The United States Supreme Court ruled today in favor of the union of same-sex couples, effectively giving new civil rights to LGBT couples by declaring that states cannot ban same-sex marriage, and Google is going all-out in its celebration.
Have you come across the Easter egg in Google Chrome that alleviates the frustration of your Internet going down with a fun side-scrolling game? You’re a dinosaur running and your objective is to jump and avoid hitting obstacles like rocks, ditches, and cacti, getting the highest score you can in order show off and brag to your friends (or earn their pity on you). Recently, that game has become a bit more difficult with the introduction of a new obstacle — a dinosaur that can fly.
Chrome evangelist François Beaufort posted to his Google+ account yesterday to show off what the new dinosaur, a pterodactyl, looks like in action in the game, saying it was added in a recent update to Chromium. You won’t face off against the dinosaur until your score nears 500 and, to be honest, I was having trouble reaching that score so I just used the image he shared, pictured above.
If you haven’t seen this Easter egg in Chrome before, next time you try and load a website in Chrome and get the “Unable to connect to the Internet” page, click on the dinosaur and then press either the <Up> or <Left> key on your keyboard and the game will begin. Or you can just disable the Internet connection on your computer and try to refresh a page.
After adding an April Fools’ Easter egg to Maps this morning, Google has since added another gem to its mobile version of Chrome. First noticed by the Google Operating System blog, there’s now a menu in Chrome mobile that lets you “share a reaction” from any webpage you visit.
Google has started the April Fools Day fun a bit early with a new Pac-Man easter egg allowing users to play the classic arcade game on the streets of Google Maps. Here’s how to do it:
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[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvwV4lk_FLI]
If you’re participating in the ongoing developer preview of Android Lollipop, there’s a nice little Easter egg embedded in its latest build. If you go to Settings > About phone and repeatedly tap the Android version, a nice lollipop icon will show up on your screen. Give the image a long-press and you’ll launch a hidden Flappy Bird clone.
A new easter egg discovered and shared this morning by Search Engine Land allows users of the Google app on iOS (not the website) to play with the letters of the Google logo and flick them around as you like. Once you move the letters from the normal position, you can also tilt your device to see them slightly sway across the screen. Some users won’t be able to play with the logo today as the Google Doodle is honoring Nelson Mandela today, but that will most likely will be refreshed around midnight. In the mean time, check out the full video of the Easter egg below.
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As Google turns 15, it is celebrating with an animated doodle and an Easter Egg that takes us back to its birth in 1998. Simply google google in 1998 to see the page as it looked then.
The 1998 page is fully-functional, but the time travel doesn’t last long: any search conducted on the page is carried out using today’s index and with the results returned in today’s design …
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Yesterday, Google finally announced Android 4.3, a minor update to 4.2 that included a handful of neat features, including the ability to have more than one user profile. As time has progressed, however, a few other unannounced features have been discovered.
First, Googler Evan Rapoport posted a detailed description on Google+ about the serious enhancements the Photo Sphere team made to the functionality in Android 4.3. Rapoport says that nearly all of stitching and exposure bugs and annoyances present in Android 4.2 have been fixed in the latest update.
First, alignment and stitching are much better, giving you more level horizons and fewer errors throughout the image. While environments with lots of moving things are always challenging, scenes like the one attached here with a long flat horizon are now much better.
Second, we’ve improved exposure compensation for each individual frame, producing a beautifully exposed photo sphere. You can compare this to the previous versions that produced gray areas and inconsistent coloring in areas of high contrast (near the sun, horizons, buildings against blue sky, etc.).
We told you yesterday about a Google search easter egg for the Christmas, and today we discovered another fun way Google has decided to celebrate the holidays. When visiting YouTube, there is currently a snowflake icon next to the resizing and resolution options on the video player. Click it and your video will snow! Your mouse will even interact with the snowflakes as they fall. It will also snow in the YouTube search results when searching for “let it snow”.
In case you missed the other ways Google is celebrating, try typing “Christmas,” “Hanukkah,” or “let it snow” into Google search. You can even call Santa in Gmail. Yesterday the Android team released this Christmas-themed Ice Cream Sandwich advertisement to wish the Android community Happy Holidays.
While Samsung and Acer are readying their ChromeOS laptops for release this summer, the CR-48 is still being looked over. One user figured out a Firmware Easter Egg by doing some significant research (and taking a big fat hint laid earlier this week). The Hex message at the bottom converts to ASCII characters and revealing the following message:
Greetings from the Chrome OS x86 firmware team. This message is brought to you by Randall, Bill, Vadim, Gaurav, and Kelly. Also by the letter G and the number 42. If you’ve enjoyed this gadget, please join us at http://www.chromium.org to help make it even better. We now return you to your regularly scheduled program, already in progress. No animals were harmed in the production of this message. Apply only to affected area. Cape does not enable wearer to fly. Contents may have settled during shipment. Use no hooks.
