The new Search app for iPad from Google

 

Google launching a significant redesign for the Google Search app for iPad. Whether you’re doing research and comparing results, or exploring beautiful imagery, we have added new features to make the app more interactive, more visual and to help you find what you want more easily.
 

More interactive

You’ll notice that searching is faster and more interactive from your first keystroke. As soon as you begin to type, Google Instant starts to display results, so you don’t even need to press the search button.

Once you pick a web page to visit, you’ll see the page load on a new, slide-in pane that will layer over the search results. You can slide the pane to the right to get back to your search results, and even keep scrolling through the results as your web page is loading. This allows you to go back and forth from results to web pages quickly to get the information you are looking for.

View search results on the left and a web page on the right in the slide-in pane


More visual

Viewing image results in the app is now much more vivid. Tap on any image result to use the new image carousel, which lets beautiful images shine. You’ll see the image you selected expand, and you can easily swipe through the carousel to see other similar images.  

Swipe through the image carousel


Often you may be looking to find something you have seen before again or are continuing research on a topic. But on a tablet, typing can be a challenge. That is why we have created a visual way to explore your search history. Swipe right to view snapshots of pages you’ve visited, stacked and organized by search term. You can also manage your search history from this new view.

With this release, we also brought Instant Previews to the app so you can quickly compare web pages before you choose your result. Tapping on an icon in the top right of the screen brings you into a visual preview of the pages for your search result, easy to scroll through with the swipe of a finger.


Find easily

Finally, we added a few extra features that we hope will help you find what you want more easily.

After you’ve selected a result, a new tool helps you find exactly what you need within a web page. Tap the magnifying glass on the top right-hand corner to highlight the most relevant section of the page. You can recommend pages you like with the new +1 button, right next to the magnifying glass, and help others find relevant sites more easily as well.  

Helpful tools while you search


We’ve also made it easier to find and use your favorite Google services like Google News, Calendar and more in the new Apps menu. Tap on an icon to quickly read an email in Gmail, or share a post on Google+ within the slide-in pane. When you slide the pane to the right, you’ll be right back to searching.


Easily find more Google services


The app is available worldwide for iPads with iOS 4.0+. Download it in the App Store and start enjoying a faster and more interactive experience now.

Visibility versus Authentication and Authorization: Service On/Off

You may have already noticed, but the controls to enable and disable individual apps in Google Apps are now all in one place on the domain Control Panel under Organization & users > Services.

Domain administrators were already able to use this tab to enable and disable the Core Google Apps suite. Now they can do the same for apps they’ve acquired from the Google Apps Marketplace. This replaces the old link labeled “Disable {app name}” in the Dashboard > {app name} > “App status” page.

App and Gadget Visibilty

This on/off switch controls app and gadget visibility. Users in suborganizations where a Marketplace App is ON will see that app in the universal navigation bar under “More”, and will see the app’s contextual gadgets in Gmail. Users where the App is OFF will not see these links or gadgets.

Your customers still configure all apps through the Dashboard tab, but now the Control Panel Services tab unifies how they enable and disable every app.

New Scoping by Suborganization

The unified controls also share an important new scoping capability: now a domain administrator can select a suborganization and control which Marketplace Apps are visible to that organizational unit, just like the Core Google Apps suite!

In the example below, the administrator has overridden the domain settings for four Marketplace Apps to make three new tools visible to just the “Engineering” suborganization and to hide one application.

Visibility versus Authentication and Authorization

As developers, you should note that for any valid Google Apps domain user who goes directly to your website, OpenID/Single Sign On will always authenticate them if their domain has OpenID enabled. This includes users who are in suborganizations where your app is OFF. That means this visibility toggle feature is not a substitute for checking that the users accessing your app have a valid license.

Similarly, the on/off switch does not affect the OAuth scopes your app has been granted when the domain admin installed your app — the admin only revokes those by explicitly revoking data access or by deleting your app. The control panel on/off switch is just a way for a domain administrator to control the visibility of apps and gadgets that would otherwise be site-wide.

Google Apps Script And Calorie Counting

It’s in the news lately that by 2030, 50% of the population will be obese. Well, I’m a bit (ok, maybe more than a bit) overweight now and was looking to do something about it. So for my diet, I’ve started counting calories. I’ve tried a number of other diets with mixed results, but calorie counting for me always works. However, counting calories can be a bit of a pain. There are a number of ways to figure out how many calories are in things, such as the container the item comes from, websites like http://caloriecount.about.com/, http://fatsecret.com/ or search on your favorite search engine. Finding out the calorie content of a food isn’t really so much of a problem in and of itself because after awhile you just know how many calories are in the usual things you eat. But where is the best place to keep track the current running total for the day? It has to be easily accessible to me or I don’t do it. I don’t always have paper, nor am I in places where I have connectivity. Android, Gmail and of course, Google Apps Script to the rescue!

Counting Calories using Apps Script


The process is simple. I send an email to myself with the subject “@FOOD” where the body contains the number of calories in the food and the name of the food, one per line. I wrote a script which, every 15 minutes, scans my email and computes the total of calories I’ve consumed in the last 24 hours and updates a spreadsheet with the total.

Why do it this way? Using Gmail for the recording makes it so if I’m offline on my phone, the gmail app will send it when I’m online. Putting it in a Google spreadsheet means I can make a shortcut for it in chrome, and a desktop web shortcut icon on my Android phone for easy access. Additionally, using a spreadsheet allows me to perform other calculations, make charts, etc.

How do you set it up?

First create a new spreadsheet, and click on Tools > Script Editor. Click on File > New > From Script Template. Search for “Calorie Counting” and you will be able to locate the script. Then, click Install and you are all set. Save the script, run it, at which point you’ll get two authorization dialogs, click ok through them. Run it again to make sure it populates the sheet properly. Then, in the script editor, click Triggers>Current script’s triggers and add a new trigger:

And you’re all set! Your spreadsheet, after the script runs will look like this:

From here the possibilities are endless. I’m thinking I could make a UiApp script which uses the new Charts bean to draw a graph. Perhaps make a service to view/change calories because I mess things up every once in awhile. You could also add code for “@WEIGH” messages to track weight and could graph that too. Your imagination is the limit! And if you have an even better idea for how to use Apps Script to improve Gmail and Spreadsheets, you can post it to our Gallery (Script Editor > Share > Publish Project) to share with the world.