Send An Email For Mobile Payments To Friends With Square Cash

Mobile payment solution Square, which lets merchants accept debit cards and credit cards on their smartphone, has launched Square Cash — a new service that allows individuals to transfer money to their friends through an app or an email. It seems to be the simplest way to make payments on your mobile. “Square Cash makes it convenient to send money to anyone—without making them jump through hoops to retrieve it. Now it’s easier than ever to split a bill, send a birthday gift, or settle up with a friend, no matter where you are.” said Square Cash lead Brian Grassadonia....

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A New Google Experiment Hides Search Results URLs

There's a war against URLs. Browsers start to hide them from the address bar: some remove "http" from the URL (Chrome, Firefox), Opera removes parameters, Safari for iOS only shows the domain name, Chrome and Safari show queries instead of Google's search URLs. All in the name of simplifying the interface.



A new Google search experiment replaces search results URLs with site names or domain names, depending on their popularity. Google tested a similar feature in 2011.

Most people don't understand URLs and find them too complicated. That's why many of them use search engines instead of typing URLs in the address bar, even for sites they visit frequently.



Still, web addresses are helpful because they provide useful information and they can be easily shared. If you only display "New York Times" instead of any New York Times URL, it's not obvious if you're linking to the homepage, to a section of the site, to a NYTimes blog or a blog post. URLs sometimes include useful information like the date when an article was published, the topic of the article or categories for shopping sites.



Google already shows incomplete URLs for search results, only displays site names for news results and replaces some URL elements with linked breadcrumbs.

{ Thanks, Rubén. }

Inline Google Help

If you click the "Help" link when you use services like Gmail or Google Drive, Google no longer sends you to the Help Center by opening a new tab. Google shows a small panel with suggested articles related to the feature you're using and lets you use the search feature without leaving the app.



All the articles open inside the panel, you can move the panel using drag and drop and maximize it. The panel doesn't close when you click inside the app, so you can read Google's instructions and follow them.



Here are some screenshots from Gmail. Just click the gear button and select "Help" to see the help widget.

If you go to the contact manager, Google's suggested articles are about contacts.

Drag the header to move the help box.

Some Google services that use inline help: Gmail, Google Drive, Play Music, AdSense, YouTube, Google+.

Google Music's Feeling Lucky

Google Play Music has a new feature called "I'm Feeling Lucky" that creates a radio based on your listening history. If you subscribe to All Access, Google includes a lot of songs that aren't in your library, otherwise the feature is a fancy name for "shuffle".



Here are some screenshots from the Android app:

There's a "dice" animation while the playlist is generated:

You can reorder the songs, remove some of them or add all the songs to a playlist by tapping "save queue".

You can find a similar feature in the desktop interface: go to "Listen Now" and click "I'm Feeling Lucky Radio".

You get a different "Feeling Lucky" playlist every time you roll the dice and the songs from the playlist are usually related. Here's an example of Eurovision-related playlist:

Click "Refresh station" and you'll get a completely new playlist:

For the old-fashioned shuffle feature restricted to your library, go to "My Library" and click "Shuffle My Library". In the Android app, go to the "Songs" tab from the "My Library" section and tap "shuffle all".



{ Thanks, Zachary. }

A Test Of Character: 10 Font Games That Prove Typography Can Be Fun

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. This is the famous pangram for anyone who pays attention to fonts and the art of typography. If you haven’t heard this ever, then it’s time to exit the arena because the battle could get bloody as we head to some of the font games mentioned below. There will be a lot of kerning and only the strong characters will survive. You can’t turn tail. Well, I did manage to playfully throw in some font terms there. But it was all done to point out that playing around with typography can...

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