Seo Master present to you: By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs
I just got back from a trip to Belgium that had me speaking at JavaPolis, a conference full of Java and Web folk from Europe and beyond. Google engineers were all over, and we gave talks on Gears, GWT, Google data APIs, Guice, Google Java Collections, and Java language issues. It was capped off with an informal pub meetup where Google and Atlassian took the bill. Remember, they take pride in that Belgian beer.
GWT was in full force at the event. Many people came up to me to discuss their GWT implementations, and a lot of cool APIs and applications have been announced recently. For example, JSTM, the Java Shared Transacted Memory for GWT is a promising new library that gives you a transactional cache that can keep clients in sync. Map this onto Google Gears, and you can get offline caching. The author of the library is taking a lot at that feature right now. We also saw GWT Voices, which gives GWT developers with a cross browser sound API. Finally, Chronoscope showed us that you could take a GWT application, and with a small amount of work get it running on Android. A huge benefit of using the Java programming language across the board.
Speaking of Android, we got to have a nice long chat with Dianne Hackborn and Jason Parks of the Android team about many facets of the platform.
OpenSocial has been chugging away too, and it was exciting to see Apache Shindig, the open source set of components around OpenSocial, get released. This release includes a core gadget container foundation and an open source version of the gmodules.com renderer.
A fun new API was released recently too, which got a lot of buzz in the community. Out of the Zurich office, we saw the Google Charts API, which allows you to create dynamic charts in very short order. You can even integrate the new API with KML for quick data visualization.
The open source side of Google Code has had a busy time too. We released the Google Mac Developer Playground, which is a home for useful open source code produced by the Google Mac team, and any engineers at Google. With this release, Dave MacLachlan announced Statz which has already seen a major upgrade, allowing you to talk to a large swath of services.
On the back of the Google Summer of Code project, the team wanted to keep spreading open source goodness, and announced the Google Highly Open Participation Contest, and have already updated us of its performance. It is outstanding to see so many people coming together to help the myriad of open source communities out there.
Seo Master present to you: By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs
I just have to take a breath as I start this posting. The last couple of weeks have been a real trip as we first announced OpenSocial and then Android, both announcements that have drawn a lot of interest.
Let's start with Android. We started out announcing the Open Handset Alliance and made sure people realise that this effort is bigger than a Google Phone. It is a mobile platform, with many phones to come! After some of the initial surprise we released the part that you, as a developer, care about: Android SDK.
We have been astonished at the response. We now have over three and a half thousand messages on the Google Group with four thousand members. The discussion has been all over the map, from initial Eclipse setup, to discussing the sample code, to working on how to write native applications on the platform.
We have plenty of material for you to absorb, but a great way to start it:
We have only just begun here, and the current API is a baby 0.5 release, but it is contagious to see the container and social developers work together. Patrick Chanezon sat down and chatted with us about the new APIs and the Campfire One announcement shows you a lot.
To enable developers to get containers going quickly we have put out an opensource container sample and have also seen the beginnings of Apache Shindig, another potential container.
There are a couple of fun new open source projects announced: AxsJAX aims to make accessible Ajax applications more possible, and nsscache is an open source named services system.
We put together a nice piece on a spider's view of Web 2.0 which discusses SEO principles and how Web 2.0 practices affect, or do not affect them. What about Web -1.0? That is discussed in this great tech talk on the Web that wasn't. A nice history lesson.
I got to host my first tech talk at Google. I was lucky enough to pull in Steve Souders, Chief Performance Yahoo!, to discuss High Performance Web Sites and YSlow. If you want to make sure your sites run well, check out his core principles.
Oh, and one other thing. The Google Code team did a huge amount of work in revamping Google Code which coincided with the major launches. We believe that the site is a lot cleaner now, and gives us a base to work on as we move forward to do a better job at serving all developers out there. Thanks for joining us so far.
