projects and services Archives - Jerwin Pastoral Website Designer and Developer

New UI Design of Google Plus for Profile and Business Page

18 Apr
2012

by Jerwin Pastoral

Google has rolled out the complete new, neat and decent interface of Google Plus. They added many new features including the Cover Photos for Google Plus Profiles and Pages. The users have option to add scrapbook photos or profile photos to their Google Plus profiles as well as pages. Also, the profile photos are now much larger of 250 x 250 pixels.

Exact sizes of Google Plus Cover Photo is 940 pixels of width and 180 pixel of height. Meanwhile, you still have an option to add five smaller scrapbook photos in the same area with the dimension of 110 pixel of width and height.

The following video has more details on how you can customize the profile page of your Google Plus account. Also, this slide has more detailed information on the layout and dimensions of profile photos.

Navigation that you can make your own
The navigation panel on the left hand side is adjustable based on your preference.
-You can drag apps up or down to create the order you want
-You can hover over certain apps to reveal a set of quick actions
-You can show or hide apps by moving them in and out of “More”

Conversation and Sharing
Google+ is may your favorite for extended conversations with people with the easiest to share with your circles from just about anywhere, and the Hangouts system has proven time and again to be an invaluable.
-Full bleed photos and videos that’ll make you really proud to post
-A stream of conversation “cards” that make it easier to scan and join discussions
-An activity drawer that highlights the community around your content

The chat tool has been moved to the far right, allowing the list of active instant messenger users go all the way down this side of the page. This is a huge improvement for anyone who has more that fifteen users on their list, which was a previous limitation of the chat implementation.

Heatmap tools for tracking user behaviour on a website

07 Mar
2012

by Jerwin Pastoral

Blog

How to's

A heat map is a graphical representation of data where the individual values contained in a matrix are represented as colors. (Souce: wikipedia )

Click heat maps and click visualizers help you to see where your customers are clicking on your web pages so that you can best optimize the pages to get more page views or more revenue or just better navigation for your customers. Click heat maps display the clicks that are made on your pages in a visual form to help you see where people are clicking. Heatmaps visualize the stream of visitors on your website – showing hot and cold click zones. They provide an overall view of the activity and helps you to see every mouse movement and every click. It will improve web usability, conversions and revenue.

Reasons to use heatmaps

See, where people don’t click and why. It helps to…
Optimize landing pages
Optimize link & advert placement
Minimize shopping cart abandonment
Maximize conversions of online forms
Predict how visitors will use your site in the future.
Simplify web usability testing
Short: Find problems and fix them to boost your web project!

How to understand and use heatmaps
As an example we will take a look at my website. A heatmap overlay on the right shows the pattern of user behavior for the menu on top and on the main screenshot of my latest projects.

To know what all these different colors mean
The colors show the density of userclicks. Cooler colors such as blue and green get less clicks. Warmer colors get the most clicks.

The color key references the amount of participants whose eyes fixated on certain parts of the page. The red/orange/yellow areas are where the larger amount of the groupd looked most. The dark blue areas are where they looked least (Source: Poynter Online).

The red/orange color indivates that almost all subjects halted their gaze at that part of the page for at least a fraction of a second.

The yellow color indicates that more than half of all subjects haltered their gaze the part of the page for at least a fraction of a second.

New Google+ iOS app, now with Instant Upload!

16 Feb
2012

by Jerwin Pastoral

Blog

This month the Google+ iOS app is getting an upgrade to include a feature that’s been the most demanded by users – instant upload.

Instant upload automatically puts every photo and video that you take using your smartphone into a private album within Google+. From there, you can choose what to share (and importantly what not to share) with your circles. It’s a pretty great feature that takes away the pain of having to upload every single photo you take manually to the network.

Google+ product manager Anton Lopyrev elaborates in a Google+ post:

Instant Upload is only active while the Google+ iOS app is open, and for a brief period after you close it. Re-opening the Google+ app resumes your photo & video uploads exactly where they left off.

Google aired a new commercial during the Grammys on Sunday night called “New Dad.” The ad specifically touted Google+’s instant upload feature, making the case that it will help you “never lose a memory.”

New Facebook lightbox viewer suchlike Google+ counterpart

09 Feb
2012

by Jerwin Pastoral

Blog

Facebook tweaked its photo viewer interface, making it look a lot like its counterpart on Google+.

