Posted by Garrett Wu, Software Engineer

Since I’ve been working on Google Reader, I’ve told a lot of my friends about how great it is. And while some of them try Reader and find it really useful, many of them aren’t interested in taking the time to get Reader set up. That’s why today, I’m happy to announce an experimental product from the Google Reader team that makes the best stuff in Reader more accessible for everyone, while giving Reader users a new way to view their feeds. It’s called Google Reader Play, and it’s a new way to browse interesting stuff on the web that’s easy to use and personalized to the things you like. Best of all, there’s no set-up required: visit google.com/reader/play to give it a try.

In Google Reader Play, items are presented one at a time, and each item is big and full-screen. After you’ve read an item, just click the next arrow to move to the next one, or click any item on the filmstrip below to fast-forward. Of course, you can click the title or image of any item to go to the original version. And since so much of the good stuff online is visual, we automatically enlarge images and auto-play videos full-screen.

Reader Play adapts to your tastes — as you browse, you can let us know which stuff you enjoy by clicking the “like” button, and we’ll use that info to show you more items we think you’ll like. If you want, you can also choose categories, and we’ll personalize your stream to only show you stuff from those categories. And you don’t even need a Google account to use Reader Play. Of course, if you want to star, like, or share items, we’ll ask you to sign in to your Google account. Since Reader and Reader Play share the same infrastructure, any actions you take in one will be reflected in the other.

You might be wondering where we find all the awesome stuff in Reader Play. It uses the same technology as the Recommended Items feed in Reader to identify and aggregate the most interesting items on the web. If you sign in, Reader Play will also be personalized with items that people you’re following have shared in Google Reader, and items similar to ones you’ve previously liked, starred, or shared.

Since Reader Play is an experiment, it’s launching in Google Labs for now. To be clear, Reader Play isn’t intended to replace Google Reader: both Google Reader and Reader Play are about finding and reading interesting stuff online. In essense, Reader Play is a different view of Reader. It’s designed to be a fun and easy way to browse interesting items, while Reader is a highly customizable way to organize your feeds, keep track of what you’ve read, and much more. In Reader, you can switch to this view by clicking “View in Reader Play” from the feed settings menu.

Try Reader Play today and let us know what you think. Send us feedback in our forum or on Twitter, and check out our help article for more info.

Read more here:
​And now for something completely different

Posted by Garrett Wu, Software Engineer

Since I’ve been working on Google Reader, I’ve told a lot of my friends about how great it is. And while some of them try Reader and find it really useful, many of them aren’t interested in taking the time to get Reader set up. That’s why today, I’m happy to announce an experimental product from the Google Reader team that makes the best stuff in Reader more accessible for everyone, while giving Reader users a new way to view their feeds. It’s called Google Reader Play, and it’s a new way to browse interesting stuff on the web that’s easy to use and personalized to the things you like. Best of all, there’s no set-up required: visit google.com/reader/play to give it a try.

In Google Reader Play, items are presented one at a time, and each item is big and full-screen. After you’ve read an item, just click the next arrow to move to the next one, or click any item on the filmstrip below to fast-forward. Of course, you can click the title or image of any item to go to the original version. And since so much of the good stuff online is visual, we automatically enlarge images and auto-play videos full-screen.

Reader Play adapts to your tastes — as you browse, you can let us know which stuff you enjoy by clicking the “like” button, and we’ll use that info to show you more items we think you’ll like. If you want, you can also choose categories, and we’ll personalize your stream to only show you stuff from those categories. And you don’t even need a Google account to use Reader Play. Of course, if you want to star, like, or share items, we’ll ask you to sign in to your Google account. Since Reader and Reader Play share the same infrastructure, any actions you take in one will be reflected in the other.

You might be wondering where we find all the awesome stuff in Reader Play. It uses the same technology as the Recommended Items feed in Reader to identify and aggregate the most interesting items on the web. If you sign in, Reader Play will also be personalized with items that people you’re following have shared in Google Reader, and items similar to ones you’ve previously liked, starred, or shared.

Since Reader Play is an experiment, it’s launching in Google Labs for now. To be clear, Reader Play isn’t intended to replace Google Reader: both Google Reader and Reader Play are about finding and reading interesting stuff online. In essense, Reader Play is a different view of Reader. It’s designed to be a fun and easy way to browse interesting items, while Reader is a highly customizable way to organize your feeds, keep track of what you’ve read, and much more. In Reader, you can switch to this view by clicking “View in Reader Play” from the feed settings menu.

