Webware

Gmail has long had keyboard shortcuts, though learning them can be difficult. Enter the Gboard, a specialized mini-keyboard for Google's e-mail service. It debuts this Friday at an asking price of $19.99.

The Gboard consists of 19 colored keys set in a standard size numpad-only keyboard. Clicking on any one of these performs that particular keyboard shortcut. Included are Gmail-specific features such as starring messages, starting a search, and jumping between message threads. Outside of Gmail they simply act as normal keyboard buttons, and will type in whatever letter or number corresponds with that shortcut.

The device is powered by USB and requires no special software or drivers, however users need to first enable keyboard shortcuts within Gmail's settings before using it. Also worth noting is that it was created not by Google, but by Charlie Mason, a film producer from Venice, Calif. This is his first foray into the computer hardware business.

The Gboard consists of 19 keys, all of which act as shortcuts within Google's Gmail Web mail service.

(Credit: James Martin / CNET)

This really is a product that users will either love or hate. Those who have mastered Gmail's shortcuts will see little need to buy special hardware and find a spare USB port to plug it into. Meanwhile, newbie users may be unwilling to take the plunge on such a specific peripheral for a program that works only within another program (the browser). The Gboard runs the risk of being an unappealing prospect to both parties.

It's also not the first attempt at easing the process of learning and remembering shortcuts. This time last year Google offered users a free pack of color-coded shortcut stickers that could be tacked onto any keyboard. There have also long been specialized keyboards for video and audio editing as well as graphical design--all of which provide similar, color-coded keys. Users who don't want to commit, or tack stickers on their keyboard, also have the option of buying a silicone keyboard mat, though no such thing has been created for Gmail.

Considering there are a total of 69 Gmail shortcuts (with more on the way if Google graduates some of its experimental features from its labs section) the Gboard could just be the first step toward creating a full-size (100 plus key) version. In the meantime, its early December release and low price tag make for a good stocking stuffer if you've got a Gmail lover in your family.

The good:
• No setup required
• Color coding is logical and makes it easy to learn the keys
• Good build quality and feel; keys are flat like on a laptop
• At $19.99 it's not that expensive. Most numeric-only keyboards cost about the same.

The bad:
• Does not come close to including all of Gmail's shortcuts
• Could be rendered less useful if Gmail's shortcuts change
• Only comes in one color (black)

In a nod to efficiency, YouTube on Thursday began testing a more lightweight version of its video player pages called "feather."

Feather pages do a number of things to speed up the video-playing process, from defaulting to the standard quality version (instead of high quality or high definition), to removing various on-page features such as being able to control the size and coloring of an embed. The idea is to get the video playing as soon as possible with fewer on-page distractions.

Other efficiencies include limiting the number of loaded comments to just 10, which users are now unable to vote on or respond to. Video replies, real-time sharing, and auto-suggest from YouTube's search bar have also been cut. However, related videos remain--albeit at a more limited 5 videos compared to YouTube's usual offering of 21.

Users who want to try out the new interface can do so by opting in to it on YouTube's TestTube page, which houses experimental, or otherwise not-so-ready-for-primetime features. These include YouTube's visual warp browser, its live streams product, and comment search tool. Once it's enabled, it can quickly be disabled from any video page with a little green box that sits on the bottom right-hand corner of the screen.

It's worth noting the feature does not yet appear to work on all videos just yet. We had the best luck on popular videos, including those from YouTube's featured section. Also, if you're a YouTube power user who regularly makes use of things such as video replies and user comments, it's worth staying on the standard version of the service.

Below you can see a before and after of feather mode on the same video. Click it to enlarge.

YouTube's new feather mode ditches many of YouTube's advanced features in favor of a faster-loading page.

(Credit: CNET)

Digg on Wednesday introduced a small change to its developer API that could have a big effect on the need to visit Digg.com.

The company is now allowing third parties extended write access to the site, which will give users the option to Digg and bury both stories and comments from outside applications. Short of allowing users to submit and comment on stories, these new changes will provide much of the same experience as visiting Digg.com with whatever interface third-party developers have created.