Seo Master present to you: By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Team
It's Leopard day. I am really excited to get home to install the new version of OS X. It isn't actually the new operating system itself that excites me, it is the new applications that I know have been waiting for this release to be able to see the light of day. Our own Google Mac team has announced an update for Leopard, so update Google Desktop before you change your strips for spots. When you setup the new Mail.app, consider enabling IMAP in Gmail and using both (I have been looking forward to IMAP support for a long time)!
I was really excited to see our Blogger GData JavaScript client library release. I am particularly proud of the examples that came along with the release as they really show you some of our ideas and give you good starting points for your own secure mashups.
We got to hear to some of the teams too. Bruce Johnson and Joel Webber, members of the Google Web Toolkit team, had a nice interview with Pearson before the upcoming conference on GWT.
Paul McDonald and Rich Burdon of the Google Mashup Editor Team also discussed the nuances of the GME product and where it is heading.
In the Google Maps world Pamela played with clickable Polygons and used the ability to play a game. Also, if you are a Flash-y kind of guy, you can do more with KML and Flash.
For those that like to search across open source code, we have a new ability to tell us more about your code via the integration of Google Code Search and Sitemaps.
Fancy some video? We had some great tech talks on campus including:
I am now heading out to get Leopard roaring, but a couple of final points. The new Google Finance Gadgets are interesting, and take a look at how our developer team lives in a Mario World.2013, By: Seo Master
Seo Master present to you: By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs
Weekly Google Code Roundup: Lots of Geo, feeling Ajax-y and another SoC graduation
It really rained today, which has been the biggest rain that I have seen since moving to Mountain View. I am used to it, since I hail from England, and I have the chance to go back to London to speak on Google Gears at the Future of Web Apps conference. We learned more about Vortex, a simple new offline and sync abstraction on top of Gears.
In other Ajax news, the Ajax API team released a nice new Dynamic Feed Control that has a wizard that helps you find feeds.
The GWT team are looking forward to Pearson's GWT conference which offers dedicated time with GWT developers and core engineers. The Rialto framework also joined the GWT family by creating a GWT wrapper of itself.
The bulk of the news seemed to center around the geo landscape.
Chris Schalk wrote a detailed article on mashing Google Maps with Oracle XML DB and Java.
If you aren't sure whether it is daytime or not when you drunkenly call your friend who is in europe, flip over to the featured DaylightMap site that always shows you where the sun shines.
We will finish with some interesting news for the newest coders:
Patrick Copeland talked about a new class around testing Google Mashup Editor that will be on offer to the University of Irvine students
Seo Master present to you: By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs
It was perfect timing for Doug Crockford, the legendary Ajax curmudgeon, to come to Google to discuss Gears and the mashup problem. The same week that he chatted about the issues that we face, we saw some innovation and fun mashups abound (for example, this Campaign Trails mashup created with the Google Mashup Editor).
Just a few days after we released the ability to do authenticated, cross domain mashups with Google Calendar the JupiterIT folk created Traffik, a mashup that combines your Google Calendar with a Google Map, allowing you to login to view private events and create news ones. It is great to see early experiments with the API such as the Digg Oracle's use of WorkerPool that we went into more detail on.
Vortex is another library that sits on top of Google Gears to add functionality through a nice layer of abstraction. The library will detect if you are online or offline, and have a system to handle one use case for sync issues. Brian Dunnington liked what he saw with the Dojo Offline Toolkit, and took a lot of the ideas from there, giving us a version that isn't coupled to a particular Ajax library. Libraries like this are exactly what we want to see. Gears is aiming to give the community rock solid, low level components, and we expect to see interesting abstractions on top. XMLHttpRequest is to Prototype/Dojo/GWT as Gears it to [insert your cool new offline framework here].
After the GWT 1.4 launch / coming out of beta was announced, Bob Vawter of the GWT team was able to let his hair down and he created a GWT application for the iPhone to see what the experience was like. His take-away was:
The Google Web Toolkit can be used to create applications that, in the same code base, work well on an iPhone and a traditional desktop browser.
You can read more about the development of the GWT Feed Reader.
In other GWT news we interviewed folks from Queplix, an open source CRM company, about their experience building their products which use a lot of GWT, various Google APIs, and even the Google Mini!