The new display helps make photos more attractive by showing them larger, moving comments off to the side, and graying out the background to minimize distraction.

The lightbox feature has slowly been released to pockets of Facebook users over the last week. The new display helps Facebook compete with other photo services and social networks that already offer bigger, crisper viewers that make photography shine.

In the beginning, photos were small and lived on the actual web page. Then Facebook introduced its Theater feature, which turned the photos into pop-ups. Now, the lightbox feature dims the whole Facebook page and subdues the comments box by moving it to the right side of the screen. When you click on any photo on Facebook, it will now fill your screen and the background becomes a light grey. The photo information and comments are displayed on the right, eliminating the need to scroll down to see comments. When you hover over a photo, two large buttons to like and tag a picture are also available. Ads appear in the lower right corner as well on certain photos.

The new interface has also taken advantage of some under-used advertising real estate and now shows sponsored posts below the comments. However, the advertisements are pushed down as more comments are added.

Photographers are enthusiastic about two other recent photo features on Facebook: the cover photo at the top of the new timeline feature and the new thumbnails. Ever since Google+ has come out and had success with the photography crowd.

Google+ allows you to upload photos up to 2048-by-2048 pixels; any larger will be resized down. In 2010, Facebook increased its maximum photo size from 604 pixels, to 720 pixels on one side. Then, in February 2011, it bumped its photo size to 2048 pixels as well. Whether or not the lightbox feature compresses them down for viewing, however, remains to be seen.

Google, which many people pointed out had the lightbox function first on Google+.

Yahoo! Calendar 2012, with a brand new design and enhanced features

03 Feb
2012

by Jerwin Pastoral

Blog

While the interface of the Yahoo! Calendar is new, all of the features you enjoyed are still there, along with some enhancements. They have been announced that all users will be migrated to this new version of Yahoo! Calendar, and the current version of Yahoo! Calendar will be phased out entirely.

These are some of the key differences you may notice:

Updated Calendar toolbar: The toolbar that appears above your calendar has a new look and new buttons, but it still includes the same options to add an event or change your view (to Day, Week, Month, Year, or List view).

The new left panel: The new left panel includes three resources: a bird’s eye view of your calendar, a calendars list (which includes a list of your calendar “layers”), and your subscriptions list (a list of the calendars you’re subscribed to).

The new “To-Do” list panel on the right: This allows you to view the tasks on your To Dos list either all at once, or just those that are due or done. To change which items are displaying, click on “All To Dos” at the top of the pane.

Please note: Once your account has been migrated to the new Yahoo! Calendar, it will not be possible to switch back to a previous version.

Picnik: Google Closes Its Cool Photo-Editing Service along with a number of other services

22 Jan
2012

by Jerwin Pastoral

Blog

Google keeps on slimming down its product line to focus on what CEO Larry Page calls its “big bets.” Today it offered updates on five products that will be going dark this year. It’s announced that it’s shuttering even more offerings, and one of them is Picnik, the excellent online photo editor which it bought in 2010 and the team will work on Google’s other photo products. Google is also shutting down its Social Graph API as its Google+ API slowly trickles out. Okay, it looks like Google really is serious about its oft-stated plans to focus on fewer services and do them better.

The closure isn’t abrupt or catastrophic. Google is giving Picnik users plenty of warning–the service isn’t going away until April 19th–and they’ll be able to download their photos. But unlike some of Google’s shutdowns, closing Picnik isn’t a tacit acknowledgment that a service never found an audience. (I never heard of Google’s Gmail Message Continuity and Social Graph API until the company said they were going away.) Picnik is popular, and it’s good, and the world will be a sadder place place without it–at least for folks who already know and love it.

Why is it going away? That’s not entirely clear. Google’s blog post says it’s so “the Picnik team can continue creating photo-editing magic across Google products. ” But when you go to Picnik, you get a message that “Picnik is moving its easy yet powerful photo editing tools to Google+,” which is a slightly different message. In either case, though, it sounds like Google thinks that photo editing is less of a destination, which is what Picnik was, and more of a feature.

