Google Data » Scott Knaster

Getting your Google Mac news

Scott Knaster — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 19:00:00 +0000

By Scott Knaster, Editor

More than five years ago, we created this blog to tell you about our software for Macs. Since then, Apple’s products have become more popular than ever, and we’ve kept up by offering strong support for OS X and iOS, including the speedy and popular Google Chrome for OS X, the amazing Google Earth, and a whole bunch of excellent iOS apps.

Our Mac and iOS support has now become so mainstream that we realized we just don’t need to keep Mac news on its own blog, so we won’t be posting here any longer. For updates, we encourage you to visit our blogs for individual products, like the Chrome Blog and the Lat Long Blog.

Thanks for reading this blog over the past five and a half years!

A new blog and a new name

Scott Knaster — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 21:19:00 +0000

By Scott Knaster, Google Developers Blog Editor

The official Google Code Blog – this very blog – was born on St. Patrick's Day 2005, when Open Source Program Manager Chris DiBona posted to announce the launch of code.google.com. Last week we published our 1,000th post. Now, we’re ready to move on to a shiny new home: Google Developers Blog.

We’re doing this because starting today, we’re using the name Google Developers (and a new look) to unify our developer programs. For more info on why we decided to do this, please read our first post on the new blog. And then we’d really appreciate it if you returned to read future posts there too. You might also be interested in the Google Open Source Blog, where we write about our various open source initiatives.

So that’s it from here. Last one out, please turn off the lights. We’ll see you in the new place!

Fridaygram: Google Public DNS, lonely black hole, tiny chameleons

Scott Knaster — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 19:35:00 +0000

By Scott Knaster, Google Code Blog Editor

Google Public DNS is a fast, free DNS service that we introduced a little more than 2 years ago. As the Official Google Blog post aptly puts it, “DNS acts like the phone book of the Internet”, translating from human-readable URLs to all-numeric IP addresses. Google Public DNS started as an experimental service and has now become the most-used public DNS service in the world with over 70 billion requests per day, mostly from outside the U.S. Will the next step be support for users in more distant places? (Probably not there.)

Speaking of faraway places, astronomers using images from the Hubble space telescope have found black hole HLX-1, which appears to be all that’s left of a dwarf galaxy that once contained other stars. The theory is that this late galaxy was torn apart by a nearby spiral galaxy, leaving only HLX-1. The other stars became part of the larger galaxy.

While you’re musing on this supermassive black hole, consider some much tinier creatures: little chameleons, just about one inch long, recently discovered in Madagascar. Scientists think this miniaturization might be an evolutionary response to limited resources.

Tiny chameleon: he comes and goes, he comes and goes

Finally, we can’t help but jump on the Linsanity bandwagon. Of course, we’re doing it in a nerdy way by pointing you to this article (interesting even for non-sports fans) about why talent evaluation is so tricky.

On Fridays we take a break and do a Fridaygram post just for fun. Each Fridaygram item must pass only one test: it has to be interesting to us nerds. Special thanks to Wired Science for having many excellent posts this week.

Images: Glaw, F., et al., PLoS ONE

Come learn about Apps Script in Washington, DC

Scott Knaster — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 19:30:00 +0000

By Jan Kleinert, Developer Relations Team

Google Apps Script is a JavaScript cloud scripting language that provides easy ways to automate tasks across Google products and third party services. If you want to learn more about Google Apps Script, collaborate with other developers, and meet the Apps Script team, here’s your chance! We will be holding an Apps Script hackathon in Washington, DC on Wednesday, March 7 from 2pm - 8pm.

After we cover the basics of Apps Script, you can code along with us as we build a complete script, or you can bring your own ideas and get some help and guidance from the team. There will be food, power, and Apps Script experts available to help throughout the day. Just bring your laptop, ideas, enthusiasm, and basic knowledge of JavaScript. Check out out the details of the event and be sure to RSVP to let us know you’re coming.

Jan Kleinert is a Developer Programs Engineer based in NYC, focusing on helping developers get the most out of Google Apps Script. Prior to Apps Script, she worked on Commerce, helping merchants integrate with Google Checkout and on Chrome, helping developers build great web apps.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

Tech preview of Chromium with Dart engine now available

Scott Knaster — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 17:30:00 +0000

Pavel

Vijay

Anton

By Anton Muhin, Vijay Menon, and Pavel Podivilov, Software Engineers

Cross-posted with the Chromium Blog

An attractive feature of Web programming is a rapid development cycle. Reloading the application after the source code has changed takes a fraction of a second. We want to offer you that same experience when using Dart, and today we’re making Mac and Linux binaries available that integrate the Dart VM into Chromium.

This technology preview allows you to run your Dart programs directly on the Dart VM in Chromium and avoid a separate compilation step. Over time, these programs will take advantage of the VM’s faster performance and lower startup latency.

Dart has been designed from the start to work with the entire modern web, and we’re simultaneously continuing to improve our fast Dart-to-JavaScript compiler. Both the Dart VM and modern JavaScript engines are first-class targets for Dart.

This release of Chromium with Dart VM integration is a technology preview, and should not be used for day-to-day browsing. After more testing and developer feedback, we plan to eventually include the Dart VM in Chrome.

Today’s release of the Chromium + Dart VM integration is another step forward for the open source "batteries included" Dart platform. Our goal is to help you build complex, high performance apps for the modern web, and we encourage you to try Dart and let us know what you think.

Anton Muhin is an engineer at Google Saint Petersburg who recently worked on making V8 VM and DOM bindings faster and now is working on integrating the Dart VM into Chromium. Before that he worked on the Google Calendar backend.

Vijay Menon is a software engineer at Google Seattle working on integrating the Dart language and runtime into the browser. His background is in compilers, runtime systems, and parallel programming.

Pavel Podivilov is a software engineer at Google Saint Petersburg who worked on Chrome Developer Tools prior to joining the Dartium team.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

Falling in love with the Google+ API

Scott Knaster — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 10:00:00 +0000

By Melina Mattos, Program Manager for Google Africa and Bob Aman, Program Manager for Developer Relations

Cross-posted from the Google Africa Blog

Attention developers! Of the 90+ Google APIs, which is your favorite? We know that we fell in love with the Google+ API after we saw the amazing applications built from the Hackathons in South Africa and Kenya. We want to continue spreading the love!

This Valentine’s Day we’re thrilled to announce that we are holding three more Google+ Hackathons with the support of the Google Technology User Groups (GTUGs) in Accra, Kampala, and Lagos.

If you are ready to wow us with your application, please apply for the event using these forms: Kampala on March 10 at the 4th floor of Solis House, Lagos on March 17 at the CCHub Nigeria, and Accra on March 21 at the Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology.

Remember to start today on getting those creative juices flowing! Familiarize yourself with the API and review these resources. Begin gathering ideas and coding a little. Take advantage of the Google+ Platform Office Hours on the 15th of February. If you have any questions, please address them to us in our Google+ Hangout on February 23. Use the Hackathon to perfect your application and win one of the multiple prizes we will be awarding - including a ticket for the overall winning application to Google’s premiere developer event, Google I/O!

Any updates relating to these Hackathons and the Hangout will be posted on Google+ (of course!) using the hashtag #hackgplus. Stay tuned!

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

Building Web Apps? Check out our Field Guide

Scott Knaster — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 22:00:00 +0000

By Pete LePage, Developer Advocate

Yesterday, the Chrome Developer Relations team launched several new resources, including the Field Guide to Web Applications. It’s a new resource that is designed to help web developers create great web apps. We’ve heard loud and clear from users that they want more and better web apps, and we hope this new field guide will enable you to create those web apps. Our fictitious author Bert Appward guides you through topics like the properties of web applications, design fundamentals, tips for creating great experiences, and a few case studies that put best practices to use. Whether you're building your first web app or are just looking for ways to improve your existing apps, I hope you'll find the field guide useful.

We built the field guide to embody the principles and best practices that it preaches. We stepped away from the normal webpage look, and instead designed the experience around a field guide. We used many CSS3 features like box-shadow, opacity, multiple backgrounds and more to provide a rich, visual experience. To make sure that it worked offline, we used AppCache and other than some URL rewriting techniques, didn't use any server-side code. We used the HTML5 History API to maintain page state even though everything is served from a single HTML page. We've started working on a new case study about the field guide, so check back soon for that!

Pete LePage is a Developer Advocate on the Google Chrome team and works with developers to create great web applications for the Chrome Web Store. He recently helped launch the +Chrome Developers page on Google+.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

Image results now available from the Custom Search API

Scott Knaster — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 19:40:00 +0000

By Nam Nguyen, Software Engineer

Last year we added image results to Google Custom Search Engines to enable sites to offer image-only results that showcase photos and other digital images. For site owners who want more flexibility in presentation, they are also now available from the Custom Search API.

Read more about accessing Image Results from the Custom Search API or try it out in the Custom Search API Explorer. For billing purposes, image queries will be treated the same as web queries. If you are still using the deprecated Google Image Search API, now’s a great time to switch!

Below is an example of an image search to find small jpeg images of flowers:

https://www.googleapis.com/customsearch/v1?key=YOUR_API_KEY&cx=YOUR_CSE_ID&q=flower&searchType=image&fileType=jpg&imgSize=small&alt=json

With a valid key and cse id, here is a possible json result returned for an image item:

{
   "kind": "customsearch#result",
   "title": "flower-photo",
   "htmlTitle": "\u003cb\u003eflower\u003c/b\u003e-photo",
   "link": "http://images.example.com/flowerphoto.jpg",
   "displayLink": "images.example.com",
   "snippet": "photo of flower",
   "htmlSnippet": "photo of \u003cb\u003eflower\u003c/b\u003e",
   "mime": "image/jpeg",
   "image": {
    "contextLink": "http://images.example.com/flowergallery.html",
    "height": 100,
    "width": 100,
    "byteSize": 6104,
    "thumbnailLink": "https://encrypted-tbn2.google.com/images?q=tbn:3x4MPL3",
    "thumbnailHeight": 82,
    "thumbnailWidth": 82
   }
}

which you can use to render the image in your own site.

Note that you need to enable image search in your custom search engine control panel for the custom image search to work.

Nam Nguyen works on the JSON/Atom Custom Search API, which lets developers retrieve and display results from Google Custom Search programmatically. He is dedicated to making developers' lives a little easier by providing a simple API.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

A fresh new look for HTML5Rocks.com

Scott Knaster — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 21:16:00 +0000

By Eric Bidelman, Senior Developer Programs Engineer, Google Chrome Team

Over the past year, HTML5Rocks.com has become a top destination for developers craving to learn more about HTML5. Today, we have over 60 articles and tutorials covering the latest HTML5 tech, published by 30 contributors from around the world! We've worked hard to bring great content to the site as quickly as possible, but it's been challenging to consolidate so much information as HTML5 continues to push the web forward and evolve at an accelerated pace.

Today, we're launching an updated HTML5Rocks with better tools for finding content, including an edgy new look and "rocking" logo. As our content expands, finding things becomes more important. To address this, we've created "persona pages" with catered content in 3 different verticals (Games, Business, Mobile). If you're one of those developers, finding content relevant to you should now be a snap. We've also consolidated many of the different components (Updates, Studio, Playground) into the main site and have deeply integrated the HTML5 technology classes to bring a better identity to the content.

All in all, it's a little bit Punk and a little bit Rock and Roll.

Lastly, if you're interested in contributing to the site, it's an open source project and we'd love to have your expertise. See our contributors guide.

Eric Bidelman is a Senior Developer Programs Engineer on the Google Chrome Team and a core contributor to html5rocks.com. He is the author of the book Using the HTML5 Filesystem API.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

See you at the Game Developers Conference

Scott Knaster — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 18:04:00 +0000

By Amy Walgenbach, Developer Marketing Team

We’re returning to the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco this year with 2 Developer Days and a booth on the Expo floor. At the conference we'll be giving a peek at the latest technologies we're developing for games.

