August 14th, 2012 | by Shannon -jj Behrens | published in Youtube API
When Google+ first came out, we were really excited about the idea of writing some open source code to showcase how you could integrate YouTube with Google+. After some brainstorming, we came up with the idea of letting people collaboratively edit a playlist in realtime, and we started hacking!
We started working on Party Playlist Picker in early 2011. We’ve always wanted to release our experiment as an open source project, and you can now download the code to see one example of integrating Google+ functionality to enrich a YouTube application.
Party Playlist Picker is a Google App Engine application written in Python. It uses a Google+ share button so that partygoers can invite their friends to come edit a playlist in realtime. That feature is based on the Google App Engine channel API. It makes use of the gdata-python-client library to talk to YouTube and the google-api-python-client library to talk to Google+. It’s currently using version 1 of the YouTube API (because that’s what gdata-python-client uses), and we used OAuth 2 for authentication. In fact, we made good use of the Python client library to manage the OAuth 2 tokens for us automatically.
There’s also a lot of jQuery-based JavaScript goodness. For instance, you can search for videos without reloading the page, and you can simply drag them to add them to the playlist. If multiple people edit the page at the same time, the list of videos is updated in realtime whenever a change is made. You can also watch videos right on the page. Last of all, it keeps track of who’s edited the playlist, and whether they’re currently editing it.
There are a bunch of subtle HTML5 tricks thrown in as well. For instance, the application supports voice search, and we made a clever use of gradients to fade overflow text in the video descriptions.
Here’s a screenshot of the application:
If you’re interested in learning more, you can play around with a running version of it, or you can download the source code and hack away! If you have any questions, post them to our developer forum.
Update: Watch JJ, Jeff, and Danny Hermes (from the App Engine Developer Relations team) talk about Party Playlist Picker as part of YouTube Developers Live:
Cheers,
–Shannon -jj Behrens and Jeffrey Posnick, YouTube API Team
August 14th, 2012 | by Paul Saxman | published in Google Earth, Google Maps
Map of the Week: runtastic PRO
Why we like it: runtastic is using Google Earth to show a user 3D Earth View video playback of every run or GPS activity they track with runtastic PRO for Android. In addition to retracing a route, runtastic displays the …
Geek Time with Karen Sandler
August 14th, 2012 | by Stephanie Taylor | published in Google Open Source
During LibrePlanet 2012, Jeremy Allison had some quality Geek Time with Karen Sandler, Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation. Some highlights from their chat can be found below. Jeremy asks Karen to describe her role at the GNOME Foundation and wh…
New security settings for Google Apps mobile management
August 14th, 2012 | by Google Apps Team | published in Google Apps
On August 2nd we released additional security settings for mobile management in the Google Apps administrator control panel.- IP whitelist for Google Sync (ActiveSync)- Google Sync: Enforce delete as trash- Enable/disable user remote wipe- Only enforce…
PubTalk: AdSense publishers discuss adding content ad units to their pages
August 14th, 2012 | by Inside AdSense Team | published in Google Adsense
Welcome to the second video in our publisher feedback series. Hopefully you’ve been able to test ad sizes and placements since our last post! During the same Hangout, publishers Al Gross of infosports.com, Katie and Gene Hamilton of diyornot.co…
Introducing DFA Basics for Traffickers Online training
August 14th, 2012 | by Pamela Eng | published in Google DoubleClick
At DoubleClick, we are always looking for new ways to help our clients gain expertise in using our products. So, we are pleased to announce the DFA Basics for Traffickers online training course for new DFA users looking to learn the fundamentals of thi…
Improving Google Patents with European Patent Office patents and the Prior Art Finder
August 14th, 2012 | by Google Public Policy Blog | published in Google Public Policy
Posted by Jon Orwant, Engineering Manager Cross-posted from the Google Research blogAt Google, we’re constantly trying to make important collections of information more useful to the world. Since 2006, we’ve let people discover, search, and read…
Improving Google Patents with European Patent Office patents and the Prior Art Finder
August 14th, 2012 | by Research @ Google | published in Google Research
Posted by Jon Orwant, Engineering ManagerCross-posted with the US Public Policy Blog, the European Public Policy Blog, and Inside Search BlogAt Google, we’re constantly trying to make important collections of information more useful to the world. …
See Rebuilding in New Orleans Through Updated Street View Imagery
August 14th, 2012 | by Lat Long Blog | published in Google Earth
New Orleans is a uniquely American city. It’s a place with indigenous culture, heart, and soul with our own music, cuisine, and architecture. You can really see and feel its originality and personality walking around our historic streets. In 2008, as…
Diary of a Summer Intern – Rio
August 13th, 2012 | by Google Students | published in Google Student Blog
It’s launched!One of my photos of the fireworks display from the27th Kanagawa-Shimbun Fireworks FestivalThose words defined the start of the fireworks display that I watched from the Tokyo oceanfront piers last week. Fireworks are a traditional Japan…
Diary of a Summer Intern – Pablo
August 13th, 2012 | by Google Students | published in Google Student Blog
Like most good things in life, my internship is coming to an end — eleven weeks that have passed by so fast that I finally couldn’t do some things that I mentioned in the previous post. I didn’t have time for the bowling game, but I leave so many …
Google Summer of Code Wrapping up its 8th year
August 13th, 2012 | by Stephanie Taylor | published in Google Open Source
This summer has been an exciting one for the Google Summer of Code. We had 180 organizations participating this year, 45 of which were participating for the first time in the program. In May, 1212 students, including students from Nepal and Mauritius, …
August 11th, 2012 | by Anthony Vallone | published in Google Testing
Cross-posted from the Google Student Blog
Today we’re featuring Sabrina Williams, a Software Engineer in Test who joined Google in August 2011. Software Engineers in Test undertake a broad range of challenges on a daily basis, designing and building intelligent systems that can explore various use cases and scenarios for distributed computing infrastructure. Read on to learn more about Sabrina’s path to Google and what she works on now that she’s here!
