Google Play Music for Desktop Has a New Interface

Google Play Music's web app switched to Material Design and has a new interface that closely resembles the mobile UI. The left sidebar is now a hamburger-style menu, photos are bigger, there's more white space and everything looks like a mobile app stretched out to fit a much bigger screen.

"We're moving towards making the web feel more like an app and less like a series of web pages strung together by links," said Google UX designer Bryan Rea. "The new header, the slick transition as you scroll, the collapsible nav, new animations, these all feel like things you expect in an app not on the web. For the increased focus on big, immersive artwork, when you're listening to music, you can get lost in it (in a good way). With the new album and playlist pages, you enter an immersive world focused on the music you're enjoying."

YouTube Discontinues Collections

YouTube had a feature that allowed you to group subscriptions and create collections. This feature will soon be removed: "on 5/20/15, we'll discontinue Collections, as we'll focus on other efforts to make your subscriptions more enjoyable."

"A collection is a group of subscriptions you can create to help you organize and view content from the channels you're subscribed to. Collections can be created by themes (like 'basketball' or 'music')," explains YouTube.

Collections could be created, deleted and edited from the subscription manager. In many ways, YouTube collections were just like folders in a feed reader.

If you want to use a feed reader to manage your YouTube subscriptions, you can export them to OPML and import the file into your favorite feed reader. Open the subscriptions manager, scroll down to the bottom of the page and click "Export subscriptions". Another options is to use this link.

YouTube Switches to Roboto

After a few months of experiments, YouTube changed its font from Arial to Roboto. In addition to Android, many other Google apps and services use Roboto, a typeface designed in-house at Google by Christian Robertson.

Here are some screenshots from Firefox for Windows:

I've switched back to Arial and got this GIF animation:

Here's a screenshot from Chrome for Windows: it looks quite different.

Browsers like Firefox and Chrome show a lot of information about fonts: you can select some text, right-click, pick "inspect element", switch to the Fonts or Computed tab and find the fonts that are used.

9to5Google.com says that "the font comes in several weights, but the one Google has gone with is slightly lighter than what users may be used to compared to the Arial font. This will surely lead to some complaints about it being harder to read".

New Gmail Login Page

Gmail has a new login page. When you first sign in, Google only asks you to enter you email address. Click Next to enter your password and Google might show your name and your Google+ profile photo.

It's not clear if Google only shows the name and the profile photo for your Gmail accounts. I tried various email addresses and Gmail only displayed a generic image.

{ Thanks, Maurice Wahba. }

Google Translate Community Uses Material Design

Google Translate Community has a new interface powered by Material Design. It's a site that helps Google improve the quality of Google Translate. "Your help will enhance translations for millions of users," informs Google.

The new interface is more colorful and uses more images. There's a hamburger-style menu, a section that shows your stats and the badges you've earned. You can select 2 to 5 languages, including a few languages that aren't yet available in Google Translate like: Cantonese, Cherokee, Corsican, Tibetan, Guarani, Hawaiian and more. Then you only need to translate some phrases or rate translations.

Google also offers a simplified version of the Translate Community site, which uses the old interface.