Google Analytics in Real-Time

Two weeks ago, Google Analytics launched real-time stats. This feature is not enabled for everyone yet, but you can request an invitation using this form. After receiving the invitation, you need to switch to the new Analytics interface, select a site, go to the "Home" tab and click "Real-Time (Beta) / Overview".

I must say that this feature is addictive because it shows a lot of information about your site in real-time. You can find the number of active visitors, the number of pageviews, the top referrals and the top active pages. There's also a map that highlights the cities where your visitors are coming from. And all this information is updated so frequently that it's difficult to keep up with the ever changing stats.


Google Analytics is great for the intuitive reports and the advanced filters that help you understand traffic fluctuations, but a lot of people will use the service more often because of the real-time stats. They're constantly changing, they're mesmerizing and empowering.

Disable Blogger's Dynamic Views

If you don't like Blogger's Dynamic Views, but your favorite blog enabled one of them, there's a way to go back to the previous template: just add &v=0 to the URL. For example, here's the URL for Gmail's blog: http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/?v=0.

Unfortunately, the change is not persistent and you need to add the parameter every time you visit the homepage or one of the posts. You can also bookmark the URL.

Tabs in Google Translate

Google Translate made it easier to translate a text into multiple languages by adding tabs. When you select a language from one of the two lists, it's added as a tab and you can quickly switch between the most recent three languages. Google's language detection works pretty well, so I'm not sure why there are tabs for the source languages, but the tabs for the target languages are useful.


You've probably noticed that Google Translate's custom drop-downs for selecting languages remember the most recent languages you've selected and highlight them.


In other Google Translate news, the Android app's conversation mode now supports 14 languages. "Earlier this year, we launched an update to Google Translate for Android with an experimental feature called Conversation Mode, which enables you to you translate speech back and forth between languages. We began with just English and Spanish, but today we're expanding to 14 languages, adding Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Polish, Russian and Turkish," informs Google.

{ Thanks, Xavier. }

More About Google's New Design

Google's lead designer for search, Jon Wiley, explained in an interesting presentation at the UX Week 2011 that the unified interface is the biggest redesign in Google's history. It's interesting to know that the interface has nothing to do with Google+, but it was associated with Google+ because it was the first Google product that used it.

Larry Page decided that Google needs a more beautiful UI on the same day when he became Google's CEO (April 4). Google Creative Labs, who came up with Google's Super Bowl ad and many of the Chrome ads, designed the new interface and Google's designers were really surprised that they're finally allowed to create something bold. Jon Wiley quotes a tweet from a Google user who noticed the new design and concluded that Google must have hired some designers.

While Larry Page was really pleased with the result, many Google employees hated the redesign at first (especially Gmail's new interface), but they started to like it after a few days. It's a pretty big change for Google and it's really surprising to see that it was Larry Page's idea.



{ via François }

How to Disable Blogger's Lightbox

Last month, Blogger's team launched a Lightbox-like feature which was quickly removed after users started to complain. Blogger's Lightbox was automatically enabled for all the images from a post and blog owners couldn't disable it.

The feature is now back, it's still enabled by default, but you can disable it from Settings > Formatting by selecting "No" next to "Open images in Lightbox". If you use Blogger's new interface, the setting can be found in the "Post and comments" section. As Google explains, "If Yes is selected, when a reader clicks on an image in a post, it will be displayed in a slideshow-like overlay instead of leaving your page and navigating to the image."

The old interface:


The new interface:


{ via Blogger Buzz. Thanks, Petros. }

Google Maps in WebGL

If you like the Google Maps app for Android and you wonder why it looks better than the desktop Google Maps, there's a new experimental interface that uses WebGL and it's available in Chrome 14+ and Firefox 8+. If you click "Want to try something new?" in the Google Maps sidebar and enable MapGL, you'll see a completely new Google Maps interface that shows 3D buildings and no longer uses Flash for Street View.


"We've rebuilt Google Maps from the ground up. Our enhanced Maps provide improved performance, richer 3D graphics, smoother transitions between imagery, 45° view rotation, easier access to Street View and more," explains Google.




Google says that the new interface requires Chrome 14 or Firefox 8 (beta), Windows Vista/7 or Mac OS 10.6+ or Linux and a graphics card that supports WebGL. I've tested in Chrome 14 and it works well: the animations are smooth and Google Maps looks more like a native app.

Google Maps Adds Layer Previews

Google Maps replaced the static icons for the satellite and street maps layers with interactive previews of the layers. I'm not sure if they're useful, but they look a lot better than the icons.

Corey, a reader of this blog, found a better way to describe the new feature: "When you're looking at a map in normal view, the satellite view button shows what the satellite view looks like on the little square where the button is and acts like a window to satellite view like you're looking through the regular map and it follows the map as it moves. I thought that was pretty cool."



{ Thanks, Corey. }