It’s also worth noting that Picnik was Flash-based. This is just guesswork on my part, but it likely hastened the service’s demise. It certainly made it harder to integrate its features with other Google services, and probably even reduced Google’s enthusiasm for pointing to Picnik from elsewhere on Google

If Picnik had lived, it would surely have required a rewrite to become a pure HTML5 service, which would have been a major undertaking. I imagine that Google is busily working on improving its HTML5 graphics tools, and decided it wasn’t worth it to try and roll them into an all-new version of Picnik.

In fact, it’s pretty clear that Google circa 2012 is generally less interested in managing a bunch of destinations, and more interested in beefing up Google+. It wants to give you every possible incentive to join and use its social network.

Google will also open-source its Sky Map this year in collaboration with Carnegie Mellon university. The Google Message Continuity service, which backs up email for enterprise customers, will be retired in favor of Google Apps. The Needlebase data management platform will be integrated into other services. Finally, Urchin, whose product ultimately became Google Analytics, still had a standalone client-hosted version, which will be closed in March.

Sonny the new WordPress 3.3 gives love with multimedia and mobile

13 Dec
2011

by Jerwin Pastoral

Blog

After 14 million downloads of WordPress 3.2, WordPress 3.3 is being released yesterday, Dec 12, 2011. Codenamed “Sonny” in honor of the jazz saxophonist Sonny Stitt, WordPress 3.3 is available for download or update inside your WordPress dashboard.

WordPress software provides bloggers with a suite of editing capabilities that can be used by novices all the way to professional news organizations. The company allows bloggers to host their blogs on WordPress’ servers or download WordPress’ backend editor while working off of a different server. Multiples pages, linking, multimedia, photo galleries, tagging, search engine optimization fields and more make up what WordPress is capable of in the publication sphere. For those who are new to the service, however, WordPress can be a little daunting. For those who have been around WordPress for awhile, the software can feel cluttered.

This update addresses both of these needs. New comers are able to tour the software with pop ups that are reminiscent of Facebook’s “hey look at what’s new, want a tour?” tabs that point out any changes to your profile and news feed. On a more basic level, there is a new welcome screen as well as help tabs.

Those who have had their hand cranking the WordPress machine get a new multimedia tab, where you can drag and drop both photos and videos. You aren’t restricted to only one upload at a time either, you can drag and drop as many as you like. Drop downs on the side menu have been done away with, in favor of menus that fly out to the side. Before this the sidebar, which can become packed given the amount of pages you employ, starts to look like a word document with bullets, sub-bullets, more sub-bullets, Roman numerals, you get the picture. Instead it keeps the sidebar a little easier to navigate. Anyone who blogs for a publication with more than one editor will be happy to know that the warning prompt that says someone else is editing this piece will only show when someone else is really on that page, editing that piece.

You will also be able to import from your Tumblr with this version. Previously WordPress supported Blogger, Blogroll, LiveJournal, Moveable Type and others.

The company has also paid a little closer attention to its tablet offerings. It has revamped the iPad dashboard, with better touch functionality. Developers got more love as well, with a new application programming interface to play with. Full details on the developer changes can be found here.

Facebook sending less email notifications

21 Sep
2011

by Jerwin Pastoral

Blog

I just woke up to an email from the Facebook Team which says I’ll get less email notifications from them going forward. In fact, they might already have started doing it as I haven’t received a lot of emails from them in the recent past, or from the 25th of August. I used to get an email notification every time someone commented on any one of my Facebook Pages. By the way, here is the screenshot of the email I received in the morning.

Now, if you really want to turn individual emails back on and restore all your original settings, you can do that at any time. Just click on the above link to go your Facebook Notification Settings and Uncheck the box to change your Email Frequency preferences as shown below.

You might as well want to change the Email Notification settings for individual category such as Photos, Groups, Pages and so on.

Google Gravity

18 Sep
2011

by Jerwin Pastoral

Blog

Google is always easy to use. Now, you can play with Google. Ricardo Cabello a designer/developer has created Google Gravity. A fun filled site, in which the elements of the Google Home page are subjected to gravitational force and they fall down.

You can still use Google Gravity to search the web. Google Gravity turns of search experience into a fun filled playful one. You can play with the elements in Google Gravity, like the Google logo or the search box or links. You can drag them and throw them or do whatever you want.

New Changes To The Google Sign In Pages

18 Aug
2011

by Jerwin Pastoral

Blog

Google the search engine giant and provider of several services like email,advertising programs,social networking etc silently introduced new sign in page for their Google accounts.

