Google Developers Blog

Fridaygram: Moog doodle, new species, eclipse pictures

2012-05-25T11:49:00.000-07:00

By Scott Knaster, Google Developers Blog Editor

Earlier this week we posted a doodle honoring Bob Moog, inventor of the Moog Synthesizer. This instrument started a revolution in electronic music, as musicians in many different genres used the Moog Synthesizer and its descendants to create and enhance their music. This doodle was the first one to use the Web Audio API to create sounds, along with a bunch of other web and Google technologies. But mostly, this doodle was wonderful because it was a lot of fun to play with.

Some things are not so fun to play with, but are cool to look at, like many of the creatures on this year’s list of the top 10 new species as selected by the International Institute for Species Exploration. The list includes a super-fast wasp, a very big millipede, a sneezing monkey, and a really amazing jelly.

Bonaire Banded Box Jelly (Tamoya ohboya). Yeah, it stings. Photo credit: Ned DeLoach

Finally, for some big-time science fun this weekend, use your favorite search engine to find photos of last week’s annular eclipse. Or, if you don’t want to do your own search, you can start with these.

The Official Google Blog post about the Moog doodle includes this wonderful bit of writing: "Bob Moog is something of a patron saint of the nerdy arts..." We respect that here on the Fridaygram, because nerds r us, and that's why we publish posts with items that aren’t always related to developer topics.

The Google APIs Explorer has a new look

2012-05-23T13:40:00.001-07:00

Jake

Antonio

By Antonio Fuentes and Jake Moshenko,
Google Developer Team

Last March we introduced the Google APIs Explorer, an interactive tool that enables you to try out a Google API in minutes and explore its supported methods. When we launched it, the APIs Explorer supported over a half dozen APIs.

Starting today, the APIs Explorer has a brand new look to make it easier and more fun to navigate. We are also adding new features, including an indexed history of your API calls, a better editor for the body of a request, and a search box so you can search for APIs and methods easily.

Moreover, we have been busy adding support for more APIs to the Explorer. The Explorer now supports over two dozen Google APIs, and the list continues to grow! We have also added an indicator to show which methods require authenticated requests.

To get started, here are some sample requests you can try in the Explorer:

Use the Google+ API to search for public profiles of people named "John Smith".
Use the Books API to search for a particular book.
Use the Google+ API to list your personal Google+ activities (requires private access).

The APIs Explorer will help you get started using Google APIs in minutes. If you need more information, visit the documentation. We always welcome your feedback in the Public Forum.

Antonio Fuentes is a Product Manager focusing on developer-facing technologies.

Jake Moshenko is a Software Engineer working on the Google APIs developer experience. He believes that Google APIs should be easy to use, especially from Google platforms.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

Fridaygram: email journey, humans and robots, special space launch

2012-05-18T11:53:00.001-07:00

By Scott Knaster, Google Developers Blog Editor

This week we launched Story of Send, a new site that shows you what happens to your email after you click (or tap) Send. The site is meant for everyone, so you can share it with your [insert favorite non-nerdy reference person here].

Even though Story of Send is designed for all viewers, there are great features inside for us nerds. These appear not just in the text and animation, but also in the form of photos and videos. In particular, take a look at the video At the data center, which you’ll find on the Safe and Secure page, for a rare look inside a Google data center.

We’re used to great technology in our computers and mobile devices. More rarely, we get to see amazing tech that truly transforms lives. Thanks to research in robotics and neuroscience, two paralyzed people have controlled a robotic arm with their thoughts via a tiny injected sensor. One participant used the robot arm to grab a bottle and bring it to her so she could drink from it. This woman has been paralyzed for 15 years. After the successful experiment, one of the researchers was quoted as saying "She had a smile on her face that I and the research team will never forget".