Try Reader Play today and let us know what you think. Send us feedback in our forum or on Twitter, and check out our help article for more info.

Read more here:
​And now for something completely different

Google just turned on email notifications in Wave. That's great news if you've gotten your hands on an invite but haven't kept up with the going-ons inside—easy to do when you're not in the habit of visiting the site.

Using notifications is pretty simple stuff (click the drop-down next to your Inbox to see the dialog pictured above), and the implementation seems smart:

From the Notifications menu, you can select the frequency of your email updates. If you are an infrequent Google Wave user we would recommend the “immediately” setting, but you can change it at any time.

When you’re added to a new wave, or a wave that you are on changes, we’ll send you an email with a short summary of the text and links to go straight to your updated waves. Rest assured, we know waves can change a lot, so we will only send you one notification about a changed wave until you have logged in to look at it (i.e.: if a wave changes 10 times after we send the first notification, we won’t send 10 more emails). Waves you have open also won’t trigger updates.

Maybe you won’t need to run a completely separate Wave notifier to keep up with Wave after all.

Read more here:
Google Wave Adds Email Notifications [Notifications]

Google just turned on email notifications in Wave. That's great news if you've gotten your hands on an invite but haven't kept up with the going-ons inside—easy to do when you're not in the habit of visiting the site.

Using notifications is pretty simple stuff (click the drop-down next to your Inbox to see the dialog pictured above), and the implementation seems smart:

From the Notifications menu, you can select the frequency of your email updates. If you are an infrequent Google Wave user we would recommend the “immediately” setting, but you can change it at any time.

When you’re added to a new wave, or a wave that you are on changes, we’ll send you an email with a short summary of the text and links to go straight to your updated waves. Rest assured, we know waves can change a lot, so we will only send you one notification about a changed wave until you have logged in to look at it (i.e.: if a wave changes 10 times after we send the first notification, we won’t send 10 more emails). Waves you have open also won’t trigger updates.

Maybe you won’t need to run a completely separate Wave notifier to keep up with Wave after all.

Read more here:
Google Wave Adds Email Notifications [Notifications]

When you want to to share music, movies, photos, or other files online, you’ve got countless options. We’ve examined most, and for our money, one tool emerges on top of the heap for its ease of use, wide support, and all-around excellence.

Sharing files publicly has always been a subject of hot debate, but put aside any legal concerns for the moment and consider: What if you want to just share some home videos or music privately with a few friends rather than the internet at large? What’s the easiest way to share large files?

The Answer: Opera Unite

For this writer and tech enthusiast’s money, the easiest and best way to share large files of any kind with your friends and family is to simply install Opera Unite, walk through a couple of quick configuration screens, and then send them the URL and password to access your content from any browser.

Plenty of web sites let you send large files around, usually by uploading a file and then sending a link to the content, and BitTorrent is also great for sharing large files, but the problem with both of those is that you’re unnecessarily putting your content out there online for others, and wasting bandwidth by sending it to third parties. (You could set up private torrents, but those still require an open tracking server, which aren’t always reliable.) Opera Unite sets up a fast, direct connection to share your files, it’s extremely easy to use, and best of all, it’s free!

Update: Many commenters have pointed out that Dropbox is an excellent way to share files, and we wholeheartedly agree. However, Dropbox has a 2GB limit for free accounts, which is hardly enough space to share a collection of large files with your friends—plus, you have to wait for an upload to finish before you can share it. With Opera Unite, you can share large directories of any size instantly, for free.

Setting Up Unite is Easy

Since Unite is just a component of the Opera browser, all you have to do is download and install the latest version of Opera. Unite comes along for the ride automatically, but you’ll need to activate it by opening up the sidebar, clicking the Unite icon, and going through the wizard to set up a free Unite account (see screenshot).

Note: You don’t have to switch to the Opera browser to use Unite, so if you’re a Firefox or Chrome loyalist, you can still choose to use Opera just for your file sharing needs.

Once you’ve set it up, you can right-click on Opera Unite Home and access the Properties, or you can select the File Sharing module and click the Start button to open up a short configuration wizard to help you share your files.