Tell us about yourself and how you got to Google.
I grew up in rural Prunedale, Calif. and went to Stanford where I double-majored in philosophy and computer science. After college I spent six years as a software engineer at HP, working primarily on printer drivers. I began focusing on testing my last two years there—reading books, looking up information and prototyping test tools in my own time. By the time I left, I’d started a project for an automated test framework that most of our lab used.
I applied for a software engineering role at Google four years ago and didn’t do well in my interviews. Thankfully, a Google recruiter called last year and set me up for software engineer (SWE) interviews again. After a day of talking about testing and mocking for every design question I answered, I was told that there were opportunities for me in SWE and SET. I ended up choosing the SET role after speaking with the SET hiring manager. He said two things that convinced me. First, SETs spend as much time coding as SWEs, and I wanted a role where I could write code. Second, the SETs job is to creatively solve testing problems, which sounded more interesting to me than writing features for a product. This seemed like a really unique and appealing opportunity, so I took it!
So what exactly do SETs do?
SETs are SWEs who are really into testing. We help SWEs design and refactor their code so that it is more testable. We work with test engineers (TEs) to figure out how to automate difficult test cases. We also write harnesses, frameworks and tools to make test automation possible. SETs tend to have the best understanding of how everything plays together (production code, manual tests, automated tests, tools, etc.) and we have to make that information accessible to everyone on the team.
What project do you work on?
I work on the Google Cloud Print team. Our goal is to make it possible to print anywhere from any device. You can use Google Cloud Print to connect home and work printers to the web so that you (and anyone you share your printers with) can access them from your phone, tablet, Chromebook, PC or any other supported web-connected device.
What advice would you give to aspiring SETs?
First, for computer science majors in general: if there’s any other field about which you are passionate, at least minor in it. CS is wonderfully chameleonic in that it can be applied to anything. So if, for example, you love art history, minor in art and you can write software to help restore images of old paintings.
For aspiring SETs, challenge yourself to write tests for all of the code you write for school. If you can get an internship where you have access to a real-world code base, study how that company approaches testing their code. If it’s well-tested, see how they did it. If it’s not well-tested, think about how you would test it. I don’t (personally) know of a CS program that has even a full course based on testing, so you’ll have to teach yourself. Start by looking up buzzwords like “unit test” and “test-driven development.” Look up the different types of tests (unit, integration, component, system, etc.). Find a code coverage tool (if a free/cheap one is available for your language of choice) and see how well you’re covering your code with your tests. Write a tool that will run all of your tests every time you build your code. If all of this sounds like fun…well…we need more people like you!
If you’re interested in applying for a Software Engineer in Test position, please apply for our general Software Engineer position, then indicate in your resume objective line that you’re interested in the SET role.
Posted by Jessica Safir, University Programs
Mark Your Calendars For These Upcoming Analytics Events
August 10th, 2012 | by Google Analytics team | published in Google Analytics
Next week Google Analytics team members will be presenting on several key areas of measurement, both online and in-person. Be sure to mark your calendars and join us as we share ideas and best practices about everything analytics.Google Developers Live…
August 10th, 2012 | by Josh Pyle | published in Google Affiliate Network
Google Affiliate Network is excited to join our fellow affiliate marketers at Affiliate Summit East from August 12-14, 2012 at Hilton New York.At the conference, you’ll have a chance to hear from our team. Dan Chiss, Head of Network Solutions, will be …