Our Developer Days will take place in Room 2020 at Moscone Center. Day 1 (March 5) will focus on web games and Day 2 (March 6) will feature mobile games. From scalable servers, to high-performance code and graphics in web browsers, to porting console games to the web, come learn about how our technologies can help you better create, distribute, promote, and monetize games. We also have several Googlers speaking at other sessions during the conference. In addition, we'll have booth 1901 on the show floor March 7th-9th where you can meet Googlers working on games, demo what's new, meet partners, and get answers to your questions.

For more information on our presence at GDC, including a full list of our talks and speaker details, please visit http://www.google.com/events/gdc. If you stop by, you might even be able to score a pass to Google’s invitation-only GDC party. We look forward to meeting you in person!

Amy Walgenbach leads marketing for the Google+ Platform and developer marketing for games at Google.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

Fridaygram: Unicode, ancient lake, very ancient sound

Scott Knaster — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 20:15:00 +0000

By Scott Knaster, Google Code Blog Editor

Unicode was created with the ambitious goal of representing every human language, with room left over for a whole bunch of symbols, too. More than 20 years after Unicode was started, over 60% of the pages on the web are now encoded in Unicode. That’s pretty good growth when you consider that Unicode’s coverage was less than 5% of the web in 2005. Having a standard like Unicode is important because, as Mark Davis writes, "The more documents that are in Unicode, the less likely you will see mangled characters (what Japanese call mojibake) when you're surfing the web."

In news of older stuff, a Russian expedition that has been working for 10 years has finally drilled through Antarctic ice and reached Lake Vostok, a huge freshwater lake more than 12,000 feet below the surface. The ice has covered this lake for at least 15 million years, which is well before the work on Unicode began. Eventually the team will take samples of the lake water, looking for signs of life and other ancient treasures.

Finally, you can go back even further in time and listen to the song of a cricket that was around during the Jurassic period, 165 million years ago. That cricket really sounds great for its age.

On Fridays we take a break and do a Fridaygram post just for fun. Each Fridaygram item must pass only one test: it has to be interesting to us nerds.

Google Summer of Code 2012 is on!

Scott Knaster — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 20:08:00 +0000

By Carol Smith, Open Source Team

Cross-posted with the Google Open Source Blog

Today at FOSDEM I was proud to announce Google Summer of Code 2012.

This will be the 8th year for Google Summer of Code, an innovative program dedicated to introducing students from colleges and universities around the world to open source software development. The program offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source projects with the help of mentoring organizations from all around the globe. Over the past seven years Google Summer of Code has had 6,000 students from over 90 countries complete the program. Our goal is to help these students pursue academic challenges over the summer break while they create and release open source code for the benefit of all.

Spread the word to your friends! If you know of a university student that would be interested in working on open source projects this summer, or if you know of an organization that might want to mentor students to work on their open source projects, please direct them to our Google Summer of Code 2012 website where they can find our timeline along with the FAQs. And stay tuned for more details coming soon!

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

Fridaygram: science education, simulating galaxies, spider webs

Scott Knaster — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 20:11:00 +0000

By Scott Knaster, Google Code Blog Editor

Most software developers started getting interested in technology at an early age. With that in mind, Google Roots in Science and Engineering (RISE) is a program that annually awards grants to groups that come up with great new ways to teach students in Computer Science (CS) and science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). This year’s awards were just announced. The winners included a program that helps primary school students in Dublin, girls in the San Francisco Bay Area, and kids in Uganda who want to learn about technology.

Scientists love to have reproducible results so they can test theories and ideas. What if you’d like to reproduce the creation of a galaxy? That task is still out of scale for humans, but scientists at the Laboratoire pour l'Utilisation de Lasers Intenses (LULI) have figured out a lab procedure that simulates the magnetic fields in newly formed galaxies. The experimental version uses lasers and carbon rods in place of clouds of gas and dark matter, but the results are useful, and you don’t need a galaxy-sized lab to work in.

Narrowing our view from giant galaxies to little spiders, a new study says spider webs are not just strong, but also have the ability to become either stiff or soft, as necessary. Spider webs are also designed to stay as strong as possible when strands are damaged. So spiders are good engineers.

Finally, you might use some of your weekend time to ponder this Vi Hart video about SpongeBob SquarePants and Fibonacci sequences.

Fridaygram posts are just for fun. Fridaygrams are designed for your Friday afternoon and weekend enjoyment. Each Fridaygram item must pass only one test: it has to be interesting to us nerds, and we certainly love our lasers.

Angry Birds Chrome now uses the Web Audio API

Scott Knaster — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 22:16:00 +0000

By Fred Sauer, Developer Advocate

Cross-posted with the Google Web Toolkit Blog

Last week Angry Birds for Chrome was updated to use the Web Audio API for all its in-game audio for Chrome users, which means Chrome users get the full Angry Birds experience, without any plugins. The Web Audio API supports a wide variety of use cases, including the high fidelity and low latency requirements of games. Users of other supported browsers will still get sound via Flash or HTML5 audio.

How does this cross-browser audio magic work? As you may have seen or heard, Angry Birds was in no small part made possible by the cross-platform open source PlayN library. When building for the HTML platform, PlayN in turn relies heavily on Google Web Toolkit (GWT) to delivery a highly optimized web experience for users, and on gwt-voices to easily deliver a cross-browser audio experience.

The responsibility of choosing the appropriate audio API for the game's sound is (mostly) left up to gwt-voices, which chooses the audio API that will give the best experience. If you'd like to hear how other audio APIs perform, you can ask gwt-voices to try to use the Web Audio API, Flash, HTML5 Audio, or even native audio. Your mileage will vary by browser and platform and which plugins you have installed. Also, gwt-voices will select the best available fallback, if the desired audio API is not going to work at all in your environment.

Want to learn more? Check out the Web Audio API tutorial and don't let those pigs grunt too much.

Fred Sauer is a Developer Advocate at Google where most of his time is devoted to Google App Engine and Google Web Toolkit. He is the author of various GWT related open source projects including gwt-dnd (providing in browser Drag and Drop capabilities), gwt-log (an advanced logging framework) and gwt-voices (for cross browser sound support). Fred has dedicated much of his career to Java related development, with an increasing focus on HTML5.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

Translating JavaScript to Dart

Scott Knaster — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 20:00:00 +0000

Marcin

Aaron

By Aaron Wheeler, Senior User Experience Prototyper, and Marcin Wichary, Senior User Experience Designer

Cross-posted with the Chromium Blog

It took approximately 2000 years for the original Rosetta Stone to be discovered, which helped translate the Egyptian Hieroglyphs. We couldn’t wait that long to bridge the Dart and JavaScript worlds, so today we are releasing the JavaScript to Dart Synonym app.

Like most web developers, we are familiar, comfortable, and productive with JavaScript. We were curious about Dart, and thanks to a recent Dart hackathon, we had the chance to play with the language and libraries. The problem was, as JavaScript developers, we didn’t know how to map common JavaScript idioms to Dart. Hence the idea for this synonym app was born.

We started with the basics that every JavaScript and jQuery developer knows: variables, arrays, functions, classes, DOM manipulation, and many more. Then, with the help of the Dart team, we recorded the corresponding Dart versions of each idiom. To practice what we learned, we wrote this app with Dart.

We hope our app that maps between JavaScript and Dart eases your introduction to Dart and gives you a sense of where the project is going. We know the team is eager to hear your feedback. Don’t hesitate to join the conversation or file a new issue for either Dart or the Synonym app. And remember, Dart isn’t set in stone, so your feedback counts.

Aaron Wheeler is a user experience prototyper working on special projects that go beyond the Web. He balances design and engineering outside of work as well, splitting time between artistic pursuits and bicycle maintenance.

Marcin Wichary is a user experience designer, currently working on the Chrome browser and thinking of the future of the Web platform. He also occasionally codes interactive homepage doodles, such as Pac-Man and Stanislaw Lem.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

g|saudi arabia 2.0 is back

Scott Knaster — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 18:31:00 +0000

By Rania Hadi, MENA Outreach Manager

View this post in Arabic

Building on a year packed with g|days throughout the Middle East and North Africa, today we are announcing Google MENA’s first 2012 event to kick off the new year. On March 24-25, Google, in collaboration with Badir Technology Incubator, will be hosting our second event in the Kingdom: g|saudi arabia 2.0.

We’re coming to Jeddah with a host of fresh sessions on all things technology and business. Google engineers, product managers, and business leaders will be there to not only deliver trainings but will be available for any questions, ideas, or discussions you may want to have. We’re also planning some new formats: hands-on workshops, dedicated sessions for women in technology, and chances to showcase Saudi’s finest developer talent.

So if you are a developer, programmer, IT professional, entrepreneur, or small business/start-up, you won’t want to miss this event! If you need more convincing, have a look at the fun, enthusiasm and energy from last year.

Rania Hadi has been with Google since 2004 and now works on Outreach in MENA. She focuses on building relationships and promoting Google technologies with the developer and tech communities.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

Fridaygram: faster web, stronger machines, prettier planet

Scott Knaster — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 20:55:00 +0000

By Scott Knaster, Google Code Blog Editor

Everybody likes a faster web, and that theme has been evident this week here on Google Code Blog. On Monday, Yuchung Cheng wrote about Google’s research into making TCP faster through various proposals and experiments. Yesterday, Roberto Peon and Will Chan blogged about SPDY (pronounced speedy), Google’s protocol for speeding up the web’s application layer historically handled by HTTP. In related news this week, the chairman of the HTTPbis Working Group announced support for SPDY in a public post.

At Google, these projects are part of our Make the Web Faster initiative, although TCP improvements and SPDY are efforts of the whole community. Even if you’re not working on TCP or SPDY, you can find lots of useful resources at our Make the Web Faster site. For example, there are articles on compression, caching, metrics, and more, a set of tools for measuring and optimizing pages, and several discussion forums for communicating with other interested folks.

Sometimes stronger is more important than faster. Scientists looking to improve the durability of machinery have been studying the yellow fattail scorpion, which uses bumps on its back to resist damage from sandstorms. Researchers hope to use the scorpion’s design to create erosion-resistant surfaces for blades, pipes, and similar parts. Or maybe they’ll make machines that look like giant yellow scorpions.

Finally, take a step back from everything on Earth and have a look at NASA’s latest "Blue Marble" images of our planet. We have a beautiful home.

Let’s say this fast: Fridaygram posts are just for fun. Fridaygrams are designed for your Friday afternoon and weekend enjoyment. Each Fridaygram item must pass only one test: it has to be interesting to us nerds. That definitely includes speed, space, and scorpions.

Making the web speedier and safer with SPDY

Scott Knaster — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 19:31:00 +0000

Will

Roberto

By Roberto Peon and Will Chan, Software Engineers

Cross-posted with the Chromium Blog

In the two years since we announced SPDY, we’ve been working with the web community on evolving the spec and getting SPDY deployed on the Web.

Chrome, Android Honeycomb devices, and Google's servers have been speaking SPDY for some time, bringing important benefits to users. For example, thanks to SPDY, a significant percentage of Chrome users saw a decrease in search latency when we launched SSL-search. Given that Google search results are some of the most highly optimized pages on the internet, this was a surprising and welcome result.

We’ve also seen widespread community uptake and participation. Recently, Firefox has added SPDY support, which means that soon half of the browsers in use will support SPDY. On the server front, nginx has announced plans to implement SPDY, and we're actively working on a full featured mod-spdy for Apache. In addition, Strangeloop, Amazon, and Cotendo have all announced that they’ve been using SPDY.

Given SPDY's rapid adoption rate, we’re working hard on acceptance tests to help validate new implementations. Our best practices document can also help website operators make their sites as speedy as possible.

With the help of Mozilla and other contributors, we’re pushing hard to finalize and implement SPDY draft-3 in early 2012, as standardization discussions for SPDY will start at the next meeting of the IETF.

We look forward to working even more closely with the community to improve SPDY and make the Web faster!

To learn more about SPDY, see the link to a Tech Talk here, with slides here.