The Technical Bits

Internally, Opera Unite is nothing more than a web server that runs inside of your web browser, and uses the standard HTTP protocol so your friends and family can access your shared content from any browser. Your free Unite account gives you access to Opera's dynamic DNS service, which means you can share your content with an easy-to-remember, unique URL that you can send to anybody. Unite automatically hooks into your router using uPnP to dynamically open port 8840, but it can also use a Unite proxy server when you're behind a more restrictive firewall—though it will obviously be slower.

Everything is password protected, so even if you've set up file sharing and the URL is public, it doesn't mean that people will be able to see what you are sharing—only those that you've given both the public URL and the password to can access your files. You'll probably want to change the default passwords, though.

Share Files With Your Friends

Now that you’ve set up Unite, it’s time to start sharing. Click on the Unite icon in the left-hand pane of Opera (it’s the swirly-looking one), then double-click the File Sharing module.

You'll be asked to choose the folder you wish to share. You can click the Advanced button and set up a few additional properties, but that's pretty much all you'll need to do to start sharing your files—a URL and password will be automatically generated for you so you can share those files quickly and easily.

After setting up your file share, the next time you double-click on the File Sharing module in the left-hand Opera panel you'll open up the administration page. Look over to the right-hand side, where you can see the URL and the automatically generated password. You can copy and paste those to your friends, and they'll be able to access the files immediately—but you should probably change the password to something slightly more difficult first.

Your unique Opera Unite URL will always be set to the [devicename].[username].operaunite.com address format, so you can actually have multiple devices set up on your network and easily share files with each one. If you would prefer to get a little more geeky, you can actually set up your own domain name for Opera Unite, but that’s probably overkill for just sharing some files with friends.

Accessing the Shared Content

Once you've sent somebody the URL, they'll be prompted for a password to access the shared content, at which point they can browse through all the files you've shared and download them. Since Opera Unite usually enables port-forwarding on your router automatically with uPnP, the connection is surprisingly fast if you have a decent internet connection—it's going to be slower if it has to go through the Opera proxy server.

What makes this really great for sharing with your less tech-savvy friends is that they don’t have to install any applications, or even install Opera—all of the content should work from any browser.

Taking Unite Beyond Simple File-Sharing

Since Opera Unite is nothing more than a web server, it also enables many downloadable modules to do any number of things that you could do with a full web server setup—like create your own streaming music server so you can access your content from anywhere. Just double-click on the media server module in the Unite panel, choose the location of your music folder, and then make sure to set a more difficult password. Just like that, you've enabled your entire music collection to be streamed from any browser anywhere, directly off your home PC. There's a player embedded directly in the page so you don't even need a media player installed on the other machine.

The fun doesn't stop with media serving—there are modules for a simple HTML web server, photo sharing, whiteboards, chatrooms, file sync, and more.

---

What about you? What’s your best method of sharing large files with your friends and family? Have you used Opera Unite? Share your thoughts in the comments.

The How-To Geek loves the simplicity of Opera Unite for sharing files. His geeky articles can be found daily here on Lifehacker, How-To Geek, and Twitter.

Read more here:
What’s the Easiest Way to Share Large Files and Media with Friends? [How To]

When you want to to share music, movies, photos, or other files online, you’ve got countless options. We’ve examined most, and for our money, one tool emerges on top of the heap for its ease of use, wide support, and all-around excellence.

Sharing files publicly has always been a subject of hot debate, but put aside any legal concerns for the moment and consider: What if you want to just share some home videos or music privately with a few friends rather than the internet at large? What’s the easiest way to share large files?

The Answer: Opera Unite

For this writer and tech enthusiast’s money, the easiest and best way to share large files of any kind with your friends and family is to simply install Opera Unite, walk through a couple of quick configuration screens, and then send them the URL and password to access your content from any browser.

Plenty of web sites let you send large files around, usually by uploading a file and then sending a link to the content, and BitTorrent is also great for sharing large files, but the problem with both of those is that you’re unnecessarily putting your content out there online for others, and wasting bandwidth by sending it to third parties. (You could set up private torrents, but those still require an open tracking server, which aren’t always reliable.) Opera Unite sets up a fast, direct connection to share your files, it’s extremely easy to use, and best of all, it’s free!

Update: Many commenters have pointed out that Dropbox is an excellent way to share files, and we wholeheartedly agree. However, Dropbox has a 2GB limit for free accounts, which is hardly enough space to share a collection of large files with your friends—plus, you have to wait for an upload to finish before you can share it. With Opera Unite, you can share large directories of any size instantly, for free.

