Gmail Chat: Now With Video and Voice

After having signed a deal with MGM Studios that would allow Google to stream full length movies and TV episodes on YouTube, Google decided to sprinkle some video on Gmail too. They spiced up Gmail with something that was long missing.

Gmail chat now does video and voice too. After having chat and rich mail rolled in a single package, video and voice chat comes as a welcome add-on. According to the GMail blog, they have tried to make it "an easy to use, seamless experience with high quality audio and video all for free." My first hand experience says they have faired very well in delivering what they tried for. It uses Vidyo technology which they say is covered under pending patents.

Both participants of the chat need to install a small package of video plugin from here to enable this feature in Gmail. The Mac installer comes as 2.4 MB download and the Windows XP version is a 476 KB initial downloader which then downloads and installs the remaining content. On the Mac, the installation DMG contains a .PKG file and an uninstaller. You need to quit all your browsers before installing it. The Mac version needs Mac OS X 10.4 or later and 5.6 MB of space. Once the installation is complete, it opens the Chat settings page in your Gmail account. The defaults worked fine for me. You can verify if your settings are correct by opening that little section that shows the audio input/ output levels and starts your web cam. The audio output levels here may sound a little low but this is just the level at which you hear the ring that is played for an incoming chat request. The troubleshooting link doesn't really offer any good help yet other than a three step installation guide.

Once everything is in place, you should see a green camera icon besides your name in the chat panel in Gmail. You could start a video and voice chat from the little popup menu on the chat window. A small panel slides up and starts your web cam. The other participant hears a ring and must accept the invitation to video chat before they can view your web cam. The visual and voice clarity is amazing here (unlike that in the settings verification page). It uses  XMPP, RTP and H.264 standards, so that level of performance is expected. You can pop that window out, just as you would during a regular chat to resize the video frame. To have a more immersive experience, you could turn to the full screen mode, which didn't fail to impress me.

What I didn't like was a little echo that I could hear at times. The echo cancellation option in the settings page didn't seem to have any effect in removing it. It didn't work for me if I set my status to invisible.

Overall it is an impressive move by Gmail. There's a good news for developers, for they can leverage this technology in their own applications too.

So, Gmail is indeed getting close to doing our laundry. You can read more about this feature in the Official GMail Blog here.

4 Quick Short Posts: Part 1: What, Why? And Google Chrome

A lot happened since I last blogged. I have a reason for being away. I've been very busy with my college assignments. Not that I say I've been very regular in the past, but it so happens that when I think of being more loyal to the interwebs, something or the other crops up and all that loyalty gets trapped within the confines of my head.

Thought of writing an abridged post, but there is a lot to write and having them separated in to shorter posts sounds like a better idea to me. Plus, some topics deserve to stand out from the rest. They won't be detailed posts, so spare me if I'm not able to serve you well this time.

All done creating a base for the rest, here's part one for you...

Google Chrome:

Google recently (ok, it was recent when I thought of writing about it) launched their new web browser - Chrome. It is based on code from the open source browser Chromium. Chrome became an instant hit without much publicity. That is one thing I highly admire about Google - there's never much flashy advertising about their products, but still they get famous pretty quickly. Chrome, for a relevant example, obtained a little more than 1% of the browser market share within two days of its launch.

As of now, it has been launched for the Windows platform only, but a Linux and Mac port is being worked upon. For the same reason, I've not been able to personally review it, because I never really returned to my PC after 29th July. But from what I hear on the web and from people who tried it out, it has been one great browser. Google, as they put it on their blog says, Chrome is a browser for the current face of the web.

Google Suggest which graduated out of Labs few days back, is built into the OmniBox (the address bar, because it does more than just getting URLs, has been christened that) in Chrome and is a great feature. I see Google Chrome as a step closer to the hypothetical Google OS for computers. Who knows may be we'll have it some day sitting pretty on our computers (Naah, I still don't see the thought of me leaving the Mac!)

To know more about it, I'd suggest all of you on the Windows platform to take it for a spin once, you'll sure like it.

[This post is part 1 of a multipart post, read part two, three and four by clicking on the links]

Safari 4 to Allow Saving Web Pages as Applications

Apple, last Friday released the latest version of its Safari web browser - Safari 4.0, to the developer community. Amongst the new feature additions, there is one feature that will appeal to the general users.

On the Mac, Safari 4.0 takes the well known Web Clip feature one step ahead by allowing web pages to be saved as independent Mac apps. These pages, or site specific browsers, can be run independent of Safari. This functionality could be earlier achieved by a few third party apps like Prism and Fluid, but having it built in to the browser will be an added plus.

With the current scenario in bandwidth availability, saving web pages had become a thing of past or an uncommon affair. This feature however might bring Mac users back to saving pages. It would be interesting to have an independent app for commonly visited websites like Twitter, Google, Facebook and such. It will free the users from the hassles of having unmanageable number of tabs open in a browser. Though it is unclear as to when Safari 4.0 will be available to the general users, this feature will be liked by all.

Apart from this, the new build will have a new "Develop" menu, a redesigned Web Inspector, and JavaScript debugging and profiling options. It also carries over features from the new build of WebKit which include support for HTML 5. It will also support CSS gradients, reflections, masks and named canvases.

Never Saw This On apple.com

Did Apple leave it that way by mistake? Or did I catch them updating the contents on this support page. 

The links on the page point to https://ossuat.corp.apple.com/EXPERT/getProductList.do which currently return a "Can't find the server" error on Safari.

Whatever be it, I never saw something like this on Apple's website before.

Recent Account Activity in Gmail

Recently, while checking my mails in Gmail, an extra piece of information regarding "Recent Activity" towards the end of the page caught my attention. If you haven't noticed, check near the bottom of your Gmail page. Gmail now displays your last account activity stats.

It displays the time elapsed since the last activity that took place on your account along with the IP address that was used to log in. Initially when I saw it, it was showing me the time since I logged in. Besides the time is a link to give you more details, clicking on which lists out the last few session details in a new popout window. The page displays information about the last activity on your mail account and any concurrent activity in detail.

The 'Details' page shows the access type (Browser, Mobile or POP3, etc.), the IP address and the date & time of the current and the last 4 sessions. Apart from this, if the account is opened in an another location, you are informed about it in the Concurrent Session Information section. This section lists out the number of places where the account has been simultaneously logged into, along with the access type(s) and the IP address(es).

To take it for a spin, I decided to log in to my account from my mobile browser too. The same section on the mobile browser showed me that the account is open in one other location along with the IP address (of my computer) and an option to check the details. Soon, the content on desktop browser too changed and showed that the account is open in one other location along with the IP address of my mobile phone.

Apart from this, the 'Details' pop-out page gives you an option to sign out all other sessions. The Gmail Help Center, in this answer, says that this data can be used to find out if and when someone gained access to your account. It says, you can know that your account was compromised if there is a great variation in the IP addresses in spite of you accessing it from the same computer every time, or if there is an access type that you never used, or that there is a concurrent session that you do not know of. Here is an entry in the Official Gmail Blog regarding the same.

In my opinion, this is a nice move by Google to keep its users informed about the security of their accounts. With this information at hand, one might be able to minimize damages in an unfortunate event of his/her account security getting compromised.