Roberto Peon and Will Chan co-lead the SPDY effort at Google. Roberto leads SPDY server efforts and continues to tell people to be unafraid of trying to change the world for the better. Will works on the Chrome network stack and leads the Chrome SPDY efforts. Outside of work, Will enjoys traveling the world in search of cheap beer and absurd situations.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

Let’s make TCP faster

Scott Knaster — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 18:00:00 +0000

By Yuchung Cheng, Make The Web Faster Team

Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), the workhorse of the Internet, is designed to deliver all the Web’s content and operate over a huge range of network types. To deliver content effectively, Web browsers typically open several dozen parallel TCP connections ahead of making actual requests. This strategy overcomes inherent TCP limitations but results in high latency in many situations and is not scalable.

Our research shows that the key to reducing latency is saving round trips. We’re experimenting with several improvements to TCP. Here’s a summary of some of our recommendations to make TCP faster:

1. Increase TCP initial congestion window to 10 (IW10). The amount of data sent at the beginning of a TCP connection is currently 3 packets, implying 3 round trips (RTT) to deliver a tiny 15KB-sized content. Our experiments indicate that IW10 reduces the network latency of Web transfers by over 10%.

2. Reduce the initial timeout from 3 seconds to 1 second. An RTT of 3 seconds was appropriate a couple of decades ago, but today’s Internet requires a much smaller timeout. Our rationale for this change is well documented here.

3. Use TCP Fast Open (TFO). For 33% of all HTTP requests, the browser needs to first spend one RTT to establish a TCP connection with the remote peer. Most HTTP responses fit in the initial TCP congestion window of 10 packets, doubling response time. TFO removes this overhead by including the HTTP request in the initial TCP SYN packet. We’ve demonstrated TFO reducing Page Load time by 10% on average, and over 40% in many situations. Our research paper and internet-draft address concerns such as dropped packets and DOS attacks when using TFO.

4. Use Proportional Rate Reduction for TCP (PRR). Packet losses indicate the network is in disorder or is congested. PRR, a new loss recovery algorithm, retransmits smoothly to recover losses during network congestion. The algorithm is faster than the current mechanism by adjusting the transmission rate according to the degree of losses. PRR is now part of the Linux kernel and is in the process of becoming part of the TCP standard.

In addition, we are developing algorithms to recover faster on noisy mobile networks, as well as a guaranteed 2-RTT delivery during startup. All our work on TCP is open-source and publicly available. We disseminate our innovations through the Linux kernel, IETF standards proposals, and research publications. Our goal is to partner with industry and academia to improve TCP for the whole Internet. Please watch this blog and http://code.google.com/speed/ for further information.

Yuchung Cheng works on the transport layer to make the Web faster. He believes the current transport layer badly needs an overhaul to catch up with other (networking) technologies. He can be reached at ycheng@google.com.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

Fridaygram: don’t censor the web, rediscovering Darwin, beautiful nebula

Scott Knaster — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 21:26:00 +0000

By Scott Knaster, Google Code Blog Editor

Last Wednesday, the web looked very different than it usually does. Dozens of popular sites went dark or were modified in some way. We censored the logo on our homepage. As you probably know by now, all this was done to call attention to prospective legislation being debated by the U.S. Congress: the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA). These bills would censor the web, eliminate due process, and despite their titles, would not stop piracy.

We asked you to take action by signing a petition to Congress, and you responded. More than 7 million people in the U.S. added their names to the petition. We’re asking you to please keep sharing the petition with your friends at http://www.google.com/takeaction.

Let’s go from the U.S. Congress to the British Geological Survey, where Howard Falcon-Lang recently discovered a wooden cabinet tucked away in a corner. Inside the cabinet were rock samples with the signature C. Darwin, Esquire. As in Charles Darwin. It turns out that these samples were collected by Darwin during his HMS Beagle voyages in the 1830s, and had been misplaced for 165 years. Probably they’ll keep better track of the Darwin samples now.

Finally, for something that’s just really cool, please take a look at this video that zooms into an image of the Helix Nebula in the constellation Aquarius. Enjoy!

Fridaygram posts are generally just for fun, although we’ve put on our serious hat for the main item today. Fridaygrams are designed for your Friday afternoon and weekend enjoyment. Each Fridaygram item must pass only one test: it has to be interesting to us nerds.

Google Apps EMEA Developer Tour (continued)

Scott Knaster — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 08:00:00 +0000

By Nicolas Garnier, Developer Relations Team

Cross-posted from the Google Apps Developer Blog

Two months ago we announced that a few of us from the Google Apps Developer Relations team would be going around EMEA to meet with developers and talk about Google Apps technologies. We have met great developers from Germany, France, Russia, Czech Republic, Egypt, Switzerland, Israel, and Spain during Google Developer Days, hackathons, developer conferences and GTUG meetings.

This year we are continuing the tour with a series of Google Apps Script hackathons taking place in Vienna, Milan, Madrid, Munich and Dublin over the next few months. These hackathons provide a fun and hands-on way to learn about Google Apps Script and a good opportunity to give us your feedback on this technology.

For more information about the tour and to register for these events, please visit the Google Apps EMEA Developer Tour website.

We plan to organize many other Google Apps events close to you in the near future. Look for updates on the Google Apps EMEA Developer Tour website or keep an eye out for further announcements on the Google Apps Developer Blog.

Nicolas Garnier joined Google’s Developer Relations team in 2008 and lives in Zurich. He is a Developer Advocate focusing on Google Apps and Web APIs. Before joining Google, Nicolas worked at Airbus and at the French Space Agency where he built web applications for scientific researchers.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

Google Cloud Storage: concurrency controls and deeper App Engine integration

Scott Knaster — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 20:00:00 +0000

By Navneet Joneja, Product Manager

Google Cloud Storage is a robust, high-performance service that enables developers and businesses to use Google’s infrastructure to store and serve their data. Today, we’re announcing a new feature that gives you greater control over concurrent writes to the same object, and the availability of an App Engine Files API that makes it easier to read and write data from Java App Engine applications.

Write concurrency control

A number of our customers have asked us for greater control over concurrent writes, in order to implement features like strongly consistent write operations and distributed locking semantics in the cloud. In response to your feedback, we’re announcing the release of version-based concurrency control. Every time you update an object, it gets assigned a 32-bit, monotonically increasing sequence number. This version number is returned as a header with every GET or HEAD request. You can then use a conditional write operation to manage concurrent updates to the object (for example, when you want read-modify-write semantics). This feature is currently experimental.

AppEngine Files API for Java applications

Last fall, we announced the ability to read and write your Google Cloud Storage data using the App Engine Files API for Python applications. Today, we’re making the Files API available to Java App Engine applications too. This feature is currently experimental, and we’ll continue to enhance it in the months to come.

As always, we welcome your feedback in our discussion group. If you haven’t tried Google Cloud Storage yet, you can sign up and get started here.

Navneet Joneja loves being at the forefront of the next generation of simple and reliable software infrastructure, the foundation on which next-generation technology is being built. When not working, he can usually be found dreaming up new ways to entertain his intensely curious almost-two-year-old.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

Fridaygram: Science Fair, tiny frog, friggatriskaidekaphobia

Scott Knaster — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 20:02:00 +0000

By Scott Knaster, Google Code Blog Editor

This week we launched the 2012 Google Science Fair for students ages 13 to 18. For the Science Fair, young scientists are asked to pose a question, answer it through scientific inquiry, and report the results online. We’ll pick 90 regional finalists, then choose the top 15 to come to Google in Mountain View, California. Nobel laureates and other distinguished folks will judge the finalists.

Grown-up scientists working in the Papua New Guinea rain forest recently heard what sounded like an insect call, then tried to find out what was making the noise. Eventually they bagged leaf litter from the forest floor and began to sort through it, when a tiny frog jumped out. It was Paedophryne amauensis, and at an average length of 7.7 millimeters, it’s said to be the world’s smallest vertebrate. So watch your step the next time you’re walking around the rain forest.

Finally, in celebration of today’s day and date, please take a look at these wonderful photos from a Friday the 13th party in 1940, where attendees tempted fate by breaking a mirror, walking under a ladder, and otherwise indulging in every superstition they could think of. After you’re done, cross your fingers and hope for a great weekend.

Happy new year! Fridaygram posts are just for fun. Fridaygrams are designed for your Friday afternoon and weekend enjoyment. Each Fridaygram item must pass only one test: it has to be interesting to us nerds.

Join us for the first ever G|Tanzania and G|Ethiopia

Scott Knaster — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 22:08:00 +0000

By Melina Mattos, Program Manager, Google Africa

Cross-posted from the Google Africa Blog

2011 was a busy year for the Google Africa team. The g|Day developer and business conference visited Senegal, Ghana, Nigeria, Cameroon, Uganda, Kenya, South Africa, and Angola in 2011, expanding from 5 countries in 2010 and from 2 in 2009. Over the year, business professionals, entrepreneurs, and marketers have explored innovative technologies to get online and to serve their business needs. Developers and webmasters have had an in-depth look at Android, Chrome, App Engine, Maps, Webmaster Tools, and more.

While we are excited about all the activity growing in the local communities, we are always looking for opportunities to engage with new communities of developers, business leaders, and entrepreneurs who are as passionate about technology as we are. Therefore, we are excited to kick off the 2012 G-Day roadshow with G-Tanzania and G-Ethiopia.

G-Tanzania will be held on February 2nd and 3rd at Mlimani City Conference Center in Dar es Salaam, followed by G-Ethiopia on February 7th and 8th at the Hilton Hotel and Conference Center in Addis Ababa.

Registration is now open for these free events. Space is limited so be sure to register as soon as possible for G-Tanzania and G-Ethiopia to improve the chances of your application being accepted. We look forward to seeing you soon!

Melina Mattos is a Program Manager for the Sub-Saharan Africa Outreach team. When she's not busy working with developer and business communities in Africa, she's either exploring the great outdoors, sitting on a plane, or playing with her camera.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

Web Fonts, now more compressed

Scott Knaster — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 22:00:00 +0000

By Raph Levien, Engineer, Google Web Fonts

One of Google’s core principles is that "fast is better than slow", and the Web Fonts team takes that to heart. We’re always looking for ways to make web fonts load faster, and that’s doubtless a key factor in our rapid user adoption. Today, we are announcing a new way to make web fonts smaller and faster, in collaboration with the Monotype Imaging Fonts.com Web Fonts team. Google Web Fonts now implements Monotype Imaging’s MicroType Express compression format, which yields an approximate 15% savings in file size over using gzip alone. This change will automatically speed up Google Web Fonts for Internet Explorer browsers (version 6 and up). We’re also actively working to offer improved compression with other modern browsers, including Google Chrome.

We’ve kept the interface simple, so designers don’t need to update their integrations in any way — we’ll automatically upgrade the CSS snippet and font files so that site designers and visitors get their fonts faster. We’ve done this for previous speed optimizations as well, such as automatically stripping the hints (metadata used for improving rendering quality on Windows) when serving fonts to Mac, iOS, and Android clients. We expect that most future optimizations will also be automatic and transparent.

Monotype Imaging has agreed to make MicroType Express available to the public at no cost; the license can be found at monotypeimaging.com/aboutus/mtx-license. We believe it’s friendly to both open source and proprietary implementations.

Today, we are also releasing an implementation of MicroType Express compression as part of the Embedded OpenType converter in the open-source sfntly library, adding to the existing WOFF compression. The sfntly library, developed by the Google Internationalization Engineering team, serves as the core conversion engine in Google Web Fonts for subsetting, hint stripping, and related functions of our dynamic serving path. We hope that all web font services, as well as people hosting their own web fonts, will use sfntly to optimize font serving across the web.

We are proud to be working with Monotype Imaging, and we look forward to learning more from designers, users, sites and other partners to advance the state of web fonts together!

Raph Levien is an expert on fonts and graphics technologies. Raph designed Inconsolata, one of the fonts available on the Web Font API. Raph enjoys photography and spending time with his family.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

Fridaygram: goodbye to 2011

Scott Knaster — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 15:52:00 +0000

By Scott Knaster, Google Code Blog Editor

This is the last Fridaygram of 2011, and like most everybody else, we’re in a reflective mood. It’s also the 208th post on Google Code Blog this year, which means we’ve averaged more than one post every two days, so that’s plenty of stuff for you to read. What did we write about?

