Check out the official Google Talk Blog - this week we launched a feature that allows you to set your Google Talk picture from your webcam.I wrote this as a small side project to teach myself Flash/Actionscript, which was quite, um, interesting, given my C++ background (I miss static type checking). It was a lot of fun though, and I owe many thanks to our UX designers who helped supply the necessary "Googley" factor.
You can try it out here in the Google Talk gadget - simply click on your Google Talk picture in the upper right hand corner, and choose the "Take Photo..." option (you'll need a webcam to see this option). You can also see how it works (in Japanese) in this unofficial video.
There are a few undocumented keyboard shortcuts for this feature:
- SPACE
will take a picture ESC will discard the taken picture ENTER will save it as your Google Talk picture
6 comments:
That's a great feature and works very nicely, but the various Google Talk clients are all becoming very out of sync. Gmail chat now has group chat and emoticons like the Gadget, but now has AOL integration which none of the others have. The Gadget has Youtube & Picasa integration and now this webcam feature, while the client has none of the above but does have voice chat! And the various languages that the client is available in still haven't received the updates that the English version got in July 2006, such as file transfer and voicemail.
It's natural that the various versions vary depending on their purpose - I wouldn't expect certain things in Gmail chat for example, but it is very sad that the client has been neglected for such a long time. It's the only way on the whole network to make voice calls, it's still only for Windows, and it has none of the essential features (group chat especially!) that have since been brought to the web-based platforms. And when are we going to see true webcam support with video conferencing, and the ability to call landlines, SIP phones and Skype users?
The client seems to have taken over the homepage again recently from the gadget, which gives me hope, and the aquisitions of Marratech and Grand Central a while ago seemed promising, but why is Google not communicating? Even the AOL integration turned out disappointing, as Gtalk users still cannot talk to them and the networks aren't interoperable.
Great new webcam feature though, and I hope to see more soon. :)
this features is still not available for me.
why link to go to google gadget link back to your blog?
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