Sticking to JavaScript for just a touch more, the Google Maps API team have added a new Local Search Control which makes it simple to search the map that you are on. You can add this control to your Maps mashup with a line of JavaScript.
In other API news, Jeff Scudder announced a new release of the GData Python client library which gives you access to various new releases and a refactored codebase.
What else?
T.V. Raman kindly stopped by for a podcast interview on accessibility which may have some data and thoughts that surprise you.
And, for those of you who write test code, you may recognize the battle cry of: But it works on my machine!. John Thomas talks about the stability of your tests.
Seo Master present to you: By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs
We had a really fun week with launches and news across a myriad of products. From a technical perspective, it was really exciting to see the launch of a new GData JavaScript library that enables full CRUD access from the browser. No need for proxies. Jun Yang, engineer on the GData team, sat down to explain the API and how it works. People will remember when the mainstream thought it was impossible to do full read/write authenticated cross domain access in a secure way.
Speaking of JavaScript APIs, The Digg Oracle is a new Google Gears application that showcases the pattern of sucking down data, and allowing you to do local manipulations and data filtering in the client. It makes heavy use of the WorkerPool and the local database. See it in action.
The Google Gadget and AdSense universes combined for the introduction of Google Gadget Ads, which are customized "mini-sites" that run as ads on AdSense publisher websites. These ads are interactive, engaging, and will appeal to your users, simultaneously providing value to advertisers while getting visitors to stick around your site. The end result is that advertisers get more engaged users, users have a richer ad experience, and publishers opted in to image ads may see increased competition for their ad space.
These videos could have included a presentation, and now you can create presentations from within Google Docs itself. Now we the great collaboration experience that we have for docs and spreadsheets can be had for your presentations. Please use this power for good, and no slides with 20 bullet points!
Seo Master present to you: By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs
On the back of the stream of developer releases last week, we had some interesting activity in the community, and from our own product teams.
Omar Kilani, of the Remember The Milk team, did a fantastic, thorough write-up of his experience getting his product working offline with Gears. The article moves past an introduction to delve into the design decisions around an offline-capable architecture, and user messaging and presentation of state. We learn why Omar decided to go with the explicit offline mode, and then the five steps to offline conversion.
The Google Mashup Editor team has also been churning out new features based on your feedback. As a developer you can now enable public read only $user feed so that applications can share $user feeds to create social applications, edit XML, CSS and HTML files uploaded into the editor, work with Gadget files, and much more.
The cool easter egg of the week goes to the flight simulator that is in the most recent Google Earth application. There is something special about flying around the grand canyon, or over manhattan. Give it a try.
Flying is cool, but we all love searching. The Google Reader team released the much anticipated feature of being able to search across your feeds. If you knew that you had read about something a few days ago but couldn't find it, now you can.
Sharing is a kin to searching, and the Google Book Search, which had a significant Ajax facelift a year ago, has joined the two. A summer intern added the ability to save snippets from public domain books, and embed them to your website. It is as simple as selecting the text you want, and how you want to show it (an image of just text).
Featured Media
Mark Stahl, tech lead of the Google data APIs, talked to us about GData, the history behind it, the parts and pieces, and how people are implementing applications on top of it.
Quicksilver is a keyboard-driven launcher that is the first application that I install when I get a new Mac. Nicholas Jitkoff, creator of Quicksilver, is a Google employee on the Mac team, and they finally got him to talk all about Quicksilver: past, present, and future.
Mark Utting came to talk about Model-Based Testing and he compares two different kinds of test model: black-box models and white-box models.
Seo Master present to you: By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs
You know the summer is ending when the kids are back at school. We had a raft of exciting announcements this week, starting with the web developer tools of Gears and GWT, and including the latest set of Google data APIs to join the family.
The Gears team announced a new developer release. The release you, the developers, to play with new APIs including some new Gears modules (HttpRequest and Timer), and the ability to support cross-origin work.