Along those same lines, the company has also launched a reference page for what developers can now create called "DiggLite." This is a stripped-down version of Digg.com's home page that includes all features developers can implement in their own tools. But it's missing many of the bells and whistles found on Digg proper. The company is also planning to update its Firefox toolbar add-on to let users Digg any page they are on without having to visit Digg itself.

DiggLite is a less featured version of Digg that makes use of Digg's new writeable API calls. It also features no advertising.

(Credit: CNET)

Prior to Wednesday's tweak, Digg had updated its API back in mid-June, giving developers access to its overhauled search engine, as well as tweaking its usage terms to allow for commercial applications. It also allowed third-party apps to view some user data, including stories any particular user had favorited, which paved the way for third-party recommendation tools.

The move to give developers more of Digg.com's features is an exciting one for developers, but a bit odd given Digg's current business model of pushing advertising on its users. In recent years, the site has filled in with more ads, including a recently-released (and notably experimental) advertising model that has users control how long certain ads get to stay on the site by voting on them as if they were regular news stories. There was even a campaign from McDonalds a few weeks ago that placed certain upcoming stories within the context of being as fresh as a breakfast sandwich.

So it does seem a little odd the company would be willing to risk losing a few users to third-party Digg front-ends that offer up a (now richer) Digg experience. This could become even more muddled when the company extends its API to allow users to submit new stories and comments--something it hinted at in Wednesday's blog post. Then again, between this and the launch of its real-time Trends experiment, it could just be a sign that Digg's real-time home page overhaul is ready to roll.

Comcast on Tuesday announced the launch of a pilot program for its Internet customers to keep track of how much bandwidth they're using. The company is finally introducing a Web-based metering program, which will let users check these numbers from any browser.

This comes a little more than a year after Comcast began enforcing a strict 250GB cap on download bandwidth, exiling those who went over twice for an entire year before being able to get Internet service again. In the interim the company had offered no official tool for customers to see how close they were getting to that limit, outside of a free McAfee Security software program that needed to be installed on each computer sharing that connection.

The new online meter is coming first to customers in Portland, Ore., as part of a pilot project, which could be expanded to other parts of the country beginning next year. Those in the pilot will be able to track all activity that goes through the cable modem they have rented from the company or purchased on their own. The meter shows the past three months of data use, though to begin with, users will only be able to see what they've used in December. It tracks each gigabyte used, which the company says is rounded down to the nearest gigabyte instead of rounding up. That data is refreshed every three hours.

Comcast says that this new metering system is quite accurate. To prove that, it hired consulting company NetForecast to do a comparative analysis which put Comcast's meter at within plus or minus 0.5 percent of its own internal testing (PDF).

Comcast's new bandwidth meter will only be available to those in Portland, Ore., before the company rolls it out to other markets.

(Credit: Comcast/CNET)

In an e-mail, Comcast spokesman Charlie Douglas wanted to reaffirm that most Comcast customers will never have a problem with going over. "The median customer consumes approximately 2 to 4GB of data in a month," he said. And even with the new bandwidth monitor, "almost 99 percent of our customers should not be concerned about their monthly data usage or even crossing our 250GB-per-month excessive-usage threshold."

Comcast says it needs to do more testing before branching off into the rest of the U.S. In the meantime, those Portland customers who have been chosen to be a part of it will find an invitation in their e-mail to test it out.

Google on Tuesday added a small but welcomed feature to its Reader service: favicons. These are the little square icons provided by sites that show up both in your address bar and open tabs (in most browsers at least). Google Reader users can now opt in to see them in their feed source list, where previously, feeds just showed up as little blue RSS signal logos. According to Google it was the top requested feature from Google Reader's product ideas mini-site.

In many ways favicons are a logical step in simplifying the feed reading process, since you can now find a particular feed in a long list of sites without even looking at the names. This is especially important since Reader displays feeds out of alphabetical order. However, some might find it to be sensory overload; luckily there's a quick toggle to turn them on and off right form the subscriptions list.

