Guide For All

Google+ has long been the best nerd-filled social network your mom hasn’t caught onto yet. On Friday, it got even better.

The Mountain View company has rolled 24 new features into the Google+ experience, and all of these new additions are now available in for iOS, Android and web users. On top of that, Google has redesigned its social network’s iPhone app, too.

Our first assessment of the big push: wherever you use it (if you’re one of the 135 million on the service), Google+ has improved.

The new iPhone app (version 4.0 if you’re keeping score) moves the look and feel of G+ stylistically closer to Google’s other iOS apps — the fantastic Google+ for iPad, Google Maps for iPhone, Gmail for iPhone and the Google Search iPhone app. Previously, Google+ on the iPhone had a look all its own, using a lot of black and dark gray across the interface, with a great deal of real estate given to photos. It was beautiful, and it made me wish more people used Google+, because that would make it more exciting to interact with. Alas, most of my friends — like 800 million other humans on the web — are turning to Facebook over Google+ to share and network with the world. And while that likely won’t change anytime too soon, the iPhone redesign greatly rewards those who do use G+.

The new look is airy with lots of white space, and it brings a level of personality and charm not many social networking apps (outside of Path) can match.

The use of dark regions is now confined to a black bar across the bottom of the default view — this bar is where the stream of incoming posts from your Circles shows up. The bar disappears as you’re scrolling through your stream, only to return when you’re not scrolling — which is when you’d actually want to use it. In the bar are four buttons: share a photo, check into a location, share a link from the web, or type a post. Each of the four buttons uses one of the four colors from Google’s logo — blue for photos, red for check-ins, yellow for links and green for written words. Gone is the black background, which has been replaced by a light gray color. Posts show up on white cards reminiscent of Android’s Google Now cards. Speaking of Android, the Google+ Android app remains the same for the most part, but it now also has this re-appearing black bar on its stream view.

Like the old app, you can choose which of your circles shows up in the stream view by tapping on a button at the top of the app. And, like the old app, refreshing your stream is done by the familiar pull-to-refresh action. Tug downwards on your stream and four bars show up above the most recent post, thinning as you stretch them. Let go and the text changes to “loading,” and the bars blink one at a time until the loading completes. It’s a nice embellishment.

via:wired