Stephanie Liu of the Google data APIs team introduced us to the new YouTube GData APIs. Now you can search through YouTube's index and get detailed video, user, and playlist information in the form of GData feeds.
Featured Projects
The Google Zurich office has released an exciting new open source virtual server management tool called Ganeti. Ganeti is built on top of Xen and other open source software, and here at Google, we've used Ganeti in the internal corporate environment to facilitate cluster management of virtual servers in commodity hardware.
Gears In Motion is the latest database tool to sit on top of the Gears Database module. It allows you to visualize your local datastores in a new way.
We take the keyboard for granted, but Jaewoo Ahn came to Google to talk about MobileQWERTY a simplified keyboard concept suited for the mobile form factor.
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
It has been a busy time recently. The Zoho team announced offline support for their Writer application this week, so we met at their offices and talked to them about their experience. This is our first video talk, but more are in the works, so head over to our new YouTube channel.
If you are a Mac developer you now have access to more of our APIs via the updated Google Data APIs Objective-C Client Library. You can now work with Google Code Search, Picasa Web Albums, and do more with Google Calendars.
Speaking of Google Calendar, we introduced Calendar Gadgets which allow you to add behaviour to your calendar via Gadgets. Some early examples include adding horoscopes, sudoku puzzles that get harder throughout the week, and the ability to keep up with the all important celebrity birthdays.
The maps world has been productive. The big news of the week is the ability to embed a Map in a YouTube like way. Now you don't need to code to be able to build a map, and place it anyway you wish.
This doesn't mean the API is slowing down. Richard Garland wrote about a new cluster zoom feature that ties DragZoom and Marker Manager.
Introducing Sky in Google Earth has gotten a lot of people excited. Looking down at the earth is great, but being able to sit on your back and look up at the stars is just what you want on a nice summer night. Now you can do just that.
Featured Projects
Who's Web maps out various Web 2.0 talent on a rich Maps API implementation.
Zoho Writer has gone offline... in a good way. Now you can keep some of your docs available for that plane trip. Read more.
John Resig of Mozilla and jQuery gave a talk on Best Practices in Javascript Library Design based on his work on both the jQuery library, and the new FUEL library for building Firefox plugins.
Michael Still talked about Practical MythTV, which covered the powerful open source personal video recorder.
Seo Master present to you: By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs
In API and developer-product news...
ExtMapTypeControl 1.1 contains a smarter traffic button. In this week's release of API v2.86, there is a "changed" event for GTrafficOverlay that sends a boolean indicating whether traffic data is available in the current viewport. Using this event, Pamela modified the traffic button in ExtMapTypeControl to behave exactly as the maps.google.com button does. The example below lets you test out the new behavior - pan and zoom out to the other side of the world to see the button disappear.
The Google Mashup Editor has a couple of great new mashups including EarthQuake! which gives detailed information on earthquakes and plots their magnitude on a Google Map. If you are a Sudoku fan, Offline Sudoku will let you play away even when the internet connection isn't there for you, using Google Gears.
Speaking of Gears, Arjun Kalura has created a database sync module that shows the progress of a sync between a remote database, and a local one. The example also uses the worker pool to execute SQL in its own thread and hence keeping the user interface freed up to show the progress report on how the sync process is going.
We feel pretty generous with the amount of storage that we give out with our services such as Gmail and Picasa, but we realise that some users would like more so we now offer a way for you to buy more storage if you need it.
Joining the Open Invention Network: "You'll often hear members of our open source team say, "Every time you use Google, you're using Linux." It's absolutely true. Check a Google engineer's workstation, and you'll probably find it's running Linux. Do a search on Google.com, and a Linux server will return your results. Ever since Google got its start, Linux has given us the power and flexibility we need to serve millions of users around the world.
In turn, we feel a strong responsibility to the Linux community, and we're always looking for creative ways to put our resources in the hands of Linux developers. That's why today we became a licensee of the Open Invention Network (OIN), an innovative patent-sharing organization founded to create a legally protected environment for anyone who works with Linux."
