Fine-tuning your shadows
July 28th, 2010 | by aidanchopra | published in Google SketchUp
You can control which entities in your models cast shadows; you can also determine which ones are able to receive them. Case in point:Recently, I needed an image of a traffic light that appeared to be lit up. I searched the 3D Warehouse and found a nic…
July 28th, 2010 | by Mia | published in Youtube
As you could probably guess, we’re really excited about the imminent launch of Google TV. You can learn more about this initiative here, but it’s basically a new way to watch TV by seamlessly integrating the Web and TV into one incredible viewing exp…
July 28th, 2010 | by Ellen Ko | published in Google Open Source
Just over a week ago, we hosted Google London Open Source Jam 17. The event is an opportunity for open source developers to give five minute presentations to their peers, socialise, eat pizza, and drink beer. The topic for this Jam was “Speed” and …
July 27th, 2010 | by acd | published in Google Wave
Over the last few months, I’ve seen a surprising number of time-related extensions popping up in our gallery – timers, stopwatches, countdowns, and the like. I think it’s because 1) many people use Wave to interact with folks from different timezones, and 2) many people use Wave during meetings… and many people don’t like meetings to go over time.
Whatever the reasons may be, it’s a good thing for all of us, as these extensions come in handy in a variety of situations.
For example, the Remaining Time gadget is a favorite of mine. Its simple interface lets you specify an event name and an event time, and then it countdowns to that time.
We first used this gadget in the Google I/O 2010 conference session waves to show the countdown until the start of the talk. We did this because many developers were eager to watch the live notes for a session from afar, but they couldn’t easily convert from the San Francisco time listed into their own local time. By including a countdown, they could look at the remaining time and instantly know when to return to the wave.
More recently, in our local Google DevFest AU conference, I used the gadget to let speakers know how much time they have left to present. I set up a laptop in front of the speakers, created a wave with the gadget in it,and set it to countdown until the end of their talk. By using a wave instead of a desktop app, I could modify the wave from my comfortable seat in the back if I wanted to give them more time or send them a message.
Besides the “remaining time” gadget, you might also check out these time-related extensions:
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Time-me: Gives you all the basic functionality of a stopwatch – start, stop, and split, but since it’s in Wave, anyone can do those actions, and it shows the usernames for each split.
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Time-Manager: Lets you start and stop counting time, and shows the total time counted. The developer created it because he loves the similar functionality in Basecamp ® for tracking the amount of time spent on tasks and wanted to bring that to Wave.
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Local time gadget: Lets you specify a time in your locale and converts that time to the local time of whoever’s viewing it. It was created by a gamer in the US who schedules gaming sessions for him and his friends in wave, and he wanted to make it easy for them to see the local time for each session.
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Deadline gadget: Similar to the gadget I described above, this one lets you specify a end time and shows the remaining days, hours, and minutes. This one is designed specifically for visualizing task deadlines, like when a blog post should be completed, and lets you check off the task when done.
Wave on!
Posted by Pamela Fox, Developer Relations, Google Wave Team
July 27th, 2010 | by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Marketing Manager | published in Google Apps, iGoogle
The Start Page is being automatically be converted to iGoogle. The Start Page gadgets your users have configured will be migrated to iGoogle pages, after which users can modify their iGoogle gadgets, tabs and themes. Your Start Page web address will …
July 27th, 2010 | by Research Admin | published in Google Research
Posted by Fernando Pereira, Research DirectorGooglers were recognized in three of the four paper awards at ICML 2010: Sajid Siddiqi was co-recipient of the best paper award for Hilbert Space Embeddings of Hidden Markov Models with Le Song, Byron Boots,…
July 27th, 2010 | by Mike Marchak | published in Google Code
Since we launched the new orkut, we’ve been working hard to launch new features and introduce the new design to other pages that are still using the older UI. Today, we’re excited to announce the redesign of the app pages on orkut. Because we want …
July 27th, 2010 | by Tasha Danko | published in Google SketchUp
For those of you who haven’t yet tried it, Google Building Maker is our simple 3D modeling tool that allows you to construct buildings by aligning various types of blocks to photos – all from your Internet browser. The completed models are automatica…
July 27th, 2010 | by The App Engine Team | published in Google App Engine
If you have been running an App Engine application over the last few months, you will have noticed that performance of the Datastore has drastically improved. In fact, it quickly improved after the blog post we wrote in May acknowledging the performan…
July 27th, 2010 | by Tim Bray | published in Google Android
We’ve just announced the introduction of a licensing server for Android Market. This should address one of the concerns we’ve heard repeatedly from the Android developer community.The impact and intent, as outlined in the announcement, are straight…
July 27th, 2010 | by Deanna Yick | published in Google Earth
When Google Places was reintroduced with its new name and additional features earlier this year, we thought it’d be an opportune time to experiment with a new way of engaging with our users. So we launched a Google Moderator page and invited busine…
July 27th, 2010 | by A Googler | published in Google Blog
Humans have always been fascinated by the night sky. And Googlers are no exception. Over the years, Google engineers have used their 20 percent time to create Google Sky, Moon, Mars and most recently Google Sky Map for Android. This handy app, built by…
July 27th, 2010 | by Inside AdWords crew | published in Google Adwords
In order to provide the best online marketing experience, we want to make sure that you understand how each dollar you invest in AdWords is performing.Today, we’re announcing some upcoming changes to the way our third party partners provide reports a…
July 27th, 2010 | by Tim Bray | published in Google Android
[This post is by Eric Chu, Android Developer Ecosystem. — Tim Bray]In my conversations with Android developers, I often hear that you’d like better protection against unauthorized use of your applications. So today, I’m pleased to announce the re…
July 27th, 2010 | by Google Docs | published in Google Docs
Document translationYou can now translate your documents in the new editor into one of the 53 Google Docs languages by selecting Tools -> Translate document…. From there, you can create a translated copy of the document by choosing a title for the tr…