Setting Up Unite is Easy

Since Unite is just a component of the Opera browser, all you have to do is download and install the latest version of Opera. Unite comes along for the ride automatically, but you’ll need to activate it by opening up the sidebar, clicking the Unite icon, and going through the wizard to set up a free Unite account (see screenshot).

Note: You don’t have to switch to the Opera browser to use Unite, so if you’re a Firefox or Chrome loyalist, you can still choose to use Opera just for your file sharing needs.

Once you’ve set it up, you can right-click on Opera Unite Home and access the Properties, or you can select the File Sharing module and click the Start button to open up a short configuration wizard to help you share your files.

The Technical Bits

Internally, Opera Unite is nothing more than a web server that runs inside of your web browser, and uses the standard HTTP protocol so your friends and family can access your shared content from any browser. Your free Unite account gives you access to Opera's dynamic DNS service, which means you can share your content with an easy-to-remember, unique URL that you can send to anybody. Unite automatically hooks into your router using uPnP to dynamically open port 8840, but it can also use a Unite proxy server when you're behind a more restrictive firewall—though it will obviously be slower.

Everything is password protected, so even if you've set up file sharing and the URL is public, it doesn't mean that people will be able to see what you are sharing—only those that you've given both the public URL and the password to can access your files. You'll probably want to change the default passwords, though.

Share Files With Your Friends

Now that you’ve set up Unite, it’s time to start sharing. Click on the Unite icon in the left-hand pane of Opera (it’s the swirly-looking one), then double-click the File Sharing module.

You'll be asked to choose the folder you wish to share. You can click the Advanced button and set up a few additional properties, but that's pretty much all you'll need to do to start sharing your files—a URL and password will be automatically generated for you so you can share those files quickly and easily.

After setting up your file share, the next time you double-click on the File Sharing module in the left-hand Opera panel you'll open up the administration page. Look over to the right-hand side, where you can see the URL and the automatically generated password. You can copy and paste those to your friends, and they'll be able to access the files immediately—but you should probably change the password to something slightly more difficult first.

Your unique Opera Unite URL will always be set to the [devicename].[username].operaunite.com address format, so you can actually have multiple devices set up on your network and easily share files with each one. If you would prefer to get a little more geeky, you can actually set up your own domain name for Opera Unite, but that’s probably overkill for just sharing some files with friends.

Accessing the Shared Content

Once you've sent somebody the URL, they'll be prompted for a password to access the shared content, at which point they can browse through all the files you've shared and download them. Since Opera Unite usually enables port-forwarding on your router automatically with uPnP, the connection is surprisingly fast if you have a decent internet connection—it's going to be slower if it has to go through the Opera proxy server.

What makes this really great for sharing with your less tech-savvy friends is that they don’t have to install any applications, or even install Opera—all of the content should work from any browser.

Taking Unite Beyond Simple File-Sharing

Since Opera Unite is nothing more than a web server, it also enables many downloadable modules to do any number of things that you could do with a full web server setup—like create your own streaming music server so you can access your content from anywhere. Just double-click on the media server module in the Unite panel, choose the location of your music folder, and then make sure to set a more difficult password. Just like that, you've enabled your entire music collection to be streamed from any browser anywhere, directly off your home PC. There's a player embedded directly in the page so you don't even need a media player installed on the other machine.

The fun doesn't stop with media serving—there are modules for a simple HTML web server, photo sharing, whiteboards, chatrooms, file sync, and more.

---

What about you? What’s your best method of sharing large files with your friends and family? Have you used Opera Unite? Share your thoughts in the comments.

The How-To Geek loves the simplicity of Opera Unite for sharing files. His geeky articles can be found daily here on Lifehacker, How-To Geek, and Twitter.

Read more here:
What’s the Easiest Way to Share Large Files and Media with Friends? [How To]

Windows only: The latest beta version of the Opera browser adds total Windows 7 integration, with Jump Lists, Aero Peek, and a beautiful Aero Glass interface—and we've got a quick tour of all the new features.

The first thing you’ll notice after installing the 10.5 beta is that the interface has been completely re-done with Aero Glass for Windows 7 or Vista users. The menu bar has been rolled up into a single button similar to the way Office 2007 works, with easy access to all common functions all from one place.

Windows 7 users can now hover their mouse over the taskbar button and see previews of each of the open tabs, and moving your mouse over a specific tab will enable the Aero Peek effect and show the Opera window with the contents of that particular tab—just the way Internet Explorer 8 does. You can even middle-click on the thumbnail preview to close a tab.