Finally, space fans might want to make time this weekend to watch the May 19 launch of the private SpaceX Dragon spacecraft from Cape Canaveral on its way to the International Space Station. Depending on where you are on the planet, the launch is scheduled for morning, afternoon, or evening on Saturday. Those of us here on the west coast of North America and in Hawaii can just plan to drink a lot of coffee and stay up late tonight.

Each week we publish Fridaygram, featuring stuff from Google and beyond that you might have missed during the week. Fridaygram items aren't necessarily related to developer topics; they’re just interesting to us nerds. This week we’re wondering if Zefram Cochrane would be interested in the SpaceX launch.

Hangouts Hackathon: 1 API, 5 developers, 2 weeks

2012-05-17T11:14:00.000-07:00

By Jonathan Beri, Google+ Developer Advocate

Cross-posted from the Google+ Developers Blog

Last week we released an update to the Google+ Hangouts API, which includes several new features and possibilities to build on, like the ability to respond to facial movements in real-time inside an app.

As with any new API, we’re especially interested in what sorts of things our developer friends will dream up, so we've commissioned a handful of them to play with it over the next couple of weeks, and to share their thoughts and discoveries along the way. The participants represent a wide range of developers -- from agencies like The Barbarian Group to independent developers like Eyebeam alum Aaron Meyers teamed up with OKFocus.

Follow the Hangouts Hackathon with us on the Google+ Developers page, and, if you’re working on an interesting Hangouts API project we’d love to hear about that too. Use hashtag #hangoutshackathon to chat about our work, or your own, with the new API.

Fridaygram: App Engine search, rock-tossing chimp, man vs. beast

2012-05-11T13:16:00.000-07:00

By Scott Knaster, Google Developers Blog Editor

Google App Engine has a well-deserved reputation for regularly adding cool new features and other improvements. This week the team launched full-text search, which has been a hotly desired feature since the earliest days of App Engine. The new App Engine Search API enables you to search documents using lots of options, including searching specific fields and creating results snippets. At Google, it’s always fun to build new frontiers in search.

The App Engine Search API is a powerful tool indeed, but it probably couldn't defend you against an aggressive chimp that likes to gather and throw stones. The chimp in question, Santino, has apparently been gathering stones for years and then throwing them at intruders. Scientists have debated whether Santino is actually planning for upcoming tantrums when collecting stones. After years of close observation, researchers still disagree on whether Santino is a premeditated stone-thrower. But there is plenty of fascinating evidence, such as Santino stashing his stones beneath piles of hay where nobody will see them. Cat out of the bag, Santino?

Finally, we direct you to this remixed video of a different, stone-free interspecies confrontation. It's weird and funny, and it has special effects – what more could you want? It's a perfect way to spend a minute and ten seconds of your Friday or weekend.

Each week we publish Fridaygram, a post with cool Google and non-Google stuff you might have missed during the week. Fridaygram items aren't necessarily related to developer topics; they’re just interesting to us nerds. As for moving from App Engine Search to Santino the plotting chimp, we’re just trying to maintain our practice of tortured transitions.

Pricing plan announced for Google Cloud SQL

2012-05-10T10:00:00.000-07:00

By Joe Faith, Product Manager

Google Cloud SQL provides a fully managed database service for Google App Engine applications. Hosted on Google's infrastructure and based on the familiar MySQL database, Google Cloud SQL automatically provisions and maintains your databases, allowing you to focus on your applications and services.

In March, we were delighted to welcome our 10,000th developer on Google Cloud SQL, joining businesses like Daffodil, who halved their development time by building on Google's platform.

Since the preview launch in October 2011, we’ve been busy working on improving the performance, adding features like scheduled backups, and multihoming to increase availability and improve performance. We are also now offering more powerful instances with up to 4GB of RAM. Today, we are announcing our pricing, with two options to choose from:

For developers who want to try out the service, or who have lightweight applications, we offer a flexible "per use" pricing scheme. For example, you can get started with a cloud hosted MySQL database for around a dollar per month. You pay for just what you use.
For developers with more traffic, there are package plans that are more economical and help you predict your costs in advance.

