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Seo Master present to you: By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs

It has been a busy week as usual, especially for those interested in the world of Geo.

In API and developer-product news...

Base diving with Google Gears covers an application that we built that searches Google Base and saves the information with Google Gears allowing for off-line use.

The Safe Browsing API was released, which allows your application to use the API to download an encrypted table for local, client-side lookups of URLs that you would like to check. Now you can stop phishers and malware abusers.

Guicing Up Your Testing is the first article in a series on Google Guice by our own Dick Wall.

The Google AJAX Feed API's Slide Show Control is now available as a Google Gadget.

The mapping world was busy as always:

• Add Traffic to Your Mashup (Button + Legend, too)!
• Three new KML resources up
• Set Country/Viewport Restrictions in your GClientGeocoder for More Tailored Results

Around Google

T.V. Raman has discussed his experience using the new open source OCR that we are working on, comparing it to commercial alternatives that he uses.

Put your business on Google Maps with the Local Business Center which has launched a new look.

The Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit took place at Google last week. For more information read the wrapup article.

Google Tech Talks

Semantic Web: The Semantic Web is a field aiming a the creation, deployment, and interoperation of machine readable data on the Internet. In the talk we present some projects in DERI on Semantic Web technologies - notably Semantic Interlinking of Online Community sites, Social Semantic Collaborative Filtering, and ActiveRDF, a library for Browsing, programming and navigating Semantic Web data.

View more tech talks.

Podcasts

In Google Developer Podcast Episode Four we had the chance to interview Mark Limber on Google SketchUp, and how developers can use the Ruby, C++, and other APIs.

The OpenMRS Project: You'll get a chance to learn from Paul about the history of OpenMRS, life as a brand new organization in Summer of Code, and the social change uses of open source in developing nations.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.



You have probably heard by now, but all of the slides and video of the presentations at Google I/O are now available to watch and read. There are some real gems in there, such as Steve Yegge talking about dynamic languages and server side JavaScript.

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.

Speaking of testing, Markus Clermont and John Thomas wrote up an introduction to testing Ajax applications, something that is notoriously hard to do.

The Geo world is cooking as usual, and you can check out the numerous election mashups as the season continues to blossom.

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

Seo Master present to you: By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs

In API and developer-product news...

I will start by going meta. Linking to a roundup from a roundup makes your head spin, but we have two good ones:

Google Web Toolkit Video from Developer Day and Some Great Technical Blog Posts is a roundup itself of news in and around Google Web Toolkit.

The Community Response to Gears has been fantastic, so we tried to put together the various API abstractions, libraries, and applications that have already been built on Gears.

Using Multiple Pages in your Mashup shows you how building a mashup with the Google Mashup Editor isn't about one page maps. Paul shows you how you can create rich applications that span multiple pages.

We have a lot of great new articles and tutorials, such as:

• Converting a Maps API Mashup into a Mapplet
• Using PHP/MySQL with Google Maps and KML

Around Google

Blogger in Draft is a site for those on the bleeding edge with Blogger. Take a look at the current sneak ahead preview of Blogger.Next.

Aidan Chopra shows how you can create animated models for Google Earth. Watch the London Eye rotate as you see the people getting married at the top....

Featured Projects

Breakpad is an open-source multi-platform crash reporting system (Mac OS X, Linux, Windows).

Veloroutes is the perfect Maps API mashup for cycle enthusiasts. It has a lot of nice features including elevation information.

Google Tech Talks

Navigating the World's Photographs

This talk explores ways of transforming this massive, unorganized photo collection into visualizations of the world's sites, cities, and landscapes.

Introduction to MacLibre and OpenTouch

This presentation will cover an introduction to MacLibre & OpenTouch, both Google Summer of Code projects. The presentation will explore MacLibre as a new way of open source software distribution on Mac OS X, as well as OpenTouch as an open source framework for multimodal input devices.

View more tech talks.