The Jump List menu shows the items from your Speed Dial, lets you open a new tab, or start a new private browsing session in a separate tab. Once you've opened a new private tab—which you can also do by right-clicking on the new tab button on the right of the tab bar—the icon in the tab will change to indicate that you are in a private browsing session.

You can choose to open a separate window for private browsing, but being able to include that private tab without requiring a new window is a nice feature that you can’t currently do in any of the other mainstream browsers.

Opera 10.5 beta is a free download for Windows only; Unix and Mac builds will be available later this week.

Read more here:
Opera 10.5 Beta Adds Private Browsing and Excellent Windows 7 Integration [Downloads]

Windows only: The latest beta version of the Opera browser adds total Windows 7 integration, with Jump Lists, Aero Peek, and a beautiful Aero Glass interface—and we've got a quick tour of all the new features.

The first thing you’ll notice after installing the 10.5 beta is that the interface has been completely re-done with Aero Glass for Windows 7 or Vista users. The menu bar has been rolled up into a single button similar to the way Office 2007 works, with easy access to all common functions all from one place.

Windows 7 users can now hover their mouse over the taskbar button and see previews of each of the open tabs, and moving your mouse over a specific tab will enable the Aero Peek effect and show the Opera window with the contents of that particular tab—just the way Internet Explorer 8 does. You can even middle-click on the thumbnail preview to close a tab.

The Jump List menu shows the items from your Speed Dial, lets you open a new tab, or start a new private browsing session in a separate tab. Once you've opened a new private tab—which you can also do by right-clicking on the new tab button on the right of the tab bar—the icon in the tab will change to indicate that you are in a private browsing session.

You can choose to open a separate window for private browsing, but being able to include that private tab without requiring a new window is a nice feature that you can’t currently do in any of the other mainstream browsers.

Opera 10.5 beta is a free download for Windows only; Unix and Mac builds will be available later this week.

Read more here:
Opera 10.5 Beta Adds Private Browsing and Excellent Windows 7 Integration [Downloads]

We’re happy to announce that over the next few weeks we will be rolling out the ability to upload, store and organize any type of file in Google Docs. With this change, you’ll be able to upload and access your files from any computer — all you need is an Internet connection.

Instead of emailing files to yourself, which is particularly difficult with large files, you can upload to Google Docs any file up to 250 MB. You’ll have 1 GB of free storage for files you don’t convert into one of the Google Docs formats (i.e. Google documents, spreadsheets, and presentations), and if you need more space, you can buy additional storage for $0.25 per GB per year. This makes it easy to backup more of your key files online, from large graphics and raw photos to unedited home videos taken on your smartphone. You might even be able to replace the USB drive you reserved for those files that are too big to send over email.

Combined with shared folders, you can store, organize, and collaborate on files more easily using Google Docs. For example, if you are in a club or PTA working on large graphic files for posters or a newsletter, you can upload them to a shared folder for collaborators to view, download, and print.

You can also search for document files you’ve uploaded or that have been shared with you just like you do with your Google documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and PDFs. And you’ll be able to view many common document file types with the Google Docs viewer.

To learn how businesses can take advantage of this new functionality, check out the post on the Enterprise Blog.

As always, we’d love your feedback and if you have any questions, please check out our help page. This feature will be enabled for your account over the next couple of weeks — look for the bubble notification when you sign in to Google Docs.

Posted by: Vijay Bangaru, Product Manager, Google Docs

Read more here:
Upload and store your files in the cloud with Google Docs

Google’s search suggestions started to include instant answers for Math calculations, unit conversions, currency conversions, weather information, simple facts, local time, package tracking, word definitions and more. That means you no longer have to click the search button and open a new page to see the results: the answers are displayed instantly.

“This kind of information will appear in Suggest either above or below the suggested search terms for a variety of queries. For example, you can type “delta 140″ to see the flight status. You can also quickly discover the current time, figure out how many Euros you’ll get per dollar, or even brush up on metric conversions,” explains Google.

My only issue is that Google’s answers can’t be copied. If you try to select the suggestion, you’ll notice that the answer is not added to the search box, so the only way to copy the result is to open the search results page.

Some of the instant answers are available even if you don’t use Google’s homepage: check the search suggestions from Firefox, Chrome, IE 8 and Google Toolbar.

Read more here:
Instant Answers in Google Suggest