You will notice that the search results now tell how when fresh content shows up via a small piece of metadata such as "13 hours ago". This is an instant indicator of freshness, which you may, or may not, have weight depending on what you are looking for.
Featured Projects
MapMSG lets you create an electronic note on a map. The note can be in the form of smoke, crop circles, and more.
Walk Score is a mashup that uses the Maps and AJAX Search APIs to show you how friendly your location is for walking.
Google Tech Talks
JSR-305: Java annotations For Defects: This talk describes the current status of JSR-305, Java annotations for software defect detection. This JSR will define several standard Java annotations for properties such as @Nonnegative and @Nonnull that can be used to document your design intentions in a way that be interpreted by multiple software tools.
Open-source-based high-resolution cameras: Andrey Filippov explains the designs and applications of Elphel, Inc. intelligent, network-enabled cameras based on open source hardware and software. Google currently uses Elphel cameras for book scanning and for capturing street imagery in Google Maps.
Seo Master present to you: By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs
It feels like summer started a blink of an eye ago but we have reached August already. The summer months tend to be slower, but it doesn't seem to be the case so far at Google.
The Google Calendar data API now supports two new read/write feeds that allow you to manage a user's list of calendars. One feed lets you create and delete calendars, while the second feed can be used to add and remove subscriptions to existing calendars.
The Google Mashup Editor is a high profile, complex application that was written with GWT. Rich Burdon of the GME team discusses the rationale behind the GWT tool choice.
Over the past few weeks, we enabled geocoding in the API for India, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and Ireland. That means there are potentially 1.1 billion more users that might now be able to locate themselves on your map - that's about 1/5 of the world's population. (Pamela utilized GoogleLookup functions in a google spreadsheet to do the calculations.)
Because we know that between teaching, doing research and advising students, computer science educators are quite strapped for time, we've recently launched a site called Google Code for Educators. While you may have previously heard about our offerings for K-12 teachers, this new program is focused on CS topics at the university level, and lets us share the knowledge we've built up around things like distributed systems and AJAX programming. It's designed for university faculty to learn about new computer science topics and include them in their courses, as well as to help curious students learn on their own.
Featured Projects
The Google Singleton Detector, or GSD, is a tool which analyzes Java bytecode and detects our different types of global state, including singletons, hingletons, mingletons and fingletons.
GWT Ext allows you to Ext components from within your GWT applications.
For our latest podcast, we spoke with four students who are working together on their Summer of Code projects. Three of the students attend the University of Toronto, but Jeff Balogh visited the university at the start of the program to do some project planning with David Cooper, so he's an honorary UT alumni; both David and Jeff are working with mentors from the Python Software Foundation.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
It has been a busy time for conferences. From MashupCamp last week, to OSCON and The Ajax Experience this week. While some of the teams have been talking to developers at these events, others have been producing new APIs for you all to use.
In API and developer-product news...
A new API was added to the AJAX Search API, Image Search.
We have released a new tool that we have been playing with, the Google Singleton Detector, as open source. Its job is to find singletons and global state in the Java code that we produce.
While working on the Zvents mapplet, Michael Geary developed a nifty utility function called GAsync(). This lets you make several requests in a single call. Mike has kindly donated this function to the Mapplets API so that everyone can use it.
In other Map news, the Maps API team created utility functions to give you more information about your lines and shapes: GPolyline.getLength, GPolyline.getBounds, GPolygon.getArea, and GPolygon.getBounds.
The newest Google Earth Enterprise: Today, we're pleased to announce the newest version of Google Earth Enterprise. The enterprise solution brings us into close contact with some of the most advanced users of geospatial tools, and by meeting their needs, it helps make the product better for everyone. And enterprise users are some of the most active in using the products and also making contributions to the Google Earth and Maps user community, with data, blogs and mashups.
Featured Projects
The BBC Flood Tracking mapplet is a fantastic example of citizen journalism. This map includes UK flood alert information, emergency center locations, photos submitted by local residents, user-generated YouTube videos, and audio clips by BBC Radio correspondents.
Jookebox is a music mashup that pulls in data from iTunes and Amazon to give you a comprehensive view of what's happening on the music scene.
