The New Google Logo in Google Maps

The new Google logo stands out more. The latest version of the Google Maps app for Android replaced the gray Google logo from the bottom left corner with a bigger logo that's now colorful.

Here's a screenshot from an old version of Google Maps. You need to look carefully to see the logo at the bottom:

This screenshot is from the latest version of the Google Maps app. The new logo doesn't blend in with the map and it's more distracting.

A similar logo was also added to the desktop site:

App Launcher Shortcut for Google Inbox

Ever wanted to quickly switch between Gmail and Inbox? You can add Inbox to Google's app launcher: just go to inbox.google.com, click the grid icon at the top of the page and then click "add a shortcut". Drag and drop the icon to change its position.

I placed the Inbox shortcut next to Gmail's shortcut.

Inbox has a setting that lets you redirect Gmail to inbox.google.com, just in case you want to switch to Inbox.

Smaller Google Search Button

Google has recently changed the search button from the desktop site. It's now much smaller, just like the search button from the mobile UI.

You don't have to click the search button: it's much faster to press Enter, since you're already using the keyboard.

Here's a recent screenshot that shows the bigger button:

A New Google Logo

Google's homepage has a clever animation that announces a new Google logo. "These days, people interact with Google products across many different platforms, apps and devices — sometimes all in a single day. (...) Today we're introducing a new logo and identity family that reflects this reality and shows you when the Google magic is working for you, even on the tiniest screens," informs Google.

It's not just about the Google logo: many other Google icons will change. "New elements like a colorful Google mic help you identify and interact with Google whether you're talking, tapping or typing. Meanwhile, we're bidding adieu to the little blue 'g' icon and replacing it with a four-color 'G' that matches the logo."

Google's app launcher already has new icons for Google Search, Google Maps, Google Translate, Google News and Google+:

The new icons are better suited for small screens and manage to convey the Google identity using colors and playful cues. Google's logo hasn't changed a lot since 1998: it's still simple, colorful, playful and unintimidating.

{ Thanks, Gopinath. }

Quickly Copy Google's Translations

Google Translate added a few years ago a "select all" button that automatically selected the translation, so you could easily copy the text and paste it in an email message, a document or somewhere else. In Chrome, the "select all" has been replaced with a new "copy" button that selects the entire translation and copies the text to the clipboard. The nice thing is that this feature uses HTML5, not Flash. Unfortunately, the new feature is only available in Chrome and all the other browsers still get the old "select all" button.

You can still click the star button to save a translation to the phrasebook or copy the URL generated by Google Translate, which includes the original text.

{ Thanks, Alireza Eskandarpour Shoferi. }

YouTube's Red Settings

To make it more obvious that a certain option is enabled, YouTube player's settings menu changes the color of the menu item to red. For example, if annotations are enabled, the "annotations" menu item is red.

Mouse over a red setting and it temporarily becomes black. Disable the setting and it switches to black. Previously, only the radio box was red and I think it looked better.

Google's Blue Tabs

Google lets you switch between its specialized search engines and check image results, video results, news articles, books, Google Maps results and more. The active tab was red, but now it switched to blue.

Here's a screenshot that shows the blue tab:

... and a screenshot that shows the old red tab:

Back in June, I posted about a Google Mobile Search experiment that tested an oversized header and the active tab's color was blue.