At Google, we love to launch. Many of our posts were about new APIs and client libraries. We also posted a bunch of times about HTML5 and Chrome and about making the web faster. And we posted about Android, Google+, and Google Apps developer news.

Many of our 2011 posts were about the steady progress of App Engine, Cloud Storage, and other cloud topics for developers. We also published several times about commerce and in-app payments.

2011 was a stellar year for Google I/O and other developer events around the world. Some of our most popular posts provided announcements, details, and recaps of these events. And we welcomed a couple dozen guest posts during Google I/O from developers with cool stories to tell.

The two most popular Code Blog posts of the year were both launches: the Dart preview in October, and the Swiffy launch in June.

Last, and surely least, I posted 26 Fridaygrams in an attempt to amuse and enlighten you. Thank you for reading those, and thanks for dropping by and reading all the posts we’ve thrown your way this year. See you in 2012!

And finally, please enjoy one more Easter egg.

Getting to know the Android Developer Challenge finalists

Scott Knaster — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 19:19:00 +0000

By Chukwuemeka Afigbo, Program Manager, Sub-Saharan Africa

Cross-posted from the Google Africa Blog

Last month, the five finalists of the Android Developer Challenge came together to share their experiences with the world via Google+ Hangouts.

Selected from a group of more than 200 submissions and 30 semi-finalists, the five finalists were Chike Maduegbuna, Bobola Oniwura and Tope Omotunde of AfriNolly (Nigeria); David Lemayian of Olalashe (Kenya); Gerald Kibugi of Shopper’s Delight (Kenya); Herko Lategan of Rainbow Racer (South Africa); and Richard Marsh of Wedding Plandroid (South Africa).

The interview was hosted by CP Africa, a popular African blog and Gbenga Sesan, Nigerian tech evangelist, who conducted the interview while sitting in the departure lounge of the Murtala Mohammed International Airport in Lagos as he waited to board his flight to Addis Ababa.

Thanks to the power of the internet and Google+, the interview was held simultaneously in Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa, in collaboration with three developer hubs: Umbono (Cape Town, South Africa), Co Creation Hub (Lagos, Nigeria) and iHub (Nairobi, Kenya). The finalists answered live questions and questions from people around the world including Ghana, Italy, Malaysia, Mali, Nigeria and Uganda using Google Moderator.

The top-voted question was on how to prioritize features when building an application, while another participant wanted to know what kind of changes the finalists hoped to create in Africa with their applications.

To learn more about the finalists for the Android Developer Challenge and their applications, please visit the new case studies section of the Google Africa Developers website. If you create solutions using Google services for developers (Google Apps, Chrome extensions, Android, App Engine, etc.) and want to share your story with the world, let us know!

Chukwuemeka Afigbo is a Program Manager in the Sub-Saharan Africa Outreach Team. He is an avid football (soccer) fan.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

Google Prediction API: faster, easier to use, and more accurate

Scott Knaster — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 15:19:00 +0000

By Marc Cohen, Developer Relations

This holiday season, the Google Prediction API Team is bringing you four presents and, thanks to the joys of cloud computing, no reindeer are required for delivery. Here’s what you’ve already received:

Faster on-ramp: We’ve made it easier to get started by enabling you to create an empty model (by sending a trainedmodels.insert request with no storageDataLocation specified) and add training data using the trainedmodels.update method. This change allows you to submit your model contents without needing to stage the data in Google Cloud Storage.
Improved updates: The algorithms used to implement model updates (adding additional data to existing models) have been modified to work faster than ever.
More classification algorithms: We’ve increased the number of classification algorithms used to build predictive models, resulting in across-the-board improvements in accuracy.
Integration with Google Apps Script: Prediction services are now available as part of Google Apps Script, which means you can integrate prediction services with Google Docs, Google Maps, Gmail, and other great Google products.

All of the above enhancements are supported by the current Prediction API version 1.4 so you can enjoy these features using the existing client libraries.

Happy Holidays from the Google Prediction API Team. We’re looking forward to bringing you more exciting features in 2012!

Marc Cohen is a member of Google’s Developer Relations Team in Seattle. When not teaching Python programming and listening to indie rock music, he enjoys using the Google Prediction API to peer into the future.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

Speed metrics in Google Analytics

Scott Knaster — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 18:00:00 +0000

By Satish Kambala, Staff Software Engineer

At Google we believe that speed matters and a faster web is better for everyone. That’s why we started the Make The Web Faster initiative. To improve the speed of a website, we need to measure how fast web pages load. The Site Speed report, which is now available by default to all users of Google Analytics, provides just that: it enables website owners to measure page load time for their web pages.

You can use the Site Speed report to correlate speed with other metrics in Google Analytics, such as page views and conversions. This enables website owners to identify and optimize those pages that drive these metrics. Page load times can be analyzed by browser type or user location to understand if specific optimizations are required. Recently, we enhanced the Site Speed report by adding a new section called Technical (see screenshot below) which displays network and server time components of page load time.

You can learn more about the Site Speed report here. This report, along with powerful page speed analysis tools such as Page Speed Online, will help website owners delight their users by building fast and responsive websites.

Have ideas on how to make your website faster or ways to speed up the entire Web? Send us your thoughts.

Satish Kambala works at Google on stuff that helps in making the web faster. In his free time, apart from watching cricket and movies, Satish likes exploring places with his wife.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

Fridaygram: universal terms, distant space, watch where you walk

Scott Knaster — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 20:03:00 +0000

By Scott Knaster, Google Code Blog Editor

Earlier this week, we launched a single Terms of Service for most of our APIs. You might know the Terms of Service (ToS) as those legal documents you click through quickly when you start using a new product, but they’re vitally important, as they specify exactly what you and we can expect from each other when you use our APIs. (Internally, we refer to the new terms as uToS [universal terms of service], pronounced "you toss".)

The project began some time ago as a general developer ToS cleanup. At the time, we looked at the Google Terms of Service shared across many consumer products, and figured developers deserved equal consideration. In reviewing the developer ToS documents, it became clear that there was plenty of language in common among various products. And this week, the new Terms launched, covering most APIs, with more to come in time. Of the APIs that are included, a few have additional terms, but these tend to be brief. And things overall are much simpler and cleaner than before.

This project is an example of something that affects every Google developer and Google too, and yet it’s not really a technical topic. This ToS simplification was no minor project: it was over two years in the making. Getting to simplify an important set of documents by removing over 125,000 words of text is a wonderful thing.

Speaking of universal things, the incredible Voyager 1 spacecraft is now about 18 billion kilometers from the sun and is nearing the end of our solar system. Voyager now inhabits a part of space between planets and other stars that has an intense magnetic field, among other unusual properties, and we’ll learn more about the place from Voyager itself. One scientist says that Voyager is now in a "stagnation region", and I think we all know what that feels like.

And finally, if you’re planning your holiday vacation over the weekend, you might want to see what happens if you ask Google Maps for walking directions from Rivendell to Mordor.

Fridaygram posts are just for fun, and sometimes even legal stuff can be fun. Fridaygrams are designed for your Friday afternoon and weekend enjoyment. Each Fridaygram item must pass only one test: it has to be interesting to us nerds.

Introducing AdSense Management Services in Google Apps Script

Scott Knaster — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 15:52:00 +0000

By Silvano Luciani, Developer Programs Engineer, AdSense API Team

Starting today, the AdSense Management API is available as part of AdSense Services in Google Apps Script. This means that you’ll be able to automate your AdSense reporting across Google products using a JavaScript cloud scripting language to do things like:

Create AdSense performance reports for your AdSense accounts in a Google spreadsheet.
Create a chart based on your AdSense reporting data and display it in a Google spreadsheet.
Embed your scripts in a Google Sites page, for instance to import a chart.
Use triggers to schedule the execution of your scripts, for instance to periodically update the chart imported in the Google Sites page.

You can start using the service by checking out the reference documentation, which also contains some sample scripts, and by reading this tutorial, which implements the use cases mentioned above.

Based in London, Silvano Luciani joined Google in 2011 to make the AdSense API developers happier people. Before that, he has worked in Finland, Italy, Spain and the UK, writing web based configuration management tools for ISPs, social networks, web based training materials, e-commerce apps and more. He has recently discovered that he loves charts, and has finally started to play the drums in the London’s office music room. If you can call what he does "playing the drums".

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

Mobile Web performance challenges and strategies

Scott Knaster — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 00:59:00 +0000

By Ramki Krishnan, Technical Program Manager

Consumers are increasingly relying on their mobile devices to access the Web, thrusting mobile web performance into the limelight. Mobile users expect web pages to display on their mobile devices as fast as or faster than on their desktops.

As part of Google’s effort to Make The Web Faster, we invited Guy Podjarny, CTO of Blaze.io, to talk about some of the major performance concerns in the mobile web and ways to alleviate these issues. Guy’s talk focused on Front-End Optimization and highlighted 3 areas: mobile network, software, and hardware. Each of these impacts performance in myriad ways. The full video is available here, and runs just under an hour. If you don’t have time to watch this enlightening talk, this post discusses some key takeaways.

Mobile networks have high latency, and reducing the number of requests and the size of downloads are well-known optimization strategies. Guy also mentions using on-demand image displays such as loading above-the-fold images by default and other images only as they scroll into view. To handle network reliability, he recommends non-blocking requests eliminating single points of failure, with a selective aggregation of files needed for content display. Periodic pinging of the cell tower by the client can also reduce latency associated with dropped connections, but judicious timeouts and battery drain on the mobile device need to be factored in.

Modern mobile browsers are built mobile-friendly, and they can be helped further by exploiting localStorage to store CSS and JavaScript files. Pipelining multiple requests on a connection is an option, but developers need to work around head-of-line blocking by using techniques such as splitting dynamic and static resource requests on different domains.

Mobile hardware CPUs are weaker than their desktop counterparts. Guy points out the need to minimize JavaScript when designing mobile-friendly web pages and avoid reflows or defer JavaScript until after page loads. Clever image rendering techniques such as automatically resizing images to devices and loading full resolution only on zoom can also help.

Guy’s presentation makes clear that mobile web optimizations need to mitigate latencies introduced by mobile networks, software, and hardware. Rapidly changing OSes and browsers add to the challenges facing publishers. New and evolved tools and technologies will help ensure an optimal web browsing experience for mobile users.

Ramki Krishnan works at Google on the "Make The Web Faster" team. When not at work, he dreams of being a tennis pro, a humorist, and a rock drummer all rolled into one.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

In-App Payments expands its borders

Scott Knaster — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 22:42:00 +0000

By Pali Bhat, Group Product Manager

Cross-posted on the Google Commerce Blog and Chromium Blog

Since Google In-App Payments launched in July for developers in the United States, we’ve received great feedback on how easy it is to integrate as well as how simple it is for consumers to use. While the API has been off to a strong start, there’s been a growing demand for availability outside of the United States.

So starting today, we are opening developer enrollment for Google In-App Payments to 17 additional countries. In addition to the United States, developers from Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom can now use the Google In-App Payments API to incorporate an in-context payment experience into applications on the Chrome Web Store and their own sites.

Developers using In-App Payments are seeing strong conversions and revenue streams thanks to these key features:

Ease of use: the short payment process for consumers takes place right in the developer’s app or site.
Large existing user base: there are millions of Google Wallet online users in over 140 countries.
Low fees: developers pay just 5% on all transactions.

You can get started accepting payments in your web apps by following the tutorial and get answers to any questions in the forum. We look forward to expanding to even more countries in the future, as well as continuously working to improve the Google In-App Payments experience.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

Automate with the Google Affiliate Network API

Scott Knaster — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 21:14:00 +0000

By Ali Pasha, Google Affiliate Network Product Manager

Google Affiliate Network is a free program that makes it easy for website publishers to connect with quality advertisers and get rewarded for driving conversions.