Podcasts

The Joomla! Project

The entire Joomla! core team visited Google a few weeks ago, and Leslie Hawthorn got the chance to catch up with them about all things Summer of Code.2013, By: Seo Master

Seo Master present to you: By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs

This week it felt like the day after the wedding. The developer day was complete, and now we need to move on, gather up the feedback from the community, and start on the real work of producing APIs and tools for you all.

In API and developer-product news...

DragZoomControl v1.0: Easier zooming, coming right up!

Andre Lewis has contributed his GZoom control to the Google Maps Utility Library which is a set of useful additions to the Maps API, distributed under an open source license. The new control is DragZoomControl, and does what it says on the box.

New KML Developments and Documentation

Mano Marks told us about the new documentation available that tells us about how to get Google to search your KML files, and the release of KML 2.2 beta reference material. KML will now support use of the Atom Syndication format atom:author and atom:uri elements for attribution.

AJAX Feed API Slide Show Enhancements

Mark Lucovsky upgraded the AJAX Feed API Slide Show to allow you to tweak the experience by using various callbacks that let you hook slide transitions, clicks, etc. For an example, he created a slideshow view
of PodTech that allows you to play videos inline as the appropriate image shows up.

Around Google

Google Calendar Gallery

The Google Calendar Gallery helps you find public calendars that may interest you. Plug in the Red Sox schedule, or the Netflix release dates, directly into your calendar.

FeedBurner Acquisition

FeedBurner lets you manage your feeds in interesting ways. You offload the traffic to the service, can add features on top of your own feed (enable Podcast on the fly, advertising, etc), and see great statistics on how your users are using it. We are proud to have the FeedBurner team part of the Google family.

Featured Projects

San Francisco Giants Mashup

Paul McDonald, of the Google Mashup Editor team, has put together a nice mashup on all things SF Giants. As with all Google Mashups, everyone is open source, and you can "view source" on anyones application. Take a peak at this example to see how you can use the mashup editor to do some sophisticated application building.

Remember The Milk Offline

The Remember The Milk team had an advantage. They were in Sydney where we released Gears, and they were obviously on the case. They quickly released an offline version of their TODO list application.

Google Tech Talks

Java on Guice: Dependency Injection, the Java Way

Bob Lee has been traveling the world speaking on Guice recently. This week he got to give his talk right here in Mountain View, and it was recorded for your viewing pleasure.

Hey, What's That? A Map Hack

Michael Kosowsky came to chat about his cool Maps application that lets you see what you could see from a high point (e.g. Longs Peak). Fun math and visualizations indeed.

Podcasts

Google Developer Podcast Episode Three: Mike Tsao on Google Gears

We got to interview Mike Tsao of the Google Gears team on how Gears came about, the design decisions, and lessons for developers as they go about offline-enabling their applications.

The Mono Project

Miguel de Icaza was joined by three former students for Mono: Aaron Tomb, Alan McGovern and Michael Hutchinson. They chat about the past, present, and future of Mono and what the summer of coders are working on now.2013, By: Seo Master

Seo Master present to you: By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs

Phew, I am still getting over Google I/O. It is interesting to be on the inside and see the build up to the event itself. We were getting excited to hold our largest event with the developer community to date. It didn't dissapoint, and I was very happy to see developers from all walk of lives and companies. I met programmers from Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, Yahoo!, MySpace, and I could keep on going.

You can check out the keynote below, and videos of the sessions are coming very soon, so check out the Google Developers YouTube channel.



The show started well for me as I got to see a project that I have been passionate about launch, the AJAX Libraries API which has us hosting popular open source Ajax libraries on the Google infrastructure. This release is the first step and we look forward to pushing forward with the goal of aggressively getting libraries that many developers use in browsers as fast as possible. If we are successful then we can start to think of these libraries as a standard library of sorts. The community has already started to build interesting tools around this new service. For example, you can now install a Wordpress plugin that rewrites your page to use your library of choice on Google's servers.