Google Tech Talks
Inbox Zero is a fantastic talk by Merlin Mann, a well known productivity guru and creator of the popular 43 folders website. Merlin talks about Getting Things Done, the importance of getting your inbox to zero, and strategies for dealing with high volume email.
Erlang is celebrating its 20th birthday this year, and is grabbing developers interest due to its concurrency model. This talk will cover the history of Erlang, demonstrate major design goals with a few programming examples and also touch on the subject of the future of Erlang.
Erlang also has the best movie made about it: Erlang the movie. A real classic.
The Google Test Automation Conference showcases lightning talks by Harry Robinson, Dan North, Steve Freeman, Nat Pryce, Christine Newman, Andrin von Rechenberg, Ade Oshineye, Timur Hairullin, James Richardson, James Lyndsay, Jordan Dea-Mattson, Curtis "Ovid" Poe.
Launchd: One Program to Rule them All: In this talk, Dave, who developed launchd, will discuss the rationale behind launchd and how the program came to be.2013, By: Seo Master
Seo Master present to you: By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs
This week we have the pleasure of having MashupCamp hosted walking distance from the Googleplex. It was great to meet people from varied backgrounds in an open spaces format, and to see so many Googlers there mixing in with the fun. We had discussions around the Google Mashup Editor, Google Geras, and of course our various APIs such as Maps and AJAX Search and Feeds.
The AJAX API team launched new functionality in the AJAX Feed API. You can now lookup and discover feeds based on a search or URL. They also posted an iPhone targeted version of the AJAX Search component.
The results are in for the winners of the Build Your Campus in 3D Competition. The judges chose 7 teams from among the dozens who submitted more than 4000 buildings from higher education institutions all over North America. Tag a fly through your school and see if it has changed!
For those who will be at OSCON and are interested in learning about Google's open source activities, come hear our annual open source update or learn more about how the community has used our project hosting service since its launch at OSCON 2006. For those interested in our developer applications, we'll be taking a look at how to write large, multipage Ajax applications with Google Web Toolkit and getting up close and personal with Google Gears. We're excited to hear your feedback and answer your questions.
Deepak Ramanathan announced Custom Search Business Edition (CSBE), a hosted site search solution that provides Google-quality results for your website. It's fast, relevant, reliable, and flexible, so that users can quickly find what they're looking for through search results customized and integrated into your business website.
Maile Ohye posted about a new Message Center which is a new way for webmasters to receive personalized information from Google in our webmaster console. Should we need to contact you, you'll see a notification in your Webmaster Tools dashboard.
Chris Sacca, Head of Special Initiatives, has written a detailed post on the policy behind Google's commitment to open broadband platforms, including open applications, open devices, open services, and open networks.
Ionut Alex Chitu posted on the unofficial Google Operating System blog about how Google Reader works as a podcast catcher, including how you can pop-out the music player.
Featured Projects
Prague 360 makes great usage of the Google Maps API to show beautiful gigapixel mapping of certain cities, including 360 degree visualizations.
FindBugs is an open source static analysis tool to find coding defects in Java programs. Surprise yourself and run this on your code base.
Kurzweil says, computers will enable people to live forever and doctors will be doing ... all backup of your memories by late 2030. This talk is not about that, yet. Instead, the remarkable drop in disk costs makes it possible and attractive to retain past application states and store them for a long time for mining or auditing.
Secure and spontaneous communication between wireless devices that come within close ... all proximity of each other, but lack a pre-existing trust relationship -- devices that are previously unknown to each other -- is an important component of many future pervasive applications.
Eyal de Lara came to talk about Amigo, a proximity-based authentication of mobile devices.
We got to chat with Adam Sah of the Google Gadgets team about all things Gadgets. This includes the technology side of things but also the business side: such as monetizing your gadgets and the new Google Gadget Ventures.2013, By: Seo Master
Omar Khan has introduced a new blog for the Google Desktop APIs which was created to open a another line of dialog and provide useful information such as tips, announcements, developer jokes, links to articles and tutorials, and more.
