Google Home IQ

Christopher Bettig, Art Director at Google, posted some images from a Google mobile app called Google Home IQ.



"These are some illustrations and some screens of exploratory UI for a mobile app for Android and iOS, which is now a deprecated project. The app was to control a smart thermostat and had a very visual UI which needed to account and meet accessibility standards while also illustrating four main states and varying weather conditions outside the home. Each state was given a unique shape and a corresponding unique shaped UI icon for use in the app. Each of the four states (awake, away, home, and sleep) is illustrated with all the variable weather conditions."

Google now owns Nest, so that's probably one of the reasons why this app wasn't released. EnergySense was rumored to be the name of a Google service that lets you monitor and adjust energy use.



{ Thanks, Francisco Marujo. }

Google Web History, Back to Search History

Back in 2007, Google upgraded the Search History service and renamed it Web History. If you installed Google Toolbar and enabled Web History, Google recorded your entire browsing history and made it available at google.com/history. Your browsing history was searchable and it was used to personalize your search results.

Even though the service is still called Web History, the Google Toolbar feature was removed a few months ago. "With Google Web History in Toolbar you once could store the URLs of the pages you've visited, to view and manage from any computer by signing into your Google Account. However, Web History in Toolbar is no longer supported and no new Web History information is being recorded from Toolbar," informs Google.



It's surprising that Google didn't integrate Web History with Chrome. The service shows the bookmarks from Google Toolbar instead of the bookmarks saved in Chrome and it doesn't show the browsing history synced by Chrome.