Gears was launched at last years Google Developer Day, and the coming out party for this years birthday was a debranding of "Google Gears" to "Gears" to reflect the community effort. Talks by the Gears engineers showed new APIs in the works, how we are working with HTML5 and standards, Gears for Mobile demonstrations, and the MySpace Messaging launch that uses Gears to enable a new search feature that offloads processing from their data centers and gives lightning fast results.

App Engine came out in the keynote sharing the fact that anyone can signup now, the expected pricing model (important to note that the starting point will ALWAYS be free), and new APIs that work with Email and Memcached.

The Geo world had another set of news. Google Earth can now be used in the browser thanks to a new plugin that allows you to add a quick line of JavaScript to your Maps API code to see it in action.

Ben Lisbakken wrote a piece on his application that uses App Engine, Local Search, and Maps to make static maps interactive.

Finally, in housekeeping news, the Maps API blog has been transformed to the new Geo Developer Blog, so update your feed readers.

What else?

• Google Web Toolkit 1.5 Release Candidate: The new release candidate is a big one, with big new features. The GWT sessions at I/O were all packed, and I heard a lot of people walking out talking about how the difficult nature of Ajax development means they will be giving GWT a try.
• Google Visualization API update: The "GViz" API was launched within Google Spreadsheets, but now it has been expanded to live elsewhere. This includes a new JavaScript API to create add-hoc data tables on the client.
• Google Contacts API update: The Contacts API now supports contact groups, photos, extended properties, and batch processing

Finally, to end with a bit of fun. Aaron Spangler created something very cool with his 20% time. Along with a colleague, he created Radish an indoor solar-powered calendar display that hooked into Google Calendar and once ever hour updates via epaper.

Check it out:

2013, By: Seo Master

Seo Master present to you: Posted by Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs

A lot of the product teams are heads-down for Google Developer Day, which is only a matter of days away! Ed Burnette interviewed Bret Taylor, Group Product Manager, and the interview will give you a glimpse of what is to come at Developer Day.

Although the engineers and teams are hard at work preparing for Developer Day, there was still a lot of news surrounding developer APIs and products.

In API and developer-product news...

Cool Ajax Feeds and Maps Mashup

Chris Schalk has created a mashup using the AJAX Feed and Google Maps APIs. The mashup allows you to find photos in Flickr, and have them plotted on a map, thanks to georss. This is a nice example to View Source to get more of a feel for the APIs and how you can use them as building blocks to work with each other.

Generate dode from your WADL REST API descriptions with REST Describe & Compile

Thomas Steiner has released a new version of his REST Describe and Compile tool. The tool is capable of creating, editing, and describing services using the new WADL format. The current tool will generate PHP code to access your REST APIs (more languages coming), and is created with the Google Web Toolkit.

LightboxImage GWT

Everyone loves a lightbox. If you hunt around the Web you will find lightboxes, thickboxes, thinboxes, and all other boxen. This GWT component wraps the original lightbox so that you can create modular image inline popups without having to touch the JavaScript beneath.

New GData Developer Guides - Spreadsheets and Blogger

Jeff Scudder has updated the Blogger and Spreadsheet API developer guides to show you how to speak to the services in .NET and Python, to add to Java and raw HTTP examples. This is part of an on going effort to beef up the documentation. Recently you may have noticed that the Calendar docs have also been improved, and much more is coming.

Around Google

There was some other interesting news that I thought I would highlight. Pamela Saenger announced the release of a new feature on Google Translate that lets you search content in languages that you do not know, and get results back in your language. That takes some time to sync in. Imagine if you were a wine buff and you wanted to find out more about a particular French wine. You could use this feature to search the French websites, returning content in English.

I use Gmail for Mobile, Google Maps, Google Reader, and other Google products on my mobile phone. Now I can add Google Calendar to the list. If you visit calendar.google.com on your phone you will see a slim agenda view of your upcoming events.

