See your location history dashboard and more with Google Maps 5.3 for Android

Today, we’re happy to announce Google Maps 5.3 for Android, which lets you see your Google Location History dashboard, check in at “home,” and add your own aspects for places when rating them.

Location History dashboard
If you’ve enabled Location History for Google Latitude, you’ve been able to visualize interesting trends in your location history with a personal dashboard at google.com/latitude on your computer. Now, you can also see your dashboard on your phone by tapping View location history from your Latitude profile. You’ll be able to see right on your phone how far you’ve travelled as well as an estimate of how much time you’ve spent at home, at work, or out.

If you haven’t yet, you can enable Location History from your computer or from Latitude’s Settings menu on your phone. Location History is 100% opt-in and is private to you and nobody else. You can always delete any of your location history from the Manage History tab or correct the estimated work and home locations from thedashboard on your computer.

 

View your location history dashboard from your Latitude profile on your phone and see estimates of where you’ve spent your time.

Check in at home
Now that you can see how much time you spend at “home”, you might want to let friends know when you’re there. Checking in at places using Latitude is another way to keep a history of places you’ve been and also lets you share when you’re there. I love letting friends and family know when I’m at a cafe or park, but sometimes I want them to know that I’m relaxing at home or made it back safely from a road trip. So now, I can start checking in at “home” in Latitude:

1. Check in from Latitude and tap “Home - Tap to set your location” at the bottom of the nearby places list if you don’t have one yet.
2. Use the estimated current address or enter in your home address yourself.
3. Once you’ve checked in at home once, “Home” will appear at the top of the list when you’re checking in near there.

Like Latitude and other check-ins, checking in at home is entirely opt-in. Your set “home” location is not searchable and only you can check in there. Just like any other check-in, you can choose with whom to share your home check-ins (along with your name and address info).

Add your own aspects for places
When you’re rating places on the go in Maps using Google Places with Hotpot, you could always quickly leave feedback on a specific aspect or characteristic of a place, such as the food or ambiance. Before, we’d automatically include aspects about places that were commonly mentioned in reviews. Now, you can add your own aspects for each place. So if you think a place has a beautiful view or great music, you can add it yourself and quickly share it with the world.

When rating places, you can add your own aspects like “music” for places and leave quick feedback.

To get started, update Google Maps from Android Market on devices with Android OS 1.6+ anywhere Google Maps and Latitude are already available.

This weeks G-App

For many months ago Kaspar showed me a really smart app called Speed Dial. You know those favorit windows you see when you open a new tab??, sometimes you need more of them right?? well that's what speed dial does, when you open a new tab you'll find many more windows and you decide how many it can be up to 81 favorite windows.

One thing i think is annoying is - you can't see youre Google chrome apps:(

therefore i'll give it 4 out of 5 G's

(G-G-G-G)

Google "likes" stuff now

For about a week ago Google Launched a new Labs experiment called "+1" its like "like'ing" on Facebook, every time you search for something on Google you can press the +1 -button to tell other Googlers that this is a good site, it's a new and better way to get the best searches on Google, for the time it only works on the english Google.com, which also have gotten a new look, that i'll hope will get to the google site in other languages.

This weeks G-app

For about some days ago i found a social app to Chrome, its called Imo and is a chat app, it will get all your chat accounts, form for example Facebook, Google Talk, and Skype. its pretty smart because you can make groups and have faves.

There is only one BIG problem, when you start a new chat with a friend the app doesn't write the first letter you write, and that is really annoying.

i will give it 3 G's out of 5

(G-G-G)

This weeks G-App

I've found an awesome Chrome extension for some weeks ago and wanna show you guys it, its called Cortex it lets you share a webpage on for example Facebook and Twitter, just by holding your left mouse button down for over a second, when you do that a circle with your social network appears you drag your mouse to one of them and then its shared.

Unfortunately it can't share on Google Buzz, that's why i only wanna give it 4 out of 5 G's.

(G-G-G-G)

Introducing discussions in Google Docs

Introducing discussions in Google Docs: "When we launched the new Google Docs last April, one of the big changes was moving comments to the sidebar and letting people reply to comments. Today, we’re updating comments in Google Docs to facilitate rapid and seamless discussions and integrate with email in an intuitive way. Since there are a number of significant improvements, this update is only available for newly created documents for now.







To start, we’ve improved the discussion flow by adding ownership and edit rights to individual comments. Each comment now has a timestamp and profile picture.

Google Docs doesn’t force you to delete comments. Instead, you can resolve comments to remove them from the visible document and view them later by clicking the discussions button at the top of any document. You can even re-open comments from here.

We know you can’t watch all of your important documents all day to see if there are any suggestions, which is why we’ve integrated comments with your inbox to facilitate more rapid and responsive communication. You can now add someone to a discussion with an @mention. For example, typing @eddy@altostrat.com in a discussion will send a notification email to Eddy with the text of your comment.

Eddy gets a message in her inbox with your question or comment.

She can easily click through to open the document itself to respond, or simply reply to the email.



The reply will show up in the document as soon as the email is sent.



To turn off email notifications for a document, just select Mute updates from this comment at the bottom of any email or select Discussion notification settings... from the Discussions drop down.

We've been using this next-generation commenting system inside Google for several months and have seen it make the feedback cycle shorter and get more people involved. The combination of added structure and intuitive email integration have really given life to the discussions that surround our documents, and we're excited for this new feature to do the same for you.



Discussions will be available over the next few days to all users with personal Google Accounts as well as to Google Apps customers on the Rapid Release track. Please note that improved comments are only available in new documents at this time so if you want to try it out make sure to create a new document. The comments you’ve created in existing document won’t be changed.



We’re excited to hear what you think so let us know on in the comments.



Posted by: Nick Cooper, Software Engineer

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