GGeoXML Methods, GDraggableObject Events, & Geodesic Polylines details how the Maps API team has given developers GGeoXML functions to make loading and viewing files easier. GGeoXML now comes with a callback function that's entered once the file has loaded, plus a number of utility functions.
Dick Wall has written his second article on a series on Guice, Squeezing More Guice from Your Tests with EasyMock, which delves into how dependency injection and mock objects can be used together in glee.
Around Google
The FeedBurner and Blogger teams have joined up very quickly to create a nice integration of the two products. From within your Blogger settings you can now specify that you have a FeedBurner feed that manages your blog, and Blogger will use that feed address.
Featured Projects
This YouTube Mapplet mashes-up YouTube videos and Geo using the newly released Mapplets feature that now lives in My Maps.
Neil Daswani's talk discusses recent trends in security, and what every engineer needs to know to prevent the most significant emerging threats such as cross-site scripting and SQL injection attacks.
Now in his second year of working on GridSweeper for Summer of Code, Ed Baskerville recently joined us to talk more about his project and his burgeoning career as a cellist.2013, By: Seo Master
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
Seo Master present to you: By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs
Having the July 4th holiday smack in the middle of the week creates a strange week when it is hard to know which day it is. That being said, we have seen some interesting uses of our APIs, and we are happy to welcome a new team to Google.
In API and developer-product news...
Aleksander Fedorynski felt like "a penguin assigned to work on Herring Search" when he started building improvements to Google Code Search.
Mark Berghausen of the Search Quality Team has written a few words about the search considerations designers should think about when building a Flash-heavy site in: Best uses of Flash.
GrandCentral is now part of the team: "GrandCentral is an innovative service that lets users integrate all of their existing phone numbers and voice mailboxes into one account, which can be accessed from the web. We think GrandCentral's technology fits well into Google's efforts to provide services that enhance the collaborative exchange of information between our users."
Featured Projects
The Rocket GWT library provides the ability to define beans, properties, references and other Spring like concepts in GWT.
The Digg Roundup Gadget is a gadget based on the Digg Roundup tool, accompanied by a detailed "how-to" write up.
Google Tech Talks
The Seattle Conference on Scalability recently took place and a lot of great talks from the event have been made available:
Seo Master present to you: By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs
It has been a great week. From the new Google Gadget Ventures, to the new ability to click and drag locations on Google Maps, and beyond with some fantastic talks that were given on campus.
In API and developer-product news...
Do you like developing gadgets? Have you started to make a business around the ones you have developed? We want to help, and we announced the Google Gadget Ventures program which allows you to apply for grants, and even seed investments.
The Google Mashup Gallery is a mashup itself, that allows you to add your mashup to the mix. Now, everyone will be able to find your Britney vs. Christina mashup!
AppleScripting Google Desktop means that you can tell the Google Desktop application to do things for you via script. Boss around the system from your own applications and scripts.
Instead of statically working with points on Google Maps. Now you can click and drag points around, which results in your driving directions redrawing on the fly. This can be addicting.
Google Desktop is now available for Linux: Since some Linux users are program developers, Google Desktop was designed with the ability to search source code and information contained in .pdf, .ps, .man and .info documents. It also features the Quick Search Box ,which you can call up by pressing the Ctrl key twice. Type a few letters or words into the search box and your top results pop up instantly.
Facebook Gadget Receive your latest notifications on Facebook, check out your friends' latest updates, view photos, and even launch searches all from your Google Homepage.
Fill That Hole has a new Pothole Mapplet that keeps you in the know as you choose your biking routes.
Raph Levien came to talk to us about his lessons from Advogato, the community blog for free software developers.
Cameron Purdy discussed getting Coherence discussing data grids and what they can do for you.
Philippe Mougin, the project lead of FScript - a scripting solution for Mac OS X / Cocoa, discussed the project which "is much more than just a scripting language, like smalltalk it provides a set of high level exploration, browsing and development tools which let you explore Objective C libraries as easily as FScript ones."