I noticed that the page fits better with white space around the left and the right side. In other words if you are using a bigger / wider screen the page will limit itself to a particular width which makes the Google Sign in page look much better as compared with the older one.

The New to Gmail and Create an Account links has now been shifted at the top and there is plenty of blank space below the Sign in Form. The content is the same and so are the links.

Google’s New Sitelink Format Experimented

10 Aug
2011

by Jerwin Pastoral

Blog

Google is once again testing — or continuing to test — a jumbo-sized search result that displays a whopping 12 sitelinks below the main/top search result. Here’s one example of how it looks:

But the test actually dates back to at least April, when it was noticed on WebmasterWorld and discussed for about a week.

In all of the screenshots and examples that searchers have posted, the dozen sitelinks only show up on specific entity-related queries such as the exact company/organization/location name or its exact URL.

Preview Pane: Gmail New Labs Feature

09 Aug
2011

by Jerwin Pastoral

Blog

Google may have announced the impending shut-down of Google Labs, but Gmail Labs is still putting out new optional features for Gmail users.

Google has released the “Preview Pane” as a Gmail Labs feature. This allows users to preview messages in their inbox using a layout similar to how Gmail looks on a tablet device.

“When I check my email, I often rely on the message snippets to figure out which messages to open first,” says Gmail Associate Product Manager Maciek Nowakowski. “Sometimes, though, I want to see more than snippets, which is why I’m happy to announce that you can now preview messages in your inbox using a new feature in Gmail Labs called Preview Pane.”

Like all Gmail Labs feature, you have to enable it in settings. Once you’ve done so, you’ll see a toggle button in the right corner of your message list. This lets you switch between preview and list views. The button looks like this:

“For those of you who have more vertical space you can also move the preview pane below your message list. You can enable this using the dropdown arrow next to the toggle button,” notes Nowakowski. “By default there is a 3-second delay in marking a conversation as read after previewing it. If that doesn’t feel natural to you, you can change the timing in the General tab of settings.”

New Facebook Developer’s Dashboard Layout

01 Jul
2011

by Jerwin Pastoral

Blog

Facebook announced “major updates” to the Developer App, which it says will help developers “easily access, edit, and manage” apps on the Developer site.

The dashboard has been redesigned, with access to your most frequently viewed apps from the left-hand menu, as well as the option to see all apps in a summary view or search for apps from the dashboard.

“We have also made it easy for you to see important app information at a glance,” says Facebook software engineer Alan McConnell. “On the dashboard, you’ll see a summary of frequently needed app info including the app ID, app secret, and URLs. You can also quickly grant a user access token for your app, view Roles and see Insights.”

“We have reorganized the sections within the Developer App to reduce redundant fields,” he adds. “Tooltips and field descriptions have also been added to help you better understand the requested information.”

You can also add admins, developers, testers, and insights users from the Roles interface by clicking the “Add” link. You can also use auto-complete to add friends and non-friends via email or Facebook UID. Autocomplete also works in the search box.

“We built the new Developer App to be cleaner and faster, with quicker load time, so you can edit and save changes to apps at an improved speed,” says McConnell. “The app now runs on the same high-performance architecture that powers Facebook and has a streamlined workflow, eliminating inefficient operations and data fetches.”

Facebook is rolling this stuff out with a limited set of developers today, then will make it available to all over the coming weeks.
Naturally, it didn’t take long for someone to mention the ban bot fiasco in the comments of Facebook’s announcement. Francis Pelland wrote: “Will this help with the ‘ban bot’ going insane as of late? Not to mention the lack of data behind why it decides to ban apps randomly?”

If you’re unfamiliar with the recent ban bot ordeal, we discussed it at length here. Basically, Facebook banned a bunch of apps trying to clean up app spam, but took some legitimate apps out as well. We likened it to Facebook’s version of the Panda update. The developer of the popular app Profile Maker, which was one of the victims, shared his personal story about it in Web Pro News.

Facebook’s program manager for developer relations responded to Pelland’s comment by saying: “As mentioned on Friday’s post, the team is working to make changes to the process, improve the developer experience related to spam enforcement, and provide more data on negative user feedback via new App Insights. Please stay tuned.”

Facebook has said that it will release new insights around blocking in the next couple weeks.

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