Today we’re making it even easier for affiliates and advertisers to work with Google Affiliate Network by launching the Google Affiliate Network API, which enables publishers and advertisers to automate various tasks related to Google Affiliate Network.

For more information, please see the Google Affiliate Network blog.

Ali Pasha has been a Google Product Manager for several years and now works on Google Affiliate Network. Ali has also made key contributions to Android App Inventor, Google Code, Google Code Search, and Google AJAX APIs.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

Fridaygram: graphing functions, telescope milestone, baby scientists

Scott Knaster — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 20:50:00 +0000

By Scott Knaster, Google Code Blog Editor

You might already know that Google Search makes a handy calculator. Just type any calculation into a Google search box, and the answer is computed for you. Earlier this week, we added an even cooler, more powerful feature. Now, when you type a function, you’ll see it graphed.

As you can see in this image, you can graph more than one function at a time by separating them with commas. Once the graph is drawn, you can zoom and pan to see the sections and details you want. And the Google colors are a nice touch.

In other calculation-related news this week, the Hubble Space Telescope counted to 10,000. That’s the number of published scientific papers based on data gathered from Hubble. Although the telescope was launched back in 1990, it’s said to be in great shape and is taking great pictures, thanks largely to frequent service missions by astronauts. That should inspire you to change the oil in your car.

Finally, here’s one especially for you babies out there, and for those who know or are related to babies. The Nerdy Baby coloring book for very young scientists looks like a great way to nudge very small kids toward a proper nerdy upbringing. And when you’re not coloring, you can spend some time this weekend coming up with cool functions to graph on Google Search.

Fridaygram posts are just for fun. They're designed for your Friday afternoon and weekend enjoyment. Each Fridaygram item must pass only one test: it has to be interesting to us nerds (sometimes including nerdy babies).

Games, apps and runtimes come to Native Client

Scott Knaster — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 17:30:00 +0000

By Christian Stefansen, Product Manager

Cross-posted from the Chromium Blog
Updated on December 14th with the video of the event.

Since we launched Native Client late last summer, our team has been working hard to make the technology more useful to developers. Yesterday at an event held at Google we shared the progress we’ve made towards this goal and showcased work from some of the early adopters of the technology, including Square Enix, Unity Technologies, and Bungie.

One code base for all OSs
In September, we started supporting a set of core Pepper interfaces, suited for 2D graphics, audio, and compute-intensive applications. Since that release, we’ve shipped additional APIs and capabilities, providing native code with more of the capabilities available from JavaScript. These include hardware-accelerated 3D graphics via OpenGL ES 2.0, a mouse lock API, a full-screen API, and much more. One example of the kind of experience Native Client can currently support is Bastion, an award-winning role-playing game from Supergiant Games. Previously limited to Microsoft Windows® and Xbox® systems, the Native Client port of Bastion allows Supergiant to reach users on all popular desktop operating systems, with the safety and simplicity of the web.

Easy porting of previous work
If you have existing code bases in C, C++, or C#, Native Client now allows you to port your existing apps to the web while maintaining just one code base. This was particularly appealing to Spacetime Studios. They ported their multiplayer online game Star Legends to the web in less than two weeks from an existing code base of more than half a million lines of code. The side benefit of being able to maintain their existing development and testing infrastructure further accelerated their delivery of a shipping title.

More choices of programming languages
The community is actively involved in Native Client, porting some of the most popular application middleware. Ports include Unity and Moai game engines, programming language environments Mono and Lua, audio middleware such as fmod and Wwise, as well as the Bullet physics engine. These Native Client ports make the web more accessible to hundreds of thousands of application developers. At the event, we showcased upcoming applications from Heartwood, Silvertree, Exit Strategy, and Dedalord, who used those tools to bring their apps to the web with very little effort. We’ll continue to work with the community to get even more languages and middleware systems ported to Native Client.

We recognize that building a Native Client app is only the start of a successful app. That’s why we’ve enabled distribution of Native Client-based apps via the Chrome Web Store. The Chrome Web Store gives developers a simple, effective strategy to reach over 200 million active users of Google Chrome.

If all this sounds exciting, please visit our new documentation site at gonacl.com. There you’ll find a growing collection of tutorials, examples, videos, reference documentation, and much more.

Questions or suggestions? Join us in the discussion forums. We look forward to seeing some great new apps from Native Client developers.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

Introducing the Google Analytics Core Reporting API

Scott Knaster — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 20:00:00 +0000

Jeetendra

Nick

By Jeetendra Soneja and Nick Mihailovski, Google Analytics API Team

Today we are announcing the new Google Analytics Core Reporting API as a replacement for the Data Export API. This is the second phase in a larger project we started a couple months back to upgrade our APIs to new infrastructure.

The Core Reporting API has two versions.

Version 3.0 is a brand new API, with a 10x reduction in output size and support for many new client libraries, like PHP, Ruby, Python, JavaScript and Java. All new features will only be added to this version.

Version 2.4 is backward compatible with the legacy Data Export Version 2.3.

If you are building a new application or maintaining an existing one, we highly recommend migrating to version 3.0.

One of the biggest changes in switching to the Core Reporting API is that you now need to register your applications via the Google APIs Console and use a project ID to access the API.

With this change, we are also announcing the deprecation of the Data Export API version 2.3. This API will continue to work for 6 months, after which all v2.3 XML requests will return a v2.4 response. Also, we plan to terminate the Data Export API Account Feed. All configuration data should be retrieved through the Google Analytics Management API.

See our Data Export API changelog for all the details of the change and read our developer documentation for more details about each API.

If you have any questions feel free to reach out in our Data Export API Google group.

Jeetendra Soneja is the technical engineering lead on the Google Analytics API team. He's a big fan of cricket – the game, that is. :)

Nick Mihailovski is a Senior Developer Programs Engineer working on the Google Analytics API. In his spare time he likes to travel around the world.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

Around the world with Google Developer Day 2011

Scott Knaster — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 19:01:00 +0000

By Monica Tran, Google Developer Day Team

This year's Google Developer Day events just finished after a worldwide tour across nine cities and four continents. We'd like to thank the thousands of developers who contributed to making Google Developer Day a success. If we didn’t make it to your city, you can continue to get regular updates on all things developer at our Google Developers page on Google+. And for those of you looking for a community to join, get in touch with one of our local Google Technology User Groups (GTUGs) or if you’re feeling bold, start your own chapter!

Please read the recaps below, and visit our website to get the highlights, videos and photos from Google Developer Day 2011. See you in 2012!

Sao Paulo, Brazil: The countdown to Google Developer Day ended with the first of our events in Sao Paulo, where we welcomed over 1,600 developers. Brazilian developers showed up in full force for the event, celebrating the latest Chrome Webstore launch, showing us the most crazy code they’ve ever written and interacting with developers’ creations in the Android ADK showcase.

Buenos Aires, Argentina: Continuing our Latin America tour, James Whittaker, Director of Engineering, delivered a keynote featuring the latest from Android, Chrome, and Google+. The keynote presentations were built in HTML5 and featured a 3D demo of the latest Ice Age trailer. The Google+ game was a hit among attendees, who used the pin exchange as a conversation starter to meet other developers. Those who found all five, including the elusive black Circles pin, took home one of these guys.

Moscow, Russia: Russia is home to the 4th largest developer population in the world, accounting for 12% of EMEA’s developers. On October 10, more than 1,800 of those developers joined us in Moscow, where we hosted five simultaneous tracks featuring 19 speakers and 25 sessions. With the help of Russian GTUGs, we featured 16 projects, including ADK-powered robots from our Open Call challenges. Check out photos of our speakers in Russian national shirts and other photos of the event here.

Prague, Czech Republic: This year’s Google Developer Day focused on bringing nearly 1,000 members of the developer community together in creative and fun ways. Our very first Developer Sandbox featured 12 companies, in addition to four projects from ADK Challenge and a showcase of the 20 latest Android devices. At the end of the day--after 27 sessions by 25 speakers--Ignite stole the show with eight Czech influencers presenting on topics from happiness at work to 3D printing. Additionally, check out our HTML5 developer competition, Mam Padla, as well as videos and photos from the event.

Beijing, China: Despite being a late addition, China showed up in a big way with a 3-city Google Developer Day tour that attracted 2,240 attendees. In addition to the keynote, 36 breakout sessions, 21 partner booths and 6 product demos were offered, and over 60 developer applications showcased. New to Beijing this year was the live audience instant message display, which was shown during the keynote. Seven GTUGs across China sent in greeting videos and nearly a dozen developers came on stage to share their experiences developing innovative business solutions using Google technologies.

Tokyo, Japan: With over 1,700 developers in attendance after being selected via DevQuiz from 5,000 registrations, and with over 100 volunteer developers and Googlers collaborating to organize, this year’s Google Developer Day embraced the spirit of open source with 40 developers in the Developer Sandbox, 17 Open Call (Android and HTML5) exhibits, a Mini Theater for developers to stage informal presentations, and an appearance from Bar Android. Ignite closed the event with lightning talks from 6 developers and our DevQuiz team, GoogleFes!, and a special dance performance from the GDD48. Check out our highlights video and photos for the full picture.

Sydney, Australia: We hosted our largest developer audience in Australia at our third Google Developer Day event. Our Sydney-based engineers and Developer Relations speakers put on 32 sessions, including a VC panel that featured interviews from experts at Posse, Pollenizer and Atlassian. To quench their thirst, developers turned to iZac, our Android ADK-powered bartender. For more highlights and photos, visit our homepage.

Tel Aviv, Israel: Israel has one of the highest numbers of startups per capita, leading us to deem it the “Startup Nation” amongst our Google Developer Day countries. 1,450 developers joined us for this year’s event, where we hosted 27 sessions, as well as lots of fun activities at the innovation lounge. To showcase the rich innovation coming from the country, local developers Paradroid, The Sign Language Glove, Xtendi and iOnRoad (among many others) were on-hand to demo their creations; while Tmura (the Israeli Public Service Venture Fund) and the Israeli Accessibility Association helped raise awareness for causes relevant to developers. Check out the highlights video and photos.

Berlin, Germany: With over 2,100 developers in attendance at this year’s event, the grande finale of our world tour, Google Developer Day in Berlin, was also our largest single GDD in 2011. Partnering with two of the most innovative universities in Germany, Technische Universität Berlin (TU) and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (HU), we hosted 37 sessions in 5 parallel tracks. We had a great presentation of the winners of the German ADK- and HTML5-Open Call, university students showcased 31 projects with innovative technologies mostly related to Google products and GDD themes, and we had a great after-GDD get together at the famous Berlin underground space station c-base. Our German GTUG community, with 16 local GTUGs the most active in Europe, organized an amazing 4-day Developer Weekend, which included Bootcamp, Hack-and-Tell and Ignite sessions. Don’t miss our highlights video (featuring beatboxing at its best) and our photo gallery.

You might remember Monica Tran from I/O Live or one of our eight Google Developer Days around the world. Now Monica is back to lead the charge on Google I/O 2012.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

Fridaygram: indoors, in space, in formation

Scott Knaster — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 20:28:00 +0000

By Scott Knaster, Google Code Blog Editor

The latest version of Google Maps for Android can take you somewhere new: indoors. The Google Maps folks have plotted out a bunch of airports, shopping centers, stores, and other locations in the U.S. and Japan. Now you have one fewer excuse for staying at home.

From the shops to space: last Saturday NASA launched the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), including the Curiosity rover. MSL will travel to Mars over the next 8 months before a planned touchdown next August 6th. Once there, Curiosity will conduct experiments to figure out if life was ever feasible in the landing area.

Finally, if you haven’t decided yet what you’re going to do this weekend, maybe you could fly in formation with jets like this dude did. Or you could clean out the fridge.

Fridaygram posts are just for fun. They're designed for your Friday afternoon and weekend enjoyment. Each Fridaygram item must pass only one test: it has to be interesting to us nerds.

