In an email sent to Google Apps Admins, Google Apps team are dropping old browsers support from Google Apps in order to improve their products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance. As a result, in 2010, support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers will be phased out.

We plan to begin phasing out support of these older browsers on the Google Docs suite and the Google Sites editor on March 1, 2010. After that point, certain functionality within these applications may have higher latency and may not work correctly in these older browsers. Later in 2010, we will start to phase out support for these browsers for Google Mail and Google Calendar.

Google Apps will continue to support Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above. If you are still using an old browser somewhere it's time to change, since it's no more supported anywhere and Google is making a good step to encourage people using new supported and more secure browsers.

If the Google Apps team delivered more than 100 improvements in 2009, I think this number will be beated in 2010 to deliver the best and most innovative collaboration products for businesses.

Posted by Hatem at 6:29 AM to Google Apps for Your Domain | Permalink | Comments (0)

While I'm still waiting for my Wave invitation, Google released today code for the wave protocol with installation instructions to create your own wave servers, and how to generate a Self-Signed Wave Federation Certificate

The open source Wave Federation Prototype Server is delivered as a Java application that conforms to XEP-0114, the Jabber Component Protocol. In the examples below we show how to install the Wave Federation Prototype Server as an extension to the Openfire XMPP server, but it should run against any XEP-0114 compliant server.

The wave protocol specification draft defines Google Wave as a communication and collaboration platform based on hosted conversations, called waves. A wave consists of XML documents and supports concurrent modifications and low-latency updates between participants on the wave.

The wave federation protocol enables everyone to become a wave provider and share waves with others. For instance, an organization can operate as a wave provider for its members, an individual can run a wave server as a wave provider for a single user or family members, and an Internet service provider can run a wave service as another Internet service for its users as a supplement to email, IM, ftp, etc. A decentralized architecture that makes Google wave implementations limited only to your imagination.

Posted by Hatem at 11:35 AM to Google Wave | Permalink | Comments (2)

Google have an interesting webmaster tool safe browsing you can use it to check from time to time if your website or server is victim of malicious software or exploits. Sometimes your server might be attacked and the owner is not aware about it, so if you want to check simply open :

http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=phpmagazine.net

And put your website after site=, the diagnostic page will include the current status, previous status during the last 90 days. Exploits are mainly scripting exploits, and google record also the server IP which host the malicious software.

The diagnostic will tell you also if your website have acted as intermediary in the distribution of malware, probably not very useful information for you, but it is safe to know if something was going wrong.

I think it's an excellent diagnostic that you can get for FREE for your website to make sure that it is safe to browse on your website.

Posted by Hatem at 8:15 AM to General | Permalink | Comments (1)

We have previously talked about Google Analytics PHP API, in that time there was no official API available yet. Today Google Analytics API is officially available to developers, so you can get your code working with a real API instead of hacks that might broke anytime if Google update their service... etc.

Doug Tan, Ask about PHP, have written Google Analytics PHP Class using the new API and a good tutorial on how to use it. Pretty simple and very easy to use, you will get Analytics data right in your applications in minutes. Below a sample code :

Posted by Hatem at 9:12 AM to Google Analytics | PHP | Permalink | Comments (1)

Darren pointed to a new feature in Google images search letting you to filter results by color ! The results looks very accurate that you will be interested to know how google are indexing colors ? Are they using image recognition techniques to index every image in their database ? That will be crazy if you think about it, but the answer could be easily found in something launched about three years ago, an ajax game, letting everyone to tag images and get scored on that : The image labeler.

Because the results are very accurate and fast, it can only be something based on a real human indexing ! You can see below for example if you search for a car model, you can get the result you are looking for, but imagine you want to see only gray cars in results, the filter can really give you what you are looking for. While if you used "gray" as keyword in search you will get something else completely different.

I find the color filter implementation very successful. Image search is getting more and more powerful search features and I expect to see more amazing filtering options, who knows !

Posted by Hatem at 7:02 PM to Images Search | Permalink | Comments (2)

I just wanted to profit from Google new year Doodle to wish happy new year to all Googling Magazine readers and PHP Magazine readers ! During more than three years I - and many others contributors - really enjoyed sharing ideas and thoughts with all of you. Thanks for your support and hope you will enjoy even more reading us in 2009.

Posted by Hatem at 8:04 AM to Google Logos | Permalink | Comments (0)