Seo Master present to you: By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs
Code Review is produced in a variety of formats, from text to audio (iTunes) and video.
The last several days have been exciting. We are seeing great new technology that can enable us to do new things, and have old things run a lot better.
Mozilla announced TraceMonkey, which promises large JavaScript performance improvements based on their trace based JIT technique. This, which backs on to the earlier SquirrelFish announcement from Apple and the WebKit team, and IE8 beta 2 arriving today with performance improvements too.
Running a new browser and seeing Gmail get a lot faster is just as good as buying a new computer to get a speed up!
Gears 0.4 has been released and people have picked up on the main points.
As an experiment, I wrote a shim that would bridge the W3C Geolocation API that Andrei Popescu of the Gears team is editing, and the other APIs. This is shown via a simple Where are you? sample application.
Giving you access to location information is fantastic, but this isn't all Gears 0.4 has to offer.
The new YouTube multi-file upload page gives you the ability to upload many files, with progress on the upload, and the ability to resume uploads after a connectivity problem. Brad Neuberg wrote a sample that ties together the new APIs (Blob, HTTPRequest improvements, Desktop API file system addition) and shows how you could create the experience too.
For more of this content, you can follow our two new series: Open Web Podcast, and the State of HTML 5.
Mobile News
A much awaited SDK update from Android that includes the new Home screen and many UI changes. New applications are also added (Alarm Clock, Calculator, Music player, etc) and new APIs and developer tools.
We also continue to add iPhone-friendly views of the Google world. THe latest is the Google Translate view.
Been playing with Google App Engine? If so, you should be aware of datastore updates that give you the ability to do batch updates, and discussions of indexing improvements. It is fascinating to watch cool new applications: from mini-services, to full applications, to platforms themselves, giving App Engine a go.
Open Source
The Google Summer of Code is moving along, and since we are now in August we get to see the progress that the students that have been flipping bits and not burgers this summer. One example is the work of 6 students working on the Git version control system.
Steve Weis has released Keyczar, a "toolkit that makes cryptography safer and easier to use". We all commonly make mistakes including the wrong cipher modes, bad algorithms, or working with keys incorrectly. Keyczar has got your back, is there to help keep your code secure.
Speaking of security, Thomas Duebendorfer of our Swiss office gave a talk titled Are internet users at risk? that delves into the practices of browsers and plugins, and how they update themselves. This just reaffirmed my desire to have silent updates getting pushed to me to keep me more secure!
Another video that we published that caught my eye was Where the hell is Matt?. Matt Harding is the guy who you may have seen on YouTube dancing badly around the world. We got him to the office and he chatted on his adventures. If you find yourself waiting for a compile (or a Map Reduce) this Friday, give it a watch while you wait.
Finally, registration opened up for the Google Developer Day events in India, Italy, the Czech Republic, and Russia. These join the first wave of events in the UK, France, Germany, and Spain. I really hope that we get to see you at one of those locations!
As always, thanks for reading, listening, or watching, and let us know if there is anything that you would like to see.2013, By: Seo Master
Seo Master present to you: By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs
How do you like your Code Review? Choose from text to audio (iTunes) and video.
We have had a varied couple of weeks, so I decided to turn on the camera, even though I am in Eldora, Colorado, up in the mountains.
First up, the Open Web Foundation. I discuss the new foundation and what it is trying to accomplish (not another standards org!).
Then we stay on the topic of the Open Web and browsers, and how Vladimir Vukićević has an promising implementation of Canvas in IE. excanvas has done this for awhile by first emulating VML, and more recently with a Silverlight bridge. Vladimir is a Mozilla hacker, and he managed to shoehorn the Firefox Canvas code in via an <object>.
We have worked out how to license our code, but what about the other stuff that a project has? What about the documentation, the samples, the protocols? The Google Code team now allows you to choose a content license to cover those bases. Just a simple drop down away in your project hosting area.
Elsewhere, in Google Code land, the code review tool that we talked about early has now made its way to Google Code. Now you can say "Looks Good To Me" to your buddies source code as he puts in a new commit on your new opensource project.
Now you have the new tools, how about searching over that large amount of code that we are putting out there? Code Search just got a lot better with rich outlines showing you meta data on the file that you are in, and hyperlinking includes and such.
Moving to Ajax and the Web for a second. One of the common requests that we have had since we launched the AJAX Libraries API, is to be able to access the Google hosted popular opensource libraries on https as well. And, now we do. If your application is on https and you don't want users to see any "mixed content" messages, go ahead and use https on us too!
Google XML Pages (GXP) is a templating system we use at Google. Its main focus is markup: we mostly use it for generating HTML and XHTML, but it can work with other flavors of XML, like Atom, KML, and RSS. It also has some support for a few non-markup languages (JavaScript, CSS and plain text), though mostly for embedding them within markup.
Check it out and see how some of the Google products do the view side of MVC on the Web.
QR Code in Charts API: QR codes are 2D bar codes. You can store anything you want, but commonly people put URLs and contact information in there, that mobile phones can quickly scan.
