
JailbreakMe 2.0, a mobile Safari-based jailbreak app for iPhones and iPads, has just gone live and pretty much opens up any iOS device you have handy, all the way back to the iPhone 3G. More »
Two weeks ago we gave the Google News homepage a new look and feel with enhanced customization, discovery and sharing. This redesign was our biggest since Google News launched in beta in 2002.
Some of you told us that you really liked it, especially how the “News for you” section lets you see a stream of articles tailored to the interests you specify. The positive usage data we saw during our months-long tests of the redesign has continued since we introduced it to all users of the U.S. English edition, and hundreds of thousands of you have already customized your Google News homepages. But some of you wrote in to say you missed certain aspects of the previous design, such as the ability to see results grouped by section (U.S., Business, etc.) in two columns.
At Google, we’re all about launching and iterating, so we’ve been making improvements to the design in response to your feedback. For example, we’re now showing the entire cluster of articles for each story, rather than expanding the cluster when you hover your mouse over it. We’ve given you the ability to hide the weather forecast from your local news section. We made the option to switch between List view and Section view more obvious. And today we’re adding a third option in “News for you”: Two-column view, which shows the three top stories from each section and looks like this:
A key goal of the redesign was to give you more ways to personalize your Google News, and these changes add even more choices. A heartfelt thanks to all of you who have shared your thoughts with us. Please keep letting us know what you think, and we’ll keep working to make Google News even better.
There’s an old saying that all news is local. But all news is personal too—we connect with it in different ways depending on our interests, where we live, what we do and a lot of other factors. Today we’re revamping the Google News homepage with several changes designed to make the news that you see more relevant to you. We’re also trying to better highlight interesting stories you didn’t know existed and to make it easier for you to share stories through social networks.
BEFORE:
AFTER:
The new heart of the homepage is something we call “News for you”: a stream of headlines automatically tailored to your interests. You can help us get it right by using the “Edit personalization” box to specify how much you’re interested in Business, Health, Entertainment, Sports or any subject you want to add (whether it’s the Supreme Court, the World Cup or synthetic biology). You can choose to view the stories by Section view or List view, and reveal more headlines by hovering over the headline with your mouse. We’ll remember your preferences each time you log in. If you don’t want customized Google News, hit “Reset personalization” to clear all personalization preferences. If you haven’t previously customized and would prefer not to, simply save and close the “Edit personalization” box. You can always go back and change it later.
To give you more control over the news that you see, we’re now allowing you to choose which news sources you’d like to see more or less often. You can do so in News Settings. These sources will rank higher or lower for you (but not for anyone else) in Google News search results and story clusters. We’ve also added keyboard shortcuts for easier navigation, like in Gmail or Google Reader. When you’re in Google News, hit the question-mark key to pop up a full list of shortcuts.
There are the subjects that interest you and then there’s the major news of the day. To make it easy for you to find the big stories like Hurricane Alex, we’re adding links to topics that many outlets are covering. You’ll find these topics in the Top Stories section on the left side of the homepage as well as in linked keywords above headlines. Clicking on a topic link takes you to a list of related coverage that you can add to your news stream. You can change your preferences any time in “Edit personalization.”
The redesigned Google News homepage is rolling out today in the English-language edition in the U.S., and we plan to expand it to all editions in the coming months. We’re making the ability to choose which sources you’ll see more or less often available in all English-language editions worldwide and plan to expand it soon. For more information about these changes, check out the video below or visit our Help Center.
