Kevin Fox is the user experience designer who created the interface for Gmail, [1] Google Calendar, Google Reader, [2] and Friendfeed. [3]
He was a co-founder of the Internet of Things startup Electric Imp. [4] Since 2015 he has been the chief experience officer at Evan Prodromou's fuzzy.io. [5]
Andrew Jay Hertzfeld is an American software engineer and innovator who was a member of the original Apple Macintosh development team during the 1980s. After buying an Apple II in January 1978, he went to work for Apple Computer from August 1979 until March 1984, where he was a designer for the Macintosh system software. Since leaving Apple, he has co-founded three companies: Radius in 1986, General Magic in 1990, and Eazel in 1999. In 2002, he helped Mitch Kapor promote open source software with the Open Source Applications Foundation. Hertzfeld worked at Google from 2005 to 2013, where in 2011, he was the key designer of the Circles user interface in Google+.
Gmail is a free email service provided by Google. As of 2019, it had 1.5 billion active users worldwide making it the largest email service in the world. A user typically accesses Gmail in a web browser or through the official mobile application. Google also supports the use of email clients via the POP and IMAP protocols.
Google Talk was an instant messaging service that provided both text and voice communication. The instant messaging service was variously referred to colloquially as Gchat, Gtalk, or Gmessage among its users.
Google Reader was an RSS/Atom feed aggregator operated by Google. It was created in early 2005 by Google engineer Chris Wetherell and launched on October 7, 2005, through Google Labs. Google Reader grew in popularity to support a number of programs which used it as a platform for serving news and information to users. Google closed Google Reader on July 1, 2013, citing declining use.
Netvibes is a French company that offers web services.
The public history of Gmail dates back to 2004. Gmail, a free, advertising-supported webmail service with support for Email clients, is a product from Google. Over its history, the Gmail interface has become integrated with many other products and services from the company, with basic integration as part of Google Account and specific integration points with services such as Google+, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Google Hangouts, Google Meet, YouTube, and Google Buzz. It has also been made available as part of G Suite. The Official Gmail Blog tracks the public history of Gmail from July 2007.
Google Calendar is a time-management and scheduling calendar service developed by Google. It became available in beta release April 13, 2006, and in general release in July 2009, on the web and as mobile apps for the Android and iOS platforms.
Paul T. Buchheit is an American computer engineer and entrepreneur who created the email service Gmail. He developed the original prototype of Google AdSense as part of his work on Gmail. He also suggested Google's former company motto Don't be evil in a 2000 meeting on company values, after the motto was initially coined in 1999 by engineer Amit Patel.
Picasa Web Albums (PWA) was an image hosting and sharing web service from Google, often compared to Flickr and similar sites. The service links with Google's photo organizing desktop program Picasa. It was discontinued in May 2016 and succeeded by Google Photos which does not support sharing photo albums on the public world wide web.
Google Workspace is a collection of cloud computing, productivity and collaboration tools, software and products developed and marketed by Google. It consists of Gmail, Contacts, Calendar, Meet and Chat for communication; Currents for employee engagement; Drive for storage; and the Google Docs Editors suite for content creation. An Admin Panel is provided for managing users and services. Depending on edition Google Workspace may also include the digital interactive whiteboard Jamboard and an option to purchase add-ons such as the telephony service Voice. The education edition adds a learning platform Google Classroom and today has the name Workspace for Education.
Google Voice is a telephone service that provides a U.S. phone number to Google Account customers in the U.S. and Google Workspace customers in Canada, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the contiguous United States. It is used for call forwarding and voicemail services, voice and text messaging, as well as U.S. and international calls. Calls are forwarded to the phone number that each user must configure in the account web portal. Users can answer and receive calls on any of the phones configured to ring in the web portal. While answering a call, the user can switch between the configured phones. Subscribers in the United States can make outgoing calls to domestic and international destinations. The service is configured and maintained by users in a web-based application, similar in style to Google's email service Gmail, or Android and iOS applications on smartphones or tablets.
The Gmail interface makes Gmail unique amongst webmail systems for several reasons. Most evident to users are its search-oriented features and means of managing e-mail in a "conversation view" that is similar to an Internet forum.
Google Buzz was a social networking, microblogging and messaging tool that was developed by Google which replaced Google Wave and integrated into their web-based email program, Gmail. Users could share links, photos, videos, status messages and comments organized in "conversations" and visible in the user's inbox.
In user interface design and software design, the principle of least astonishment (POLA), also known as principle of least surprise, proposes that a component of a system should behave in a way that most users will expect it to behave, and therefore not astonish or surprise users. The following is a corollary of the principle: "If a necessary feature has a high astonishment factor, it may be necessary to redesign the feature."
Material Design is a design language developed by Google in 2014. Expanding on the "cards" that debuted in Google Now, Material Design uses more grid-based layouts, responsive animations and transitions, padding, and depth effects such as lighting and shadows. Google announced Material Design on June 25, 2014, at the 2014 Google I/O conference.
American fuzzy lop (AFL), stylized in lowercase as american fuzzy lop, is a free software fuzzer that employs genetic algorithms in order to efficiently increase code coverage of the test cases. So far it has detected dozens of significant software bugs in major free software projects, including X.Org Server, PHP, OpenSSL, pngcrush, bash, Firefox, BIND, Qt, and SQLite.
Ben Darnell is an American computer programmer, entrepreneur, and business executive. He is the chief technology officer for Cockroach Labs, a company he co-founded in 2015. Prior to his work at Cockroach Labs, he worked for tech companies that include FriendFeed, Facebook, Brizzly, Dropbox, Viewfinder, and Square, Inc.
Dennis Miloseski is an American product and design executive, entrepreneur, inventor, speaker, and co-founder and executive board member of Palm Ventures Group, Inc. Miloseski studied design at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh and business at Harvard Business School, Executive Education. Born in Detroit, Michigan, Miloseski relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1998 and began his career in the Silicon Valley.
Google Chat is a communication service developed by Google. Initially designed for teams and business environments, it has since been made available for general consumers. It provides direct message, group conversations, and spaces, which allow users to create and assign tasks and share files in a central place in addition to chatting. It can be accessed through its own website and app or through the Gmail website and app.