Google's choice of where to put the favicons is a tad strange though. For now, they exist only in the source subscriptions page, and not on the article pages where most of the reading is done. This is most apparent when cruising down a list of mixed items from various sites where users will still have to rely on the site names to identify where the content is coming from.

Also worth noting is that users of the Better GReader Firefox extension by Gina Trapani (formerly of blog Lifehacker) has long had an option to add site favicons to Google Reader's interface.

A bland list of blue feed icons in Google Reader gets the favicon treatment, an optional feature that can be turned on and off.

(Credit: CNET)

Movie and TV show streaming service Hulu on Monday added tagging to the mix, allowing users to add up to 30 tags to each piece of content for the sake of organization. These tags also work site-wide, which means that users can see all types of related content regardless of whether it's a TV show or feature-length film.

Users have two choices for tagging: one is creating an all-new tag, while the other is to vote up a tag someone else has made. Each time a user does this it adds to the number, giving certain tags more validity, although unlike size-based systems it's not as immediately clear which tags are more popular or common. Users can also delete tags, but only their own--meaning that if there is a bad tag placed by another user there's no way to report it.

Hulu's new tagging system is part public, part private and works on all content.

(Credit: CNET)

Tags are made public and can be seen by other users immediately, although they do not yet appear to be an integrated part of Hulu's search engine. Instead, users can search for a specific tag within the tag section of each video. It's also worth noting that some content on Hulu has an expiration date, so you can spend all the time in the world tagging videos, but something you tagged a few months ago might not be able to be watched at a later date.

One thing Hulu could do with tags (but probably won't) is add timing to the mix. Recently-launched (although still in private beta) AnyClip organizes movie clips by what's happening in them. Hulu could do the same thing with its content by giving users a way to tag by time the way video host Viddler does. Though again, this wouldn't be nearly as useful as AnyClip due to Hulu's frequent content expirations.

Worth noting is that competitor YouTube has long had tags for its hosted movies and TV shows. However, it does not let users add them.

(Credit: Josh Lowensohn / CNET)

Buying off of Craigslist can be quite a process, and of all the things for sale, the cars and trucks section is one of the most daunting. Unlike digital cameras and random bits of furniture, cars are (usually) expensive and come with an important history both from the owner, and the manufacturer.

That's why browser extension Craigslist Car Research is so useful. It adds an entire layer of data on top of each listing to make it easier to both find out more about the car, and others like it for sale on Craigslist; all without having to leave Craigslist.

The extension works the same for Firefox and Chrome. Users with Greasemonkey installed can also just add it to their list of scripts. Once it's up and running, every car listing on Craigslist gets a few extra pages of data below whatever the poster has provided, including things like:

• Car reviews from CarSurvey.org and Edmunds.com
• Recall or safety notices
• Price estimates from places like Motor Trend, Automotive.com, Kelly Blue Book, and the Canadian Black Book
•Other similar listings on Craigslist (with prices)
• A quick way to check and see other listings that seller has up on Craigslist.

All of this information can be hidden, either all at once or by specific feature. The extension also scans each list for problem words or phrases, and will tip you off on whether it's worth following up with the owner to see if it's been in an accident.

With the extension installed you get comparison shopping for other cars on Craigslist, as well as a heads-up on whether it's worth looking at other things for sale from that seller and if you should call to see if the car's been in an accident.

(Credit: CNET)

Along with this extension, developer Tech4Computer has another script that can figure out the price of importing a car from the U.S. into Canada. There's also a version of the car and truck shopping extension for motorcycle buyers.

See also: Find the right used car for you: 24 sites

Adobe Systems on Saturday will be unveiling a slightly sleeker version of its Acrobat.com hosted-application service.

The site, which combines a number of tools, including word processing, PDF conversion, spreadsheets, and live Web meetings, has been reworked with a new architecture the company says will help it scale beyond its 6 million existing users. Currently, it is garnering about 100,000 sign-ups a week, with about half those coming from the United States.