Hacking for Humanity around the world

Scott Knaster — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 17:45:00 +0000

By Christiaan Adams, Google.org Crisis Response Team

Every year, coders and designers have been gathering to meet with experts in disaster response and international development, to spend a weekend designing tools and hacking code for the public good. This weekend, December 3-4, 2011, the next Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK) hackathons will be taking place in cities around the world, with the simple idea that technology can and should be used for good.

Led by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Hewlett-Packard, NASA, and the World Bank, RHoK brings together hackers of all stripes to create open source software solutions that address issues of global interest and assist the organizations working on those issues. The fourth round of global RHoK events will be taking place in more than 30 cities on December 3-4, 2011, and you are invited and encouraged to attend.

Some of the interesting solutions that have been developed at past events include I’mOK, a mobile app that was used after the Haiti and Chile earthquakes, CHASM, a visualization tool for mapping landslide risk which is being used by the World Bank around the Caribbean, and Bushfire Connect, an online service for real-time information on fires in Australia. Hackers have also helped develop features for Person Finder, a tool created by the Google.org Crisis Response Team to help people find friends and loved ones after disasters.

We’re inviting all developers, designers, and anyone else who wants to help “hack for humanity” to attend one of the local events this weekend, December 3-4. You’ll have a chance to meet other open source developers, work with experts in disasters and international development, and contribute code to exciting projects that make a difference. Googlers will be attending several events, including those in San Francisco, New York, London, and others. We look forward to meeting you there!

And if you’re part of an organization that works in the fields of crisis response, climate change, or international development, you can submit a problem definition online, so that developers and volunteers can work on technology to address the challenge.

Visit http://www.rhok.org/ for more information and to sign up for your local event, and get set to put your hacking skills to good use.

Christiaan Adams is a developer advocate with the Google Earth Outreach Team and Google.org’s Crisis Response Team, where he helps nonprofits and disaster response organizations to use online mapping tools. When he’s not at work, he likes to go hiking or mountain biking, using Google Maps, of course.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

JavaScript Client Library for Google APIs Alpha version released

Scott Knaster — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 19:22:00 +0000

Brendan

Antonio

By Brendan O’Brien and Antonio Fuentes, Google Developer Team

Today we reached another milestone in our efforts to provide infrastructure and tools to make it easier for developers to use Google APIs: we have released the Google APIs Client Library for JavaScript in Alpha. This client library is the latest addition to our suite of client libraries, which already includes Python, PHP, and Java.

This compact and efficient client library provides access to all the Google APIs that are listed in the APIs Explorer. The client library is also flexible, supporting multiple browser environments including Chrome 8+, Firefox 3.5+, Internet Explorer 8+, Safari 4+, and Opera 11+. In addition, the JavaScript client library supports OAuth 2.0 authorization methods.

You can load the client library using the following script tag:

Loading an API and making a request is as easy as executing:


gapi.client.load('API_NAME', 'API_VERSION', CALLBACK);

// Returns a request object which can then be executed.
// METHOD_NAME is only available once CALLBACK runs.

var request = gapi.client.METHOD_NAME(PARAMETERS_OBJECT); 
request.execute(callback);

You can use the APIs Explorer to check all the methods available for an API, as well as the parameters for each method. For instance, use the above syntax with the plus.activities.search method of the Google+ API to query activities:




  
  

  
    
    

    "content">

To try this yourself, sign up in the Google APIs console or refer to the documentation on acquiring and using a developer key in the Google+ API.

The Google APIs Client Library for JavaScript is currently in Alpha, which means that we are actively developing it, but wanted to get the library in your hands as soon as possible, and we welcome any feedback to make the code better. While you can use the current library to start writing code, you should use caution when writing production code as library code changes may break your application. We are working hard to upgrade this release to Beta and beyond soon, and to release even more client libraries.

To get started, visit the JavaScript Client Library documentation page. We also welcome your feedback, which you can provide using the JavaScript client group.

Brendan O'Brien is a Software Engineer for the Browser Client group at Google. Prior to working on JavaScript APIs he was a frontend engineer for iGoogle. He is passionate about JavaScript and enjoys building web applications.

Antonio Fuentes is a Product Manager for the Google API Infrastructure group. He has experience launching products in the cloud computing, infrastructure, and virtualization space.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

Introducing Au-to-do, a sample application built on Google APIs

Scott Knaster — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 22:13:00 +0000

By Dan Holevoet, Developer Relations Team

A platform is more than the sum of its component parts. You can read about it or hear about it, but to really learn what makes up a platform you have to try it out for yourself, play with the parts, and discover what you can build.

With that in mind, we started a project called Au-to-do: a full sample application implementing a ticket tracker, built using Google APIs, that developers can download and dissect.

Au-to-do currently uses the following APIs and technologies:

Google App Engine (with the Python runtime, Datastore API, and Task Queues API)
Google Cloud Storage
Google Prediction API
Google Tasks API
OAuth 2.0

Additional integrations with Google APIs are on their way. We are also planning a series of follow-up blog posts discussing each of the integrations in depth, with details on our design decisions and best practices you can use in your own projects.

By the way, if you’re wondering how to pronounce Au-to-do, you can say "auto-do" or "ought-to-do" — either is correct.

Ready to take a look at the code? Check out the getting started guide. Found a bug? Have a great idea for a feature or API integration? Let us know by filing a request.

Happy hacking!

Dan Holevoet joined the Google Developer Relations team in 2007. When not playing Starcraft, he works on Google Apps, with a focus on the Calendar and Contacts APIs. He's previously worked on iGoogle, OpenSocial, Gmail contextual gadgets, and the Google Apps Marketplace.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

Simplifying Access Control in Google Cloud Storage

Scott Knaster — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 18:32:00 +0000

By Navneet Joneja, Product Manager

Google Cloud Storage is a robust, high-performance service that enables developers and businesses to use Google’s infrastructure to power their data. Today, we’re announcing a new feature that makes it even easier to control and share your data.

Per-Bucket Default Object ACLs

Customers building a wide variety of applications have asked us for an easier mechanism to control the permissions granted on newly created objects. Now you can define your access control policy for a bucket once by specifying a Default Object ACL for any bucket, and we’ll automatically apply that ACL to any object without an explicitly defined ACL. You can always override the default by providing a canned ACL when you upload the object or by updating the object’s ACL afterwards. This mechanism simplifies wide variety of use cases, including data sharing, controlled-access data sets and corporate drop-boxes.

New buckets without Default ACLs

After analyzing how customers use our service, we’ve also decided to make a few small changes to the behavior of buckets that have no explicit default object ACL. Effective today, new buckets are created with an implied project-private default object ACL. In other words, project editors and owners will have FULL_CONTROL access to new objects, and project viewers will have READ access to them. This change better aligns the default behavior with how our customers use storage. You can change a bucket’s default object ACL at any time after creating the bucket.

Existing buckets have an effective default object ACL of "private", and they will continue to work as they always have until and unless you specify a new default object ACL for them.

Navneet Joneja loves being at the forefront of the next generation of simple and reliable software infrastructure, the foundation on which next-generation technology is being built. When not working, he can usually be found dreaming up new ways to entertain his intensely curious one-year-old.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

Google I/O 2012 extended to three days from June 27-29, 2012

Scott Knaster — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 17:01:00 +0000

By Monica Tran, Google I/O Team

After Google I/O 2011, you consistently told us you wanted more time to attend sessions, visit our partners in the Developer Sandbox, and meet 1:1 with the engineers behind Google’s developer platforms and APIs. We recently received an unexpected opportunity to extend Google I/O to three days, so as we announced on our +Google Developers page, we are moving the conference to June 27-29, 2012. It will still take place at Moscone Center West in San Francisco.

Google I/O 2012
June 27-29, 2012
Moscone Center West, San Francisco

In the meantime, be sure to brush up on your coding skills. They’ll come in handy when the new application process opens in February. That’s all we can tell you for now, but we’d advise against making travel arrangements until then. Continue following us at our Google Developers page on Google+ to be the first to get #io12 updates!

This post supersedes our previous Save the Date announcement. Please update your calendars: Google I/O will be coming to Moscone Center in San Francisco on June 27-29. We will be responding to FAQs via our thread on Google+.

You might remember Monica Tran from I/O Live or one of our eight Google Developer Days around the world. This year, she’s back to lead the charge on Google I/O 2012.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

Fridaygram: scribbling on maps, lightweight material, canine antics

Scott Knaster — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 22:42:00 +0000

By Scott Knaster, Google Code Blog Editor

Earlier this week, our Google Maps API got a great new feature. When you build an application with the Maps API, you can now enable users to draw on the maps. There are tools for various shapes, so your users can draw circles or boxes to highlight locations, just like they would with physical maps. And to be even more like physical maps, users can use the tools to approximate drawing a coffee cup stain or a big crinkle.

Speaking of physical things, here’s one that exists in the real world, but barely makes a dent. Researchers in California have created what they say is the world’s lightest material. The material has a density of 0.9 mg/cc and is light enough to sit atop the fluff on a dandelion, although that usage seems impractical.

Finally, for weekend fun, take a look at this peer-reviewed paper entitled "A Vicious Cycle: A Cross-Sectional Study of Canine Tail-Chasing and Human Responses to It, Using a Free Video-Sharing Website". It will make you want to spend more time on YouTube, in the name of science.

Fridaygram is our weekly nerdy attempt at fun for developers. Fridaygrams have Google things, science stuff, and sometimes, Easter eggs.

Lossless and transparency encoding in WebP

Scott Knaster — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 08:00:00 +0000

Urvang

Vikas

Jyrki

By Jyrki Alakuijala, Vikas Arora, and Urvang Joshi, Software Engineers, WebP Team

Cross-posted with the Chromium Blog

In September 2010 we announced the WebP image format with lossy compression. WebP was proposed as an alternative to JPEG, with 25–34% better compression compared to JPEG images at equivalent SSIM index. We received lots of feedback, and have been busy improving the format. Last month we announced WebP support for animation, ICC profile, XMP metadata and tiling. Today, we introduce a new mode in WebP to compress images losslessly, and support for transparency – also known as alpha channel – in both the lossless and lossy modes.

With these new modes, you can now use WebP to better compress all types of images on the web. Photographic images typically encoded as JPEG can be encoded in WebP lossy mode to achieve smaller file size. Icons and graphics can be encoded better in WebP lossless mode than in PNG. WebP lossy with alpha can be used to create transparent images that have minimal visual degradation, yet are much smaller in file size. Animations compressed as GIFs can use animation support in WebP.

New lossless mode

Our main focus for lossless mode has been in compression density and simplicity in decoding. On average, we get a 45% reduction in size when starting with PNGs found on the web, and a 28% reduction in size compared to PNGs that are re-compressed with pngcrush and pngout. Smaller images on the page mean faster page loads.

New transparency mode

Today, webmasters who need transparency must encode images losslessly in PNG, leading to a significant size bloat. WebP alpha encodes images with low bits-per-pixel and provides an effective way to reduce the size of such images. Lossless compression of the alpha channel adds just 22% bytes over lossy (quality 90) WebP encoding. Smaller alpha overhead means richer images on webpages.

You can find a more detailed compression study for these modes here and sample images in the WebP-Gallery. The bit stream specification has not been finalized, and the encoding and decoding implementations have not yet been optimized for processing speed. We encourage you to try it out on your favorite set of images, check out the code, and provide feedback. We hope WebP will now handle all your needs for web images, and we're working to get WebP supported in more browsers.

Dr. Jyrki Alakuijala is a Software Engineer with a special interest in data compression. He is a father of five daughters, and sings in the Finnish Choir in Zürich. Before joining Google, Jyrki worked in neurosurgical and radiotherapy development.

Vikas Arora is a Software Engineer with a special interest in signal processing and data compression. Before joining Google, Vikas worked in the VLSI domain developing digital and analog signal simulators.

Urvang Joshi is a Software Engineer, especially interested in image processing, machine learning, and computer vision. He is also a table tennis and chess enthusiast.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

Introducing Closure Stylesheets

Scott Knaster — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 22:49:00 +0000

By Michael Bolin, Open Source Engineer

Cross-posted from the Open Source at Google blog

(CSS is for programming, not for pasting.)