What's hot today? was the question that the team that merged Google Trends with Google Zeitgeist to create Hot Trends. There are many PhD theses to be had by trying to understand why some of these make the list, and it definitely is able to show all sides of humanity.

Conferences

Besides Google Developer Day, there are some other conferences that have been mentioned:

The Google Test Automation Conference in New York City on August 23-24, has finalized the speaker list and has opened up for free, limited attendance.

Our Conference on Scalability has also opened up for registration until June 15th. They have nine great talks from industry and academia including keynotes by Jeff Dean and Marissa Mayer from Google and Werner Vogels from Amazon, and the event is taking place in Seattle on June 23rd.

Featured Projects

QueWeb Customer Care

Queplix has open sourced a web-based customer-care application that uses GWT to create a rich, desktop-like experience.

Rolling Stone AJAX Search

Rolling Stone has a nice customized use of the Google AJAX Search API that builds on top of the base GSearchers and gives results that make sense in this domain. For example, the results are split up by artist, news, album reviews, and more. This is a nice example to see how you can take the core of AJAX Search and tweak it a little bit to get what you need. This one-liner says a lot:

searcher.execute("intitle:" + query + " site:rollingstone.com/artists " +
   "-inurl:articles -inurl:photos -inurl:albums -inurl:videos " +
   "-inurl:biography -inurl:reviews -inurl:discography");

Google Tech Talks

Groovy Things To Do With Groovy

Guillaume Laforge came to Google to discuss the Groovy programming language, and came prepared with nice examples of using Groovy to access Google properties and use some of the Google APIs. If you would like an agile language on top of the JVM, check this out.

Advanced Topics in Programming Languages Series: C++ Threads

Lawrence Crowl came to discuss how the next C++ standard will provide direct support for threads, including a model of memory, atomics, variables, launching, scheduling, synchronization, and termination.

Podcasts

Google Summer of Code Podcast: Episode 2 - The Umit Project

For our second podcast, we had a chance to catch up with Adriano about life as a Summer of Coder, as well as Umit and other free software in Brazil.

Thanks for taking the time to keep up to date with our news. We look forward to seeing some of you at Google Developer Day. Keep tuning for an interesting week coming up!2013, By: Seo Master

Seo Master present to you: Posted by Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs

We have found that there is a lot of news around the web dispersed on various
Google blogs, forums, and press releases. As fantastic as this all is, we want
to try to give you a weekly round-up containing news that was of interest to us.
The goal is that if you had time to read one Google related post a week, this
would keep you up to date on the big items.

Our roundups will cover news and events surrounding our APIs, products, and
items from the community at large.

Let's get started for this week, May 14-18th, 2007.

Google Developer Podcasts

We are excited to launch the new Google Developer Podcast. In the first episode we interviewed Bob Lee of the Google Guice project. In the future you will see interviews with Googlers on many different topics, and we hope that it keeps you in touch. Please contact us if you have any requests for the show, and check out episode one.

We also have a new podcast series around the ever-popular Google Summer of Code series.

Google Developer Day

The buzz is growing around the worldwide event that is Google Developer Day, May 31st, 2007.

We have launched a new developer day site that will allow you to keep up to date on the event. You may want to check out the sessions that are planned for your location. Simply choose your location from the front page and click on sessions.

Make sure to check your location, as demand has required that some sites are having to move to new, larger space. Here in California we have announced that the sessions are going to be held in the San Jose Convention Center.

We are only a couple of weeks away, and then we will witness the community gathering around the world. We have some fantastic content to showcase, but more importantly, we get a chance to listen and learn from you all.

JavaOne Roundup

JavaOne was as busy as usual this year, especially for Googlers, who gave at least 14 presentations on a variety of topics. At the booth we found a lot of interest in discussing our technologies, especially GWT, Guice, and various APIs.

