Introducing Lightbox

Lightbox is a whole new way to interact with photos. When clicked, images now expand into a shiny new overlay that displays them at their full size for optimal viewing.

Once an image is opened in the lightbox view, any other images from the same post will now appear as thumbnails along the bottom, which can be easily browsed by clicking the arrow keys on the left or right side of the lightbox.

If you’ve custom-coded your image HTML so that images function as hyperlinks, then the lightbox view will not display and your original image hyperlink will work as expected.

For some reasons, if you’d like to disable Lightbox on your blog, log in to Blogger and select “No” next to Lightbox in the Settings | Posts and Comments section (new interface) or the Settings | Formatting section (old interface).

Suggestions and autocomplete for Blogger's blog

The text suggestions and autocomplete feature of Google Scribe, now be found in Blogger in Draft.

Google Scribe helps you write more efficiently by suggesting common words and phrases as you type. Google Scribe supports Arabic, Dutch, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Swedish. The language is automatically detected using the text in the post. Kuntal Loya, Blogger's Software Engineer, said on their blog.

Enabling Google Scribe is easy. Simply click the pencil icon in the toolbar within the Post Editor.

After Google Scribe is turned on, suggestions will appear in gray as you type, and you can accept them by hitting the spacebar or by typing a punctuation mark, such as a comma, period or question mark.

If you would like to receive more than one suggestion at a time, select "Show Multiple Suggestions" from the drop-down menu next to the pencil icon. You will then be able to see several options in a drop-down menu as you type.

Here are some keyboard shortcuts you may find handy. If you use a Mac, you can use the shortcuts below by replacing Ctrl with Command key (or 'Apple' key)

• Ctrl-j to enable and disable Scribe
• Ctrl-Shift-j to select and deselect multiple suggestions
• ESC to temporarily remove a suggestion
• TAB to restore a suggestion

Happy blogging!

Blogger interface is now available

According to Blogger team. As of right now, the new interface is available for all Blogger in Draft users. There is no sign up or activation process required; Just visit Blogger in Draft, and you’ll find the revamped interface.

Blogger new interface

Inspired by Google’s newest design evolutions, Blogger teamn have updated the look and feel of their new design. Over the last couple of months, we’ve made significant improvements to our new user interface. First and foremost, we’ve incorporated your feedback and made numerous fixes based on that feedback.

As you know, Blogger in Draft is Blogger’s equivalent to “Google Labs”. As Draft users, you'll get to experience Blogger's newest features, including the new design, earlier than other users. If you’re not yet on Blogger in Draft, simply go to draft.blogger.com, and check on the “Make Blogger in Draft my default” option on your dashboard.

Refreshed interface for image and video upload

Clicking the “photo” or “video” upload buttons in Insert image will now display a sleeker, updated picker. Blogger's also made it draggable so you can look back at the post editor if you need to. [via]

Dynamic Views for Blogger blog

Today Blogger's previewing five new dynamic templates in Blogger that you’ll soon be able to customize and use for your blog. These new views use the latest in web technology, including AJAX, HTML5 and CSS3, to deliver a host of benefits to you and your readers:

• Infinite scrolling: read more posts without having to reload or click to a second page
• New layouts: different views suited to different types of blogs
• Speed: download images as you view them, not all at once in advance
• Interactivity: there are now more ways to experience and engage with blog content

To try these views on your own blog, simply add “/view” to the end of the blog URL—for example, http://freeblogspottemplates.blogspot.com/view. These new views are available on all public Blogger blogs with feeds fully enabled.

These dynamic views will work on your blog if all of the following are true:

• Your blog is public. Your readers don’t need to sign in to view your blog.
• Your blog has feeds fully enabled. In the Settings | Site feed tab, you have enabled either Full or Jump Break for your Post Feed.
• You have not disabled dynamic views. In the Setting | Formatting tab, the option for Enable Dynamic Views is set to Yes.

If any of the above conditions are not true, users who attempt to access dynamic views for your blog will instead be taken to a landing page and redirected to your original blog in a few seconds.

Blogger Features in 2011

2010 was a big year for Blogger with template designer, real-time stats, comments spam filtering, mobile templates, web fonts, and more... And as Google promised with their users on Blogger Buzz yesterday, 2011 will be another exciting year with some features look like below:

And here's the video: