1 week, 1 day ago
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This morning, we kicked off the 6th annual Google I/O developer conference with over 6,000 developers at Moscone Center in San Francisco, 460 I/O Extended sites in 90 countries, and millions of you around the world who tuned in via our livestream. Over the next three days, we’ll be hosting technical sessions, hands-on code labs, and demonstrations of Google’s products and partners’ technology.
We believe computing is going through one of the most exciting moments in its history: people are increasingly adopting phones, tablets and newer type of devices. And this spread of technology has the potential to make a positive impact in the lives of people around the world—whether it’s simply helping you in your daily commute, or connecting you to information that was previously inaccessible.
This is why we focus so much on our two open platforms: Android and Chrome. They enable developers to innovate and reach as many people as possible with their apps and services across multiple devices. Android started as a simple idea to advance open standards on mobile; today it is the world’s leading mobile platform and growing rapidly. Similarly, Chrome launched less than five years ago from an open source project; today it’s the world’s most popular browser.
In line with that vision, we made several announcements today designed to give developers even more tools to build great apps on Android and Chrome. We also shared new innovations from across Google meant to help make life just a little easier for you, including improvements in search, communications, photos, and maps.
Here’s a quick look at some of the announcements we made at I/O:
- Android & Google Play: In addition to new developer tools, we unveiled Google Play All Access, a monthly music subscription service with access to millions of songs that joins our music store and locker; and the Google Play game services with real-time multiplayer and leaderboards. Also, coming next month to Google Play is a special Samsung Galaxy S4, which brings together cutting edge hardware from Samsung with Google’s latest software and services—including the user experience that ships with our popular Nexus devices.
- Chrome: With over 750 million active users on Chrome, we’re now focused on bringing to mobile the speed, simplicity and security improvements that we’ve seen on the desktop. To that end, today we previewed next-generation video codec VP9 for faster video-streaming performance; the requestAutocomplete API for faster payments; and Chrome Experiments such as “A Journey Through Middle Earth” and Racer to demonstrate the ability to create immersive mobile experiences not possible in years past.
- Google+: We unveiled the newly designed Google+, which helps you easily explore content as well dramatically improve your online photo experience to give you crisp, beautiful photos—without the work! We also upgraded Google+ Hangouts—our popular group video application—to help bring all of your real-life conversations online, across any device or platform, and with groups of up to 10 friends.
- Search: Search has evolved considerably in recent years: it can now have a real conversation with you, and even make your day a bit smoother by predicting information you might need. Today we added the ability to set reminders by voice and we previewed “spoken answers” on laptops and desktops in Chrome—meaning you can ask Google a question and it will speak the answer back to you.
- Maps: Today we previewed the next generation of Google Maps, which gets rid of any clutter in order to put your individual experience and exploration front and center. Each time you click or search, our technology draws you a tailored map that highlights the information you need. From design to directions, the new Google Maps is smarter and more useful.
Technology can have a profound, positive impact on the daily lives of billions of people. But we can’t do this alone—developers play a crucial role. I/O is our chance to come together and thank you for everything you do.
Posted by Sundar Pichai, SVP, Android, Chrome & Apps
Author: Emily Wood
Source:
googleblog.blogspot.com
1 week, 2 days ago
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Google announced that all developers on Google Play can now reply to user reviews. You can reply to user reviews in the Google Play Developer Console, and your replies are shown publicly below the corresponding user review on Google Play. Users receive an email notification when you reply and can either reply to you directly by email, or update their review if they choose to do so.
source: Android Developers Blog
Author: Andr.oid Eric
Source: android-er.blogspot.com
2 weeks, 1 day ago
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Developers today have the power to introduce powerful, breakthrough technologies to the world through their code. That’s why we look forward to bringing Google developers together year after year at Google I/O, our annual developer conference. In one week, we’ll welcome more than 6,000 developers to I/O through the doors of Moscone West Convention Center in San Francisco, Calif.—and many more via our event’s live streams. If you’re looking for inspiration and want to learn more about the future of our products, we hope you’ll tune in to our live keynote and technical sessions.
Starting on May 15 at 9 a.m.
PT (16:00
UTC), join us as
Google Developers Live (
GDL) powers multiple channels of live streamed content from Google I/O on
developers.google.com/io. On this page, you can:
- Stream the keynote on your computer, tablet or phone. Get in on the action, and listen to product and technology announcements straight from our teams. Live streaming will run on developers.google.com/io from 9 a.m. PT (16:00 UTC) to 7 p.m. PT (2:00 UTC) on May 15 and 16.
- Watch exclusive interviews with the Googlers behind the latest product announcements. This year, GDL will broadcast one-on-one product deep dives, executive interviews and Developer Sandbox walkthroughs from our onsite stage.
- Get the latest news in real time. We’ll post official announcements during I/O. You’ll be able to see the feed on the Google I/O homepage, in the I/O mobile app (coming soon), and on +Google Developers.
- Never miss a session. The keynote and all sessions will be recorded and made rapidly available on GDL and the Google Developers YouTube channel.
Whether you’re joining us from the comfort of home for
Google Developers Live at I/O or at an
I/O Extended event, tune into
developers.google.com/io at 9 a.m.
PT (16:00
UTC) on May 15 for the latest from Google product teams. Add
+Google Developers to your circles and follow
#io13 to stay updated on official conference announcements and connect with the community.
Posted by Mike Winton, Director of Developer Relations
Author: Emily Wood
Source:
googleblog.blogspot.com
1 month ago
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Posted by: +Samantha Schaffer and +Renee Kwang, Software Engineer Interns.
Whether you’re a web developer who builds blog templates for a living, or a web-savvy blog owner who prefers to make changes to your template using HTML, CSS or JavaScript, you may be interested in some enhancements that we made to Blogger’s Template HTML Editor.
Your blog’s HTML template is the source code that controls the appearance of your blog. This template can be customized to appear however you’d like. The improved HTML template editor now supports line numbering, syntax highlighting, auto-indentation and code folding to make editing your template much easier.
Suppose we wanted to move the date of a blog post underneath the post title, similar to the Blogger Buzz blog. To do this, follow these steps:
Click the “Template” tab on the Blogger dashboard, then the “Edit
HTML” button, to see the new template
HTML editor:
Locate the “Blog1” widget quickly using the new “Jump to widget” drop down:
This widget controls how your blog posts are displayed. The code inside the widget is folded by default. Clicking the new fold markers ‘►’ next to the line numbers expands the widget and reveals a set of “includable” tags:
Inside the “main” includable is the block of code that renders the post date:
Cut the post date code section and move it to where we want it, in this case, under the post title in the “post” includable:
To check our changes, click the new “Preview template” button to see the updates:
The post date is exactly where we want it, so tab back to “Edit template”, hit “Save template” and we’re done!
Finally, we’ve added a “Format template” button that automatically cleans up the indentation of the template, and made it possible to search for text by pressing “Ctrl+F” once you’ve clicked into the editor. To find and replace text occurrences one by one, use “Ctrl+Shift+F” or to find and replace all occurrences at once, use “Ctrl+Shift+R”.
Author: Emily Wood
Source:
buzz.blogger.com
1 month, 1 week ago
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This is the second post in the series, which started with an overview, and will cover compute.
Introduction
Compute virtualization arrived in the x86 world at the start of the millennium with the arrival of VMWare, though it had been around long before on the mainframe and then midrange systems (like large
RISC based Unix boxes).
Virtualization offers the opportunity to consolidate workload, and hence reduce costs (including administration), but it carries with it the threat of an increased administrative overhead, which can come from two directions:
- I started out with 10 physical servers, and moved them onto virtual servers running on a single box, so now I have 11 things to manage.
- Servers just became cheaper and easier to obtain, so I can have more - lots more.
By around 2004 it was becoming clear that virtualisation threatened to overwhelm already hard pressed systems administrators by giving them an exploding volume of stuff to manage. Automation was going to be needed - after all, the job of any good systems administrator is to replace themselves with a script.
Tool evolution
The evolution of automation tools generally went through 3 phases:
- Development and test. Until people got comfortable with virtualisation (often by using it extensively in development and test) it was usual for it to be deployed only to non critical environments. One of the first products was Akimbi Lab Manager (which was one of the first acquisitions by VMWare). A typical usage pattern here would be self service, with VMs requested through a portal and delivered in a matter of minutes (the limiting factor normally being how quickly an image could be copied).
- Production usage - single environment. Once confidence grew that virtualisation could be used for production workloads the automation tools followed. This usually entailed a change in usage ethos, with self service being replaced with integration to ticketting and configuration management tools. Typically these tools would (initially) only work with a single type of virtualisation platform (usually ESX).
- Multi environment.These tools add the ability to work with multiple virtualisation platforms (e.g. Xen, Hyper-V, KVM) and/or various (public) cloud platforms (usually starting with Amazon’s AWS).
I personally saw from up close one tool develop through these stages. When I worked next to
Leslie Muller I became a guinea pig for his Virtual Developer Environment (
VDE) - a system that allowed Windows desktop and server VMs (that ran on Microsoft Virtual Server) to be requested. Provisioning took around 8 minutes, which was an amazing improvement on the months it would take to get physical servers. Renewable one month leases on VMs were used to help capacity management.
Process re-engineering
Some time later (and after a complete rewrite) VDE morphed into the Virtual Machine Provisioning System (VMPS), which changed target platform to ESX and allowed for permanent VMs (for production) in addition to leases for test/dev. Many sacred cows had to be slaughtered to adapt provisioning workflows to being completed in minutes rather than weeks. The roadblocks typically fell into two categories:
- It’s my job to… Provisioning tends to make heavy use of the singleton pattern to ensure that things (such as IP addresses) are properly allocated and not duplicated. This is why provisioning is often so slow, as each singleton is a process bottleneck. In real life this often boils down to a person with an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of things. Nobody likes being replaced by a database table (even if it does free them up to do something more interesting and useful)
- Something terrible once happened… (and it took out the trade floor). People make mistakes, and often the runbooks that systems administrators have to follow have been designed specifically to avoid mistakes (and mistypes) of the past. This usually involves moving changes to outside of working hours (more process bottlenecks). A properly automated system doesn’t make mistakes, which means that changes during working hours should be possible (or changes outside of working hours can be queued up and left to run).
Once it was spun out of Credit Suisse as DynamicOps the tool grew up some more to become Virtual Resource Manager (
VRM) - a multi platform system that supported private and public clouds. DynamicOps has since been acquired by VMWare to become
vCloud Automation Center (joining Akimbi, Dunes and a bunch of other automation technologies).
Hitting the limits
Compute virtualisation and automation go a long way towards having on demand systems, and at a small scale it can seem like everything is taken care of. Sadly things can become difficult at scale, usually due to limitations in storage and network:
- Storage has traditionally forced a choice between direct attached (DAS), network attached (NAS) or a storage area network (SAN). Each of these 3 creates a tradeoff between speed, flexibility and resilience (and cost).
- Networking has (until very recently) been constrained by an inability to move VMs (for capacity management purposes) outside of VLANs, where the definition of VLANs is pretty static. This has meant that network boundaries have become constrainers of capability that would otherwise be possible with the underlying compute platform.
Conclusion
Compute virtualization has been with us for some time, and after threatening to further overwhelm already busy systems administrators a crop of automation tools have emerged to make things quicker and easier. At low scale compute automation shows what is possible with a software defined data center, but it’s only with recent changes in the networking and storage arenas that things can be made to work at larger scale.
Author: Chris Swan
Source:
blog.cohesiveft.com
2 months, 3 weeks ago
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Are you developing on Google App Engine today or interested in learning how to use it? If you’ve gone through all the great App Engine docs and Getting Started tutorials (Python, Java, or Go) but want to take your App Engine skills a step further, then Google Developers Academy (GDA) is the place to go! We launched GDA this past summer at Google I/O 2012, with content for beginners as well as seasoned developers. What can you find on App Engine in GDA today?