We also produced an article on A Java Developer's Guide to Google Technologies that gives you a taste for what was on offer.

The Java community is an important one for us, and we would love to hear from you on what you would like to see from us in the future.

Fun in AJAX API Land

The AJAX API team has followed up on the AJAX Feed API launch by building useful components that use the feed API under the scenes.

The AJAX Feed API FeedControl allows you to build a flexible blog roll component in seconds, and the AJAX Feed API Slide Show Control will create a slide show on top of any feed that uses Media RSS (e.g. Photobucket, Flickr, Picasa Web Albums). At the same time, the Picassa team created a Flash component that works with their service.

Universal Search Launches

There was big news in search this week. At Searchology, we announced our first
phase of Universal Search which ties various search products together to give you an answer that makes sense across books, music, video, news, and good old web pages.

We published a little behind the scenes coverage for those who want to dig a little.

Google Code Projects of the Week

GWT Maven Support

If you are a maven user, it is hard to go back to any other way for building your Java applications. The GWT Maven project allows you to weave your nice dependency magic with your GWT projects.

Hey, What's That?

This Google Maps mashup allows you to get a profile on what you could see from a given point. This is normally most interesting from a point that is high up, so the interface gives you a list of mountains to choose from.

For extra bonus points, you can read up on the technical side for how
they work it all out.

In other news...

YouTube API Blog: YouTube has just created a new API blog, so we should expect some interesting content around the APIs that Youtube has available to developers.

Real-time quotes for free: If you work in the financial sector, you will know that access to real-time quotes is very important indeed. It is great to see that we are going to be offering them for free, across our properties.

Viewing your collections with Google Maps: Check out the new maps view feature in 3D Warehouse.2013, By: Seo Master

Seo Master present to you: By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs

With Google I/O around the corner on May 28-29th in San Francisco, you can feel excitement bubbling within the Google Developer Programs team and beyond.

We had another Campfire One this week, and this time the team introduced Friend Connect, a way to easily add social features to your website using open protocols such as OpenID, OAuth, and OpenSocial APIs. Below is a short walk through:



The previous Campfire One was held to announce Google App Engine, and the engines continue to roar. If you are a Mac user, you may be interested to view the native App Engine Launcher, which allows you to manage your work form a UI that you know and love.

You will want to be able to write a scalable application, and Ken Ashcraft has written up some tips to do just that.

Finally, Guido van Rossum wrote a version of Mondrian, the code review system that he wrote for Googlers, that works with Subversion.

The Geo teams also had some interesting releases. First we had the long awaited official Flash API, and then we saw the new ability to find photos and Wikipedia content right in the Maps UI.

If you really liked the My Map editing tools that were made available on the Google Maps destination site, you will be happy to know that a quick polyline.enableDrawing(); will turn it on for your own mashup, hanks to new API support.

Google Doctype is a bold new undertaking spearheaded by the prolific Mark Pilgrim. Doctype aims to build a test-driven reference to the Open Web. Mark "humbly offers this fledgling encyclopedia under a Creative Commons Attribution license, and we invite the web developers of the world to contribute to it."

When you think of developers around the world, you think of translation. The AJAX Language API can now piggy back on Google Translate adding 10 new languages.

I have been having a great deal of fun with the translation API; translating Twitter on the fly, and more importantly having bookmarklet that can translate any selected text on a page.

I will finish up with some interesting thoughts on ipv6 and the new Google Reader version for iPhone.

As always, listen in to the Google Developers channel, and I hope to see a bunch of you at Google I/O. If you can't make it, be sure to follow us on Twitter as we discuss the event in real-time.2013, By: Seo Master

Seo Master present to you: By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs



The big buzz continues to revolve around our Google App Engine launch. We are seeing a host of applications being developed, and were even pleasantly surprised to see people port the APIs allowing you to run App Engine code elsewhere, such as appdrop.com.