Saturday's release includes 35 new features, all of which have been suggested by Adobe's customers through its Reddit-like Ideas page, which lets anyone vote up or down user-generated suggestions. The most notable addition is a new organizer, which consolidates all of the user's files and projects saved on Adobe's servers.

In a phone call with CNET earlier this month, Acrobat.com Director of Project Management Rick Treitman, said the organizer was the No. 1 most requested user feature. "It used to be confusing. We had three organizers, or places where users could organize files. Now there's one," he said.

The new file organizer adds some subtle changes, the most apparent being a white background, which goes against the company's infatuation with using black or dark-gray backgrounds in its products, but which makes it easier to differentiate the text and file types. Treitman said users overwhelmingly complained about it being too dark and hard to read.

Users also wanted a way to search through their files, Treitman said, so the company has added file-searching capability, albeit at a limited capacity. You can, for example, search by file name, but not within the contents of each individual file, something Treitman says is planned for a future release.

The new file organizer, a sea of white, features a new search tool that lets users wade through their files.

(Credit: Adobe Systems/CNET)

Other organizational niceties include a way to create lists, which Treitman compared to the playlist feature in Apple's iTunes software, since you can add files to multiple lists without changing their organization in your main file explorer. Files can either be dragged and dropped into these lists, or added through a right-click contextual menu.

Along with improvements to Acrobat.com, Adobe is also launching its first mobile application for the site, designed for iPhones and BlackBerry handsets. The app itself was actually built by ScanR, and it looks about the same as the company's existing mobile tool. It lets users view and convert any file they have stored on Adobe's servers, as well as convert it into a PDF or send it as a fax. Users can also snap a photo with their camera and have it sent straight to their Adobe storage.

Treitman told us the next big plan for Acrobat.com is to add a work spaces feature that offers an area in which multiple users can collaborate on documents at once and keep track of any changes made. This should bode well for the company's business users, who may have been wooed by tools from Google or Box.net, the latter of which is doing more and more to keep its users within the confines of its file storage service with features like a built-in document editor and a news feed that tracks collaborators' changes.

The new features will not change the price of Adobe's Acrobat.com paid services, which run anywhere from $15 a month to $390 a year, depending on which of the two plans users choose.

Popular online shopping site Woot is set to expand its network of sites into new territory: deal hunting.

Unlike some of the site's other properties, which offer a new item for purchase either on a daily or weekly basis (be it gadgets, wine, T-shirts, or kids toys), the new Deals.Woot service gets a steady stream of things to buy throughout the day. It's also run almost entirely by Woot's community. There are sponsored deals that have been hand-picked by Woot's editors, but users do the rest.

Users can add deals they find elsewhere on the Web through a simple submission form that pulls in photos and sometimes pricing information from the source page. Others can then vote these up or down (like links on Reddit), with the most popular (be it in total votes, or in vote velocity) rising to the top.

Woot's new Deals site lets users vote up or down user-generated deals.

(Credit: CNET)

To keep marketers from gaming these rankings, the site has a members-only status for the time being; users can't vote deals up or down unless they've purchased something from Woot before. The site is also limiting who can access the deals site while it remains in private beta, beginning by first inviting longtime-registered users, then working backwards toward those who have recently joined.

Along with deal submissions and the forum threads that go with them, the site is also a question-and-answer service. It's not as structured as the rest of the site, and acts simply as an open forum about deals, deal retailers, or off-topic items. It, too, has the same up or down voting system, both for individual threads and replies. Together with this and the community-sourced deals, the site tracks some of the top deal submitters and forum commenters. There, users can see which deal has been the fastest to rise to the top of the charts, as well as how long it took to get there.

Woot's Deals leaderboard gives a behind-the-scenes look at what's happening on the deal-finding site.

(Credit: CNET)

Woot's upcoming deal site remains an invite-only private beta, but the company hopes to launch it officially before Black Friday (which is next week). As previously mentioned, Woot members will be getting early access invites by e-mail depending on when they first registered for one of the company's services.

See also: Fatwallet, Slickdeals, RetailMeNot, Ebates, Dealnews.