If you’re interested in getting more background on what cloud computing is and where App Engine fits into that ecosystem, then this intro class (Introduction to Google App Engine) is for you. Once you’re done with this class, you’ll be ready to tackle the Getting Started tutorial, and after that, move on to the App Engine 101 in Python class.
While some of the material found in App Engine 101 is similar to what’s in the Getting Started tutorial, the 101 class targets developers who skipped the tutorial or completed it at some point in the past but don’t want to repeat the exact same thing. The main differences include the following changes to the tutorial’s content:
You can use the relational MySQL-compatible Google Cloud SQL service as an alternative to App Engine’s native non-relational datastore. Some applications do require a relational database, especially if you’re porting an existing app that relies on one. In this case, you want to learn about Cloud SQL and how to use it with App Engine. That’s why we have the Using Python App Engine with Google Cloud SQL class.
Of course, Google is best known for search. With App Engine’s powerful Search API, you can index not only plain text, but also HTML, atoms, numbers, dates, and locations (lat/long). Getting Started with the Python Search API is a two-part class that will indeed get you started: in the first part of the class, you’ll create an application using a variety of data and learn how to index such data (using “documents”). In Part 2, you’ll learn how to execute queries as well as how to update your indexes when you modify your data.
If variety is what you’re after, then look no further than the newest class in GDA: Getting Started with Go, App Engine and Google+ API. You will not only learn how to create an App Engine app using the Go programming language, but also learn how to connect to the Google+ API with the Google APIs Client Library for Go.
These are just a few examples of the types of classes you’ll find in GDA. We also have content that features many other Google technologies, including Android, Chrome, YouTube, Maps, Drive, and Wallet. We invite you to swing by for a visit soon.
-Posted by Wesley Chun, Google Developer Relations team
Author: The App Engine Team
Source:
googleappengine.blogspot.com
5 months, 3 weeks ago
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We are expanding the team at Doist with iOS programmers.
Some of our stats:
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Over 400.000 users (and growing fast)
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We already have a kick-ass iPhone app
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Our business is profitable
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You will be working with the best people from around the world
Join us either freelance or full-time and work on something that makes the world more productive.
Send your resume to amix@amix.dk, be sure to include some code you are proud of (or a link to your GitHub/BitBucket profile).
Source: amix.dk
1 year, 1 month ago
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This
Device Loaner Program is intended as a low cost (free!) option to allow developers to test apps on a physical Xperia smartphone or accessory device for up to 30 days.
For the smaller studios and independent developers with limited resources, this is a perfect program to take advantage of. With it, developers can immediately borrow an Xperia™ smartphone for up to 30 days. The service is completely free, and initially aimed at the
U.S. and Canadian market. For developers outside of these markets, you’ll be paying for international shipping fees, plus applicable customs/duties for your particular destination.
-
Device Loaner Program
Author: Android Er
Source:
android-er.blogspot.com
1 year, 1 month ago
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Timely execution of your company’s mobile strategy means getting your development teams up to speed quickly on Android. In this step-by-step guide, you’ll find best practices for each stage of Android app development.
Topics include:
- Best practices for each stage of mobile development
- Enterprise-specific considerations such as security and systems integration
- How to leverage the unique opportunities with mobility and mobile devices
- Android development and testing tools
- Deployment strategies
DOWNLOAD DEVELOPER GUIDE: Learn how developing mobile apps differs from desktop apps and what you can do to get up and running fast with Android app development for your enterprise.
Author: Android Er
Source:
android-er.blogspot.com
1 year, 2 months ago
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We are expanding the team at Todoist and Wedoist with iOS and Android programmers.
Some of our stats:
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Over 300.000 users
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Rapid growth
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Our business is profitable
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We started fulltime with the company just 8 months ago. Imagine the future :-)
Join us either freelance or full-time and work on something that makes the world more productive.
Send your resume to amix@amix.dk, be sure to include some code you are proud of (or a link to your GitHub/BitBucket profile).
Source: amix.dk