One interesting feature to the App Engine which you may not have noticed, is the integration with Google Apps. Not only can you tie an application to your domain (allowing you to have myapp.mydomain.com instead of myapp.appspot.com) but you can restrict access to the given application to only members of your domain. If I ran a company on Google Apps, this would be a nice addition. I could see the small business apps that I need running there.

Jeff Scudder then released a new version of the Google data Python client library which has support for Google App Engine and the Contacts API. If you want to use this in your Google App Engine application you simply need to set gdata.service.http_request_handler = gdata.urlfetch to make sure your requests have a path out!

Google Docs offline, and Gears

I was on the road, speaking about Gears and the Open Web in Europe last week, and it was perfect timing to be mixing with the community as Google App Engine came out and I could talk to that too. We also had a few things to talk about with Gears.

We have been getting lots of questions surrounding our stance with the various standards out there, so Aaron Boodman put down our thoughts on the matter in a piece called Gears and Standards. It talks about how we are working with HTML5, and the direction that you will see Gears going. I think it is incredibly exciting to see people realise how Gears is a lot more than "offline", and is actually an open source way to teach browsers new tricks.

Brad Neuberg talked about just that as well as new features in Gears, and tools to help you get your work done, such as PubTools. He also discussed our first Google Gears for Mobile application, done by the Picasa Team. Now the blokes in London can show off pictures of their kids as they slow poke through the city down in the tube.

The biggest news of all though was the launch of Google Docs offline. If you have ever been in the situation where the internet goes flaky right when you just need that bit of info in document, no more. Now you have the option to save docs locally on your computer, so you can access them no matter where you are.

If you would like a refresher course on how to get started with Gears check out Ben Lisbakken's new screencast.

Fun with Maps

The Geo side of the house continued to output great content, including a series of Geo Developer content:

• Quick & Dirty KML Creation: With Mano Marks, Pamela Fox, and Christiaan Adams
  A demonstration of creating KML visually in Google Earth & Google Maps, and using Spreadsheet Mapper 2.0
• Creating Custom Maps: With John Coryat
  A comparison of various ways of overlaying data in the Maps API and an in-depth explanation of creating tile layers and custom map types
• GigaPan In-Depth: With Randy Sargent & Ted Morse
  A demo of the GigaPan panorama-browsing website and KML files, plus a technical explanation of PhotoOverlay
• Dynamic KML: With Mano Marks & Brian Hamlin
  An exploration of using dynamic queries from KML, using the NetworkLink, httpQuery, and viewFormat elements, plus a demo of a PostGIS-generated NetworkLink
• Mars, Moon, and Sky Map Types: With Noel Gorelick
  A talk introducing the non-Earth Maps API map types, plus cool demos of other types of projections used with planetary imagery
• Mapping the Votes: With Michael Geary
  A whirlwind tour of what it took to create the Elections 2008 Map/Mapplet/Gadget, including SHPfile conversion, Javascript optimization, centroid calculations, Twitter updates collection, Mapplet API tricks, and more.
• Google API Talks - Android, KML, Google Maps, Gadgets
  A series of 5-minute talks by various developers and Googlers given before Geary's presentation, including an intro to Gadgets/Mapplets.
  

They were also happy to announce that KML is now a standard, and owned by the Open Geospatial Consortium. We have seen a lot of other sites consume and produce KML, so this is a great step.

Finally, a great new feature was added to Google Maps. You can now check out traffic patterns in the future. If you have a commute the following morning, you can check out an estimate of how stuck you will be based on past experience. Obviously, it can't determine if there will be any crashes or anything like that :)

And there's more...