Seo Master present to you: By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs
We are trying an experiment, putting up Code Review in a variety of formats, from text to audio (iTunes) and video.
After a great trip to Brazil and Mexico for the Google Developer Day events (Europe in September and October) I am back at it.
There has been some great news in the last week or so, shall we take a peak?
The GData team announced OAuth support around the horn. OAuth is:
An open protocol to allow secure API authentication in a simple and standard method from desktop and web applications.
And, now you can use the standard to access Google services. This is great, as you can write your applications to the one standard, and have it work across various back-ends.
There was some great news that Google, Yahoo!, and Adobe participated in. We have improved Flash indexing working with Adobe's Searchable SWF library, and some smart algorithms. We can now add URLs that are part of the SWF to the pipeline, and can fire off events to grab more data. This is another improved step (we could grok text in the SWF before) and we hope to see many more as we get better at indexing richer and more varied content on the Web.
We also open sourced the Browser Sync code to see if a community wants to come together to continue to support it.
Testing is tough, and we saw two interesting releases that sit in very different realms of the testing world.
Firstly, the Selenium team produced Selenium Ice a great new way to drive Internet Explorer as you test your Web applications.
Secondly, if you are a C++ developer and you like testing, you may be interested to take a peak at the Google Testing library for C++ that we released.
The GData teams have also come up with a couple more releases to go along with the big OAuth announcement.
The first lies with Google Calendar. You can access your GCal data through GData, but what if you just want a nice visualization of the calendar on your website?
CalVis does just that. You get to customize the look and feel, and the library does the rest.
Mrinal Wadhwa flex-ed his muscles to add Gears support to Flex applications via a nice simple library. If you are building Flex applications and want access to the growing Gears components, check it out.
Yesterday was a very Web "3D" day. We released Lively a 3D virtual experience that is the newest addition to Google Labs. It lets you create an avatar and rooms to hang out in. I also saw that Vivaty launched, and some are talking about how virtual worlds are hot in the Valley.
Lively has GTalk integration, and we just released Google talk for iPhone just in time for the new iPhone 3G launch at the end of the week. I will probably head down to one of the Apple Stores and upgrade myself!
As always, thanks for reading, listening, or watching, and let us know if there is anything that you would like to see.2013, By: Seo Master
Just as we come down from I/O, we head off to Google Developer Day events around the world. I am personally off to Brazil and Mexico City, and I am looking forward to meeting the local developers.
I gave a tech talk at Yahoo! where I discussed Google Back to Front, covering Gears and App Engine. I shared a simple App Engine example that takes a Gears-enabled Addressbook application that shows how you can store history in a visual way, and ports it to save the data on App Engine. You can watch a code walk through to see it in action.
Dick Wall (Google) and James Ward (Adobe) also got together to create an AIR application that talks to App Engine on the back end. The application, called QuickFix, takes a photo and has App Engine run the Picasa "I'm Feeling Lucky" transformation.
It is really fun to watch the great applications being built on App Engine already, such as Wordle, which builds "word clouds" from a series of text.
One final piece of news on App Engine. Nick Johnson (Google) created a little application in his spare time (read: not official) that is quite useful. smtp2web.com bridges SMTP to HTTP. This means that you can have your App Engine applications accepting email as input via the proxy. smtp2web will send an HTTP request when it gets an email on its doorstep.
There has been a lot of focus on the browser this week. Mozilla released Firefox 3, and look like they have set a download record in the process. There was a lot of browser news though, including all of the major vendors.
The standards are moving too. HTML 5 has a new working draft, and we are seeing the germination of an Acid4 series of tests.
When it comes to Gears, we saw the full release of version 0.3 which included support for the new Firefox 3 browser. It also includes the ability to create desktop shortcuts, new install flow support, progress events, and much more.
We also saw more frameworks baking Gears in. Appcelerator uses Gears under the hood to make your existing Appcelerator based application a better user experience. Also, Frizione is a JavaScript development, testing, and deployment environment that also has Gears under the hood.
If you fancy some fun on Google Maps, Katsuomi Kobayashi has created a 2D Driving Simulator using the new Flash API.
The folks at 360cities also have a great new interface that uses the Flash API, and they also seem to use every other Geo related product. We were fortunate enough to have them come in and sit down with them, and get a bunch of demos.
What else?
If you care about the social Web, check out Kevin Marks post on how not to be viral. It makes you think long term about your strategy.
Kevin Lim posted on the Custom Search API and the new developer guide. This API always surprises me with its richness, and how you can create a fantastic, custom, search experience on your own Web site.
Related to that API, we have another new AJAX Search API, Patent Search. I have to admit, I feel sorry for you if you have to use it (due to the content)!
And to finish up, Michael Ogawa has created some great visualizations of open source projects over time, such as the history of the Python code base. Check it out below.
As always, thanks for reading, listening, or watching, and let us know if there is anything that you would like to see.2013, By: Seo Master
