Slow news day at Google ahead of third-quarter earnings. How do I know?
In a press release and four (4!) blog posts today, Google trumpeted the launch of a redesigned iGoogle home page, which includes full canvas views to let users expand a gadget to access more content.
Google also moved the top, horizontal navigation tabs to the left and made them run down the page vertically, which should help users move from one canvas to another with one click.
Gadgets that have full canvas views include the Gmail gadget to let users read, send or reply to e-mails without leaving iGoogle and the Google Finance gadget, which now provides full-screen finance charts and news.
Other gadgets with full views include the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Sudoku, GoComics, TV Guide, Flixster and iLike.
“We’re very excited about these changes because it makes iGoogle a more useful homepage and a better platform for developers,” wrote Matt Gundersen, iGoogle engineer, in this main post.
I’ll take Gundersen’s word for it for now. I’d test it out if I could, but unfortunately I don’t yet have access despite being in the United States, which is the first country in which Google had enabled the new features.
New iGoogle views will come to other countries in the coming months. I’ll do a follow-up post when I can access the new gadgets and tools.
Check out the new Google gadget options here. Also, see these screenshots on Search Engine Land and ReadWriteWeb.