To finish up, a few other interesting items of the week:

• Amit Singh on the Google Mac team talked about how you can manipulate keyboard LEDs through software and receive Apple infrared remote control events
• I got to interview Bob Lee about his Twubble app, built using GWT
• Dave Astels talked about flakey tests on the toilet
• Google Code now speaks a lot of languages which apparently caused some students to fix their RSS feed parsers as they didn't grok Unicode

I hope you had a great week. Remember that our big developer event Google I/O is now just a few weeks away! We have a few posts from presenters who will be at the event to give you a little look at the content, but the best part will be having the community together to talk in the open.2013, By: Seo Master

Seo Master present to you: By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs

I got to meet developers in Colorado this week. Working from the Google Boulder office with its fun climbing wall (*so* Boulder) was a treat, and there were several API announcements that were really exciting.

First of all we had the YouTube API update. The new APIs for YouTube are very broad. Not only do you have new access via AtomPub (e.g. to upload), but you can now have fantastic control of the player with a very simple JavaScript API.

In a matter of minutes I was able to create a simple HTML little language that allows me to annotate my YouTube videos with a table of contents that jump to the correct place.

To listen to the great new features, listen in below:



Then we had the rash of new AJAX APIs.

Google AJAX Language API:

The AJAX Search and Feeds team is happy to announce a new member to their API family -- the Language API. This new API boasts two functions, language translation and language detection - which cover 13 languages and 29 translation pairs.

All this with a couple of simple JavaScript calls such as this:

google.language.translate('Gato', 'es', 'en', function(result) {
  alert(result.translation);
});

Google Visualization API:

We are excited to launch the Google Visualization API, a new API designed for visualizing structured data. The API adds the ability to send queries to data sources and process the response. The first data source that already supports this API is Google Spreadsheets. We are also launching a set of visualization gadgets that use this API.

With this API, you can read data from a data source that supports the API. You can read an entire table, or you can run a query on the data source using the API's query language. The query response is an easy to process data table designed to simplify data visualization. It includes both the underlying values and the formatted values, column types, headers and more.

Staying with visualization and charting... we had a great response to the initial Google Chart API launch, and the team came back with new features allowing very cool new graph types, and lifting the limits on chart calls.

All of these APIs share the same property of doing their thing very well, and providing a simple API to the developer. I hope you will agree, and if not, let us know what you need!

In the land of Google Gears, a couple of external libraries were features. Malte Ubl provided a nice little abstraction for cross domain messaging which uses HTML 5 postMessage(), else Gears, else a browser hack to make the beast work on all browsers.

That is for Worker pools, and with the Database API we saw Aptana releasing an update to their server-side JavaScript database API allowing you to use the Gears API on the server.

Google Code itself got some love. We have improved performance on the site and Jacob Moon shared how we did so.

Then we added an interactive developer guide that allows you to try code on the fly as you go through the GData JavaScript API. It feels good to be able to massage and play as you go.

Finally, we announced Google I/O which is "a two day developer gathering on May 28th & 29th in San Francisco. The purpose of the event is to bring developers together to learn about products, tools, and techniques which are moving the web forward as a platform." If you would like to mingle and join Google engineers, and other Web luminaries as we discuss how to move the Web forward, join us!2013, By: Seo Master

Seo Master present to you: By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs

What a week for technology news. I feel like the industry is in overdrive this week as we have large announcements in mobile (e.g. iPhone SDK, Gears for Mobile), and we get to see a beta of IE 8 for the first time.

I was very happy to see the actual release of Google Gears for Mobile. I had just been visiting the London office where I got to chat with the team behind the mobile launch. I enjoyed hearing the story behind the birth of Gears for mobile, and their thoughts on where mobile development is heading. It seems like we hear people claiming the breakthrough of the mobile Web every year, but 2008 may finally be the right time. We are getting the combination of devices that are good enough, and better networks. The tools that Gears provides seem to almost make more sense in the mobile world, and I look forward to seeing the community build new Gears to unlock the power of the mobile devices and put that functionality into the hands of Web hackers.

Listen in to the conversation below:



The mobile release happened right as Brad Neuberg and myself were doing a mini mid-west tour of the University of Illinois Urbana/Champaign, and the University of Michigan. It was great to meet the students and see their views on the Web. Speaking on Gears at the birth of the Web browser was also a real honour.