When the Closure Tools were first released a little over two years ago, they gave web developers the ability to organize and optimize their JavaScript and HTML in a new way. But there was something missing, namely, a tool to help manage CSS.

You see, the nature of CSS runs contrary to the DRY principle that is exhibited in good software engineering. For example, if there is a color that should be used for multiple classes in a stylesheet, a developer has no choice but to copy-and-paste it everywhere because CSS has no concept of variables. Similarly, if there is a value in a stylesheet that is derived from other values, there is no way to express that because CSS also lacks functions. Common patterns of style blocks are duplicated over and over because CSS has no macros. All of these properties of CSS conspire to make stylesheets extremely difficult to maintain.

To this end, we are excited to introduce the missing piece in the Closure Tools suite: Closure Stylesheets. Closure Stylesheets is an an extension to CSS that adds variables, functions, conditionals, and mixins to standard CSS. The tool also supports minification, linting, RTL flipping, and CSS class renaming. As the existing Closure Tools have done for JavaScript and HTML, Closure Stylesheets will help you write CSS in a maintainable way, while also empowering you to deliver optimized code to your users. We hope you enjoy it! Please let us know what you think in the discussion forum.

Michael Bolin is an Open Source Engineer at Google.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

Flash developers: export to HTML5 with new Swiffy extension

Scott Knaster — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 17:26:00 +0000

By Esteban de la Canal, Software Engineer

We launched Google Swiffy in July. Swiffy enables you to convert Flash SWF files to HTML5. One of our main aims for Swiffy is to let you continue to use Flash as a development environment, even when you’re developing animations for environments that don’t support Flash.

To speed up the development process, we’ve built the Swiffy Extension for Flash Professional. The extension enables you to convert your animation to HTML5 with one click (or keyboard shortcut). The extension is available for both Mac and Windows, and it uses Swiffy as a web service, so you’ll always get our latest and greatest conversion. Information about the conversion process is shown within Flash Professional.

You can download the Swiffy Extension from the Google Swiffy site. We hope it will streamline your workflow when you use Flash and Swiffy to produce HTML5 animations. Please let us know how well it works for you via our feedback page.

Esteban de la Canal is a Software Engineer on the Swiffy team. He also enjoys game development, particularly weird-looking snake-like games in Flash.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

Upcoming changes to OAuth 2.0 endpoint

Scott Knaster — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 23:49:00 +0000

By Justin Smith, Senior Product Manager

UPDATE 11/14: After considering the feedback and timing, we have decided to delay the launch of the changes described in this post. The new date for these changes is December 7th, 2011. Once again, we expect these changes to have minimal impact. If you have any questions or comments, please post on the OAuth 2.0 Group. We will be actively monitoring that group and will work to respond quickly.

Original post:

In the coming weeks we will be making three changes to the experimental OAuth 2.0 endpoint. We expect the impact to be minimal, and we’re emailing developers who are most likely to be affected.

We will be releasing these changes on December 7, 2011. This post describes the changes, their impact, and how they can be mitigated.

Change #1: Error responses for client-side web applications

The first change relates to the way errors are returned in OAuth 2.0 client-side web applications. It does not impact server-side, native, or device flows.

The current behavior of the OAuth 2.0 endpoint in certain error conditions is to return the error to the application as a query string parameter, for example:

https://www.example.com/back?error=access_denied.

The OAuth 2.0 specification indicates that the error should be returned in the fragment of the response. We are updating our OAuth 2.0 implementation to support the most recent draft of the specification. As a result, we will be changing the way we return errors to applications in the client-side flow.

As an example, today an error returns to your application as

https://www.example.com/back?error=access_denied. After this change, it will be returned as

https://www.example.com/back#error=access_denied.

There is no mitigation for this change, so your application will have to handle these types of errors in client-side script.

Change #2: Offline access as a separate parameter

The second change impacts the OAuth 2.0 server-side flow only. It does not impact client-side, native, or device flows. For context, this flow consists of the following steps:

Redirect the browser to the Google OAuth 2.0 endpoint.
The user will be shown a consent page.
If the user consents, parse the authorization code from the query string of the response.
Exchange the authorization code for a short-lived access token and a long-lived refresh token.

Once your application has obtained a long-lived refresh token (step 4), it may access a Google API at any time. This means server-side applications do not require the end-user to be present when obtaining new access tokens. We’re calling this type of access offline.

The client-side flow, in contrast, requires the user to be present when obtaining an access token. This type of access is called online.

With this change, we will be exposing online and offline access as a separate parameter that’s available only in the server-side flow.

When your application requests offline access, the consent page shown to a user will reflect that your application requests offline access and your application will receive an access and a refresh token. Once your application has a refresh token, it may obtain a new access token at any time.

When your application requests online access, your application will only receive an access token. No refresh token will be returned. This means that a user must be present in order for your application to obtain a new access token.

If unspecified in the request, online is the default.

A mitigation for this change is described at the end of this post.

Change #3: Server-side auto-approval

This change also impacts the OAuth 2.0 server-side flow only.

In the current implementation of OAuth2, every time your application redirects a user to Google, that user must give explicit consent before an authorization code is given to your application. As a result, sending a user through the flow another time requires them to see the consent screen again. Most applications don’t do this, but rather use the existing server-side flow as it was intended: a one-time association (import contacts, calendar operations, etc.) where the result is a refresh token which may be used to obtain new access tokens.

The behavior is changing to the following:

Users will only see the consent screen on their first time through the sequence.
If the application requests offline access, only the first authorization code exchange results in a refresh token.

To put it another way, consent will be auto-approved for returning users unless the user has revoked access. Refresh tokens are not returned for responses that were auto-approved.

The next section describes how to mitigate this change.

Mitigation of offline access (#2) and auto-approval (#3) changes

If you want to keep the existing behavior in your server-side applications, include the approval_prompt=force and access_type=offline parameters in an authorization code request.

For example, if the following is a target URL for obtaining an authorization code today:

https://accounts.google.com/o/oauth2/auth?
client_id=21302922996.apps.googleusercontent.com&
redirect_uri=https://www.example.com/back&
scope=https://www.google.com/m8/feeds/&
response_type=code

You can maintain the current behavior by changing the target URL to:

https://accounts.google.com/o/oauth2/auth?
client_id=21302922996.apps.googleusercontent.com&
redirect_uri=https://www.example.com/back&
scope=https://www.google.com/m8/feeds/&
response_type=code&
access_type=offline&
approval_prompt=force

You may start including these parameters in authorization code requests today.

Questions?

If you have any questions or comments, please post on the OAuth 2.0 Group (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/OAuth 2.0-dev). We will be actively monitoring that group and will work to respond quickly.

Justin Smith is a Product Manager who works on authentication and authorization technologies at Google. He enjoys woodworking, cycling, country music, and the company of his wife (not necessarily in that order).

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

Google BigQuery Service: Big data analytics at Google speed

Scott Knaster — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 19:30:00 +0000

By Ju-kay Kwek, Product Manager

(Cross-posted on the Google App Engine Blog and the Google Enterprise Blog.)

Rapidly crunching terabytes of big data can lead to better business decisions, but this has traditionally required tremendous IT investments. Imagine a large online retailer that wants to provide better product recommendations by analyzing website usage and purchase patterns from millions of website visits. Or consider a car manufacturer that wants to maximize its advertising impact by learning how its last global campaign performed across billions of multimedia impressions. Fortune 500 companies struggle to unlock the potential of data, so it’s no surprise that it’s been even harder for smaller businesses.

We developed Google BigQuery Service for large-scale internal data analytics. At Google I/O last year, we opened a preview of the service to a limited number of enterprises and developers. Today we're releasing some big improvements, and putting one of Google's most powerful data analysis systems into the hands of more companies of all sizes.

We’ve added a graphical user interface for analysts and developers to rapidly explore massive data through a web application.
We’ve made big improvements for customers accessing the service programmatically through the API. The new REST API lets you run multiple jobs in the background and manage tables and permissions with more granularity.
Whether you use the BigQuery web application or API, you can now write even more powerful queries with JOIN statements. This lets you run queries across multiple data tables, linked by data that tables have in common.
It’s also now easy to manage, secure, and share access to your data tables in BigQuery, and export query results to the desktop or to Google Cloud Storage.

Michael J. Franklin, Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley, remarked that BigQuery (internally known as Dremel) leverages “thousands of machines to process data at a scale that is simply jaw-dropping given the current state of the art.” We’re looking forward to helping businesses innovate faster by harnessing their own large data sets. BigQuery is available free of charge for now, and we’ll let customers know at least 30 days before the free period ends. We’re bringing on a new batch of pilot customers, so let us know if your business wants to test drive BigQuery Service.

Ju-kay Kwek is a Product Manager for Google BigQuery Service.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

Fridaygram: Nigel Tufnel’s delight

Scott Knaster — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 19:11:00 +0000

By Scott Knaster, Google Code Blog Editor

One of the most rewarding aspects of working on neat technology is when you can make a difference in the real world. Our Custom Search team has been collaborating with U. S. agencies to produce a job search engine for use by returning military veterans. This is especially cool because today is Veterans Day in the U. S.

Once you’ve seen the customized job search engine, I hope you’ll be inspired to use Custom Search or some other interesting technology to make a difference with your own projects. And speaking of interesting projects...

Wan and exhausted, a team of six men emerged last week from a mock spacecraft after spending almost a year and a half on a simulated trip to Mars. The six lived in windowless capsules in Moscow for 520 days to see how they would react to the confinement.

One physiologist, a trainer, a surgeon, and three engineers made up the diverse crew, who were said to be in good health at the end of the mission. Their virtual trip to Mars qualifies as either a really grueling job or a bizarre vacation.

Wonderful as the simulated Mars mission was, it can’t compete with this classic video – especially today. Have a great weekend!

Wondering what this post is doing on Google Code Blog? Once a week, on Friday, we lighten up and have a little fun, posting curious, clever, and interesting bits and pieces. One more thing: we hope you find one not-so-hidden date-appropriate message in this post.

Startup Weekend and GTUGs

Scott Knaster — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 23:08:00 +0000

By Stephanie Liu, Developer Relations, Startup and Community Outreach

We announced a partnership with Startup Weekend today that will support budding entrepreneurs all over the world.

If you’ve never experienced a Startup Weekend before, it’s an intense 54 hour event where excited entrepreneurs (developers, designers, product and business folks) get together on a Friday afternoon, pitch ideas, form into teams, then feverishly hack on a prototype application to demo on Sunday night. It’s an energizing event, where strangers become teammates overnight, and the focus is on doing instead of talking.

We love the spirit of these weekends – it’s the spirit of entrepreneurship and creation, and at the heart of it all are developers. That’s why we’re working with our local developer communities (Google Technology User Groups) and Startup Weekend to host pre-Startup Weekend bootcamps on relevant Google tech (like App Engine, Android, and Chrome/HTML5, with more to come).

Find a Bootcamp or Startup Weekend coming up near you! You can also join your local GTUG.

Stephanie Liu joined Google in 2005, and has worked with a variety of products, including AdWords, Google Video, and YouTube. She's currently focused on outreach programs to early stage tech startups, as well as growing and supporting Google's developer community (gtugs.org),

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

Google Apps EMEA developer tour

Scott Knaster — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 08:00:00 +0000

By Nicolas Garnier, Developer Relations Team

A few of us from Developer Relations will be going around EMEA in the next few months to meet with developers and talk about some Google Apps technologies for developers.

This tour will start with Ryan Boyd and Michael Manoochehri speaking about different Google Apps topics at Google Developer Days in Tel-Aviv and Berlin, and a GTUG meeting in Munich.

Then I will be giving an Apps Script talk at the Barcelona Developers Conference followed by a series of Apps Script Hackathons in France (multiple locations), Zurich, Munich and Dublin.

For more information about the tour and to register for these events, please visit the Google Apps EMEA Developer Tour website.

We plan to organize many other Google Apps events close to you in the near future. Look for updates on the Google Apps EMEA Developer Tour website or keep an eye out for further announcements on this blog.

Nicolas Garnier joined Google’s Developer Relations in 2008 and lives in Zurich. He is a Developer Advocate focusing on Google Apps and Web APIs. Before joining Google, Nicolas worked at Airbus and at the French Space Agency where he built web applications for scientific researchers.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

OAuth 2.0 Playground: open to developers

Scott Knaster — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 18:24:00 +0000

By Nicolas Garnier, Developer Relations Team

Cross-posted on the Google Apps Developer Blog

In March, we announced that all of the Google Web APIs adopted support for OAuth 2.0. It is the recommended authorization mechanism when using Google Web APIs.

Today, we are announcing the OAuth 2.0 Playground, which simplifies experimentation with the OAuth 2.0 protocol and APIs that use the protocol. Trying out some requests in the OAuth 2.0 playground can help you understand how the protocol functions and make life easier when the time comes to use OAuth in your own code.

Selecting the APIs to authorize

With the OAuth 2.0 Playground, you can walk through each step of the OAuth 2.0 flow for server-side web applications: authorizing API scopes (screen shot above), exchanging authorization tokens (screen shot below), refreshing access tokens, and sending authorized requests to API endpoints. At each step, the Playground displays the full HTTP requests and responses.

Exchanging the authorization code for a refresh token and an access token

The OAuth Playground can also use custom OAuth endpoints in order to test non-Google APIs that support OAuth 2.0 draft 10.

OAuth configuration screen

You can click the link button to generate a link to a specific Playground state. This allows quick access to replay specific requests at a later time.

Generating a deep link to the playground’s current state

Please feel free to try the OAuth 2.0 Playground. We are happy to receive any feedback, bugs, or questions in the OAuth Playground forum.

Nicolas Garnier joined Google’s Developer Relations in 2008 and lives in Zurich. He is a Developer Advocate focusing on Google Apps and Web APIs. Before joining Google, Nicolas worked at Airbus and at the French Space Agency where he built web applications for scientific researchers.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

Fridaygram: small world, little robots, tiny feature

Scott Knaster — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 22:08:00 +0000

By Scott Knaster, Google Code Blog Editor

Satellite images make the world seem smaller by letting us view images of buildings and neighborhoods that are thousands of miles away. The satellite views in Google Earth and Google Maps are updated periodically. Want to know when that happens? This week we added support for 43 more languages to Follow Your World, a web site that emails you when satellite images are updated for anywhere you like. Just enter a location and your email address, and you’ll be notified when a new aerial image is available.

Back on earth, engineers at UC Berkeley’s Biomimetic Millisystems Lab have an awesome job: they get to build little robot bugs. Recently, the team added wings to its 10-centimeter Dynamic Autonomous Sprawled Hexapod (DASH) robot to see how the alteration would affect mobility. The plastic wings helped DASH move faster and climb steeper hills, among other improvements.

Finally, here’s a tiny new feature: if you do a Google search for ip, you’ll see your computer’s IP address. Handy!

And also: check out today’s Google Doodle, which honors the birthday of Mary Blair, a Disney Legend known for her work on It’s a Small World and many other theme park and movie projects. (If you’re reading this after October 21st, you can see the Doodle on our archive page within a few days.)

Small explanation: Fridaygram posts are lighter than our usual stuff, meant to provide a little geeky fun at the end of the week.

Updated at 4:30 PM to say that Follow Your World added language support this week, rather than launching.

Designing an infinite digital bookcase

Scott Knaster — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 19:25:00 +0000

By Aaron Koblin, Data Arts Team and Bill Schilit, Research

Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog

As digital designers, we often think about how to translate traditional media into a virtual space. Recently, we thought about the bookcase. What would it look like if it was designed to hold digital books?

A digital interface needs to be familiar enough to be intuitive, while simultaneously taking advantage of the lack of constraints in a virtual space. In this case, we imagined something that looks like the shelves in your living room, but is also capable of showcasing the huge number of titles available online—many more than fit on a traditional shelf. With this in mind, we designed a digital bookcase that’s an infinite 3D helix. You can spin it side-to-side and up and down with your mouse. It holds 3D models of more than 10,000 titles from Google Books.

The books are organized into 28 subjects. To choose a subject, click the subject button near the top of your screen when viewing the bookcase. The camera then flies to that subject. Clicking on a book pulls it off the shelf and brings it to the front and center of the screen. Click on the high-resolution cover and the book will open to a page with title and author information as well as a short synopsis, provided by the Google Books API. All of the visuals are rendered with WebGL, a technology in Google Chrome and other modern browsers that enables fast, hardware-accelerated 3D graphics right in the browser, without the need for a plug-in.

If you’ve finished your browsing and find a book you want to read, you can click the “Get this book” button on the bottom right of the page, which will send you to that book’s page on books.google.com. Or, you can open the title on your phone or tablet via the QR code that’s in the bottom left corner of the page, using a QR code app like Google Goggles. You can also browse just free books by selecting the “Free Books” subject in the subject viewer.

Bookworms using a modern browser can try the WebGL Bookcase today. We recommend using Google Chrome and a fast computer with a powerful graphics card. Even with new hardware, this interface is experimental and may not work on some machines. For more creative browser experiments, check out Chrome Experiments, a gallery of more than 300 creative projects made by developers and artists from around the world, many utilizing WebGL.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

New Text-to-Speech API for Chrome extensions

Scott Knaster — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 17:00:00 +0000

By Dominic Mazzoni, Software Engineer

Interested in making your Chrome Extension (or packaged app) talk using synthesized speech? Chrome now includes a Text-to-Speech (TTS) API that’s simple to use, powerful, and flexible for users.

Let’s start with the "simple to use" part. A few clever apps and extensions figured out how to talk before this API was available – typically by sending text to a remote server that returns an MP3 file that can be played using HTML5 audio. With the new API, you just need to add "tts" to your permissions and then write:

chrome.tts.speak('Hello, world!');

It’s also very easy to change the rate, pitch, and volume. Here’s an example that speaks more slowly:

chrome.tts.speak('Can you understand me now?', {rate: 0.6});

How about powerful? To get even fancier and synchronize speech with your application, you can register to receive callbacks when the speech starts and finishes. When a TTS engine supports it, you can get callbacks for individual words too. You can also get a list of possible voices and ask for a particular voice – more on this below. All the details can be found in the TTS API docs, and we provide complete example code on the samples page.

In fact, the API is powerful enough that ChromeVox, the Chrome OS screen reader for visually impaired users, is built using this API.

Here are three examples you can try now:

    TTS Demo (app)
    Talking Alarm Clock (extension)
    SpeakIt (extension)

Finally, let's talk about flexibility for users. One of the most important things we wanted to do with this API was to make sure that users have a great selection of voices to choose from. So we've opened that up to developers, too.

The TTS Engine API enables you to implement a speech engine as an extension for Chrome. Essentially, you provide some information about your voice in the extension manifest and then register a JavaScript function that gets called when the client calls chrome.tts.speak. Your extension then takes care of synthesizing and outputting the speech – using any web technology you like, including HTML5 Audio, the new Web Audio API, or Native Client.

Here are two voices implemented using the TTS Engine API that you can install now:

    Lois TTS - US English
    Flite SLT Female TTS - US English

These voices both use Native Client to synthesize speech. The experience is very easy for end users: just click and install one of those voices, and immediately any talking app or extension has the ability to speak using that voice.

If a user doesn't have any voices installed, Chrome automatically speaks using the native speech capabilities of your Windows or Mac operating system, if possible. Chrome OS comes with a built-in speech engine, too. For now, there's unfortunately no default voice support on Linux – but TTS is fully supported once users first install a voice from the Chrome Web Store.

Now it's your turn: add speech capability to your app or extension today! We can't wait to hear what you come up with, and if you talk about it, please add the hashtag #chrometts so we can join the conversation. If you have any feedback, direct it to the Chromium-extensions group.

Dominic Mazzoni is a Software Engineer working on Chrome accessibility. He's the original author of Audacity, the free audio editor.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

Google Code-in: Are you in?

Scott Knaster — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 19:32:00 +0000

By Carol Smith, Google Code-in Program Manager, Open Source Team

Cross-posted from the Google Open Source Blog

Listen up, future coders of the world: today we’re launching the second annual Google Code-in competition, an open source development contest for 13-17 year old students around the world. The purpose of the Google Code-in competition is to give students everywhere an opportunity to explore the world of open source development. We not only run open source software throughout our business, we also value the way the open source model encourages people to work together on shared goals over the Internet.

Open source development involves much more than just computer programming, and the Google Code-in competition reflects that by having lots of different tasks to choose from. We organize the tasks into eight major categories:

1. Code: Writing or refactoring code
2. Documentation: Creating and editing documents
3. Outreach: Community management and outreach, as well as marketing
4. Quality Assurance: Testing and ensuring code is of high quality
5. Research: Studying a problem and recommending solutions
6. Training: Helping others learn more
7. Translation: Localization (adapting code to your region and language)
8. User interface: User experience research or user interface design and interaction

On November 9, we’ll announce the participating mentoring organizations. Mentoring organizations are open source software organizations chosen from a pool of applicants who have participated in our Google Summer of Code program in the past. Last year we had 20 organizations participate.

Last year’s competition drew 361 participating students from 48 countries, who worked for two months on a wide variety of brain-teasing tasks ranging from coding to video editing, all in support of open source software. In January, we announced the 14 grand prize winners, who we flew to our headquarters in Mountain View, California to enjoy a day talking to Google engineers and learning what it’s like to work at Google, and another day enjoying the northern California sights and sun.

Visit the Frequently Asked Questions page on the Google Code-in site for more details on how to sign up and participate. Our goal this year is to have even more pre-university students in the contest than last time around, so help us spread the word, too.

Stay tuned to the contest site and subscribe to our mailing list for more updates on the contest. The Google Code-in contest starts on November 21, 2011, and we look forward to seeing the clever and creative ways all of the participants tackle their open source challenges.

Carol Smith is Google Code-in Program Manager, Open Source Team

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

Save the date for Google I/O 2012

Scott Knaster — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 17:00:00 +0000

By Monica Tran, Developer Marketing Team

This year’s Google I/O saw 1 million developers join us from around the world at Moscone Center, via I/O Live, and at our I/O Extended viewing parties. As we prepare to round the corner into 2012, mark your calendars: Google I/O 2012 will be returning to Moscone Center West in San Francisco on April 24-25.

Registration details will be coming soon, but for a preview of what’s to come, check out videos from last year’s event, as well as photos from our Google Developer Day events, currently taking place in eight cities around the world. Keep following us here on the Google Code Blog for the latest.

In the past four years, Monica Tran has been around the world, working as a Product Marketing Manager in Mountain View, London, and Tokyo. After a good run on Google I/O, Monica is back to lead the charge on Google Developer Day, happening in 8 cities worldwide in 2011.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

Fridaygram: we want your videos, learn math from chocolate, puzzling with wood

Scott Knaster — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 19:33:00 +0000

By Scott Knaster, Google Code Blog Editor

Last month we asked you to upload videos telling us what it’s like to be a Google developer. We really want to hear from you, so we’re reminding you again just in case you haven’t submitted your video yet. This is your chance to let us know what inspires you and what you’d like from us, so please fire up your phones and cameras, and visit our developer stories page for more info.

We hope you come up with some clever ideas for your video. Here’s something you can use for creative inspiration. Tim Chartier of Davidson College takes advantage of candy bars and chocolate chips for math instruction, starting with simple concepts that lead toward fundamental calculus. And when he’s done, there’s dessert.

After you’ve eaten your math homework, here’s a puzzle: see if you can figure out how this block of wood got a nail through it. When you think you know the answer (or you give up), watch the video to see how it was done. So there’s your potential weekend project.

Fridaygram posts are just for fun - and sometimes they tell you about cool ways to mash up calculus with chocolate. Each Fridaygram item must pass only one test: it has to be interesting to us nerds.