Death to scrap-y

Whenever I see an application that asks for my Google username and password to scrape contacts I would cry. This isn't what we want users doing, but I really understand the users are asking for the functionality of mashing up their contact data, and no-one wants to re-enter it. You can't blame third party applications for offering the functionality, and now they don't have to do it insecurely. The release of the Google Contacts API offers an AtomPub based way of consuming your contacts.

Another feature that our users keep asking for is Google Calendar sync, and we just got the Outlook sync product out to you too.

There were a couple of interesting pieces of news in the Maps space. You now have access to a new static map API that gives you a snapshot image of the map instead of an embed-able interactive widget.

Pamela Fox also put together a rich Google Maps API Gallery that answers questions such as: "How do I draw a circle on the map?" or "How do I create groups of toggle-able markers?"

The open source side of Google has been busy too. The Summer of Code 2008 has launched, so start thinking of cool projects for the students to get hacking on!

We also have a group heading to PyCon 2008, so join us there as we give a talk titled: Use Google Spreadsheets API to create a database in the cloud.

Lindsey Simon created a very cool little tool, CSSJanus, that lets you take your CSS styled Web site and create a right-to-left version for locales that need it. He talked about the work behind it, gave a screencast showing it in action for you.

Finally, there are some other cool videos to check out too (it's Friday!)

• Mission: Possible - Building a Google Gadget is a fun one, showing you how to build Gadgets in a creative way
• Google IPv6 Conference 2008: What will the IPv6 Internet look like? gives you a look at the future of the internet thanks to a panel discussion
• JRuby: The power of Java and Ruby is a talk given by Ola Bini on the JRuby run time, which follows on from Yukihiro Matsumoto (Matz) talking to us about Ruby 1.9.

As always, check out the latest tech talks, subscribe to the Google Developer Podcast and visit the Google Code YouTube channel.

After we take a breather from this week, see you next time!2013, By: Seo Master

Seo Master present to you: By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs

February already? Spring is here, and you can tell in Mountain View as the rain has stopped. Spring brings out your social side, and we have seen a lot of growth with OpenSocial and other social APIs.

There was plenty of talk across the Web about the new Social Graph API that Brad Fitzpatrick announced. The API uses the Google crawler to gather up the XFN, FOAF, and other public social data that is spread out already on the Web. You can ask for a social graph that puts this together and gives you back a nice set of JSON.

OpenSocial is moving forward also. OpenSocial 0.7 is now available in the Orkut sandbox, MySpace announced their new platform, and a great group of people got together at Six Apart for a Hackathon.

On another note, I had the pleasure to sit down with Steve Yegge at the Google Kirkland office to discuss his Rhino on Rails project. He gave frank feedback on the history, present, and future of the project and I look forward to hearing, and sharing, more.

There was more Web development news too. Two companies came out talking about GWT. First, YesMail talked about the work behind their 17 GWT modules and 33,000 lines of GWT code. They discuss the design, scalability, and testing practices that they employ.

Compiere, creator of an opensource ERP, talked to us about their recent GWT port from a Swing application.

Developers from Autodesk Labs also came to talk to us about their work implementing offline support to their Project Draw project using Gears.

Fun times at Google

Christian Schalk has spearheaded the new Google Technology User Groups, and there are events going on hopefully near you.

One such Mountain View event is a hackathon for JavaScript developers. Come to the Googleplex and enjoy code, beer, and prizes!

Open Source

We have created a new blog dedicated to Open Source, and there are already good posts covering: the growth of Project Hosting, sponsorships of the Freedom Training Task Force and Wine improvements, and the grand prize winners for the Google Highly Open Participation Contest.

And, to finish up, check out the new iGoogle Themes API.

As always, check out the latest tech talks, subscribe to the Google Developer Podcast and visit the Google Code YouTube channel.2013, By: Seo Master