We will not start charging for the service until June 12th. Full details of the pricing plans are available here: https://developers.google.com/cloud-sql/docs/billing

Google Cloud SQL is currently in limited preview. If you want to give us a try, start here: https://developers.google.com/cloud-sql/.

Joe Faith is a Product Manager on the Google Cloud Team. In a previous life he was a researcher in machine learning, bioinformatics, and information visualization, and was founder of charity fundraising site Fundraising Skills.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

New Google Analytics Easy Dashboard Library

2012-05-09T10:21:00.001-07:00

Jeetendra

Nick

By Jeetendra Soneja and Nick Mihailovski,
Google Analytics API Team

Many developers save time by using the Google Analytics API to automate Analytics reporting tasks. For example, you can use the API to create a dashboard to report data across multiple profiles. The Google Analytics Apps Gallery includes many 3rd party solutions that do this.

What if you want to build something quickly that’s custom-tailored to your business? You would typically have to spend time learning the API, figuring out how to handle authorization, then deciding how to integrate this data with a visualization library. You could build a custom solution, but it would take a lot of effort – until now, thanks to the Google Analytics Easy Dashboard Library.

Four months ago we started a project with a team of University of California Irvine students to simplify all of these steps. As part of this project, together we built the Google Analytics Easy Dashboard Library. This library makes it easy to use the Google Analytics API by distilling the process into three easy steps:

Register with Google APIs Console.
Copy and paste the JavaScript code.
Configure this code to query your data and choose a chart type to visualize it.

So now you can create custom Google Analytics dashboards very quickly, with minimal code.

Here’s a quick example. Say you want to create a line chart plotting visitors and visits for the last 30 days. Besides including the library, the only code required is:

<div id="chart1"></div>
<script>
var chart1 = new gadash.Chart({
      'type': 'LineChart',
      'divContainer': 'chart1',
      'last-n-days':30,
      'query': {
        'ids': TABLE_ID,
        'metrics': 'ga:visitors,ga:visits,ga:pageviews',
        'dimensions': 'ga:date',
  'sort': 'ga:date'
      },
      'chartOptions': {
        hAxis: {title:'Date'},
        vAxis: {title:'Visits'},
      }
    }).render();
</script>

Using the code above will create the following chart.

It’s that easy! To find out more about using the Easy Dashboard Library, read our Getting Started guide.

While the current library is very useful, we think we can add more features and make it even easier to use. To reach this goal, we’ve started working with another group of UC Irvine students, this time for three academic quarters. This new project's main goal will be to further simplify the library. We want the students we're working with to engage with you and implement your feature requests, if possible. If you use this library, we'd love to hear how you think it can be improved. Feel free to send any feedback to through our new GA-easy-dash-feedback Google Group.

We hope this library saves you time and helps you get more out of Google Analytics.

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

Experience Google I/O 2012 anywhere

2012-05-08T07:45:00.000-07:00

Dylin

Robert

By Robert Do and Dylin Martin, Google I/O Team

In 2011, Google I/O hosted 5,500 developers from 65 countries in San Francisco, but this audience was dwarfed by the more than 1 million developers from 161 countries tuning in via livestream. Next month developers worldwide will come together for three days of coding, sharing and inspiration in this year’s keynotes, sessions and Sandbox demos. And if you’re not joining us in person on June 27-29, this year’s I/O Extended and I/O Live will be even bigger and better, with more I/O Extended locations and more sessions streamed live.

Get together locally: I/O Extended

With I/O Extended, organizers can take the reins and use the momentum behind Google I/O to bring people together. If you’re interested in hosting an event, check out our planning site here. Otherwise, wherever you are, chances are good that there's a community of passionate developers like you already gathering at an I/O Extended event. Find a location near you and RSVP to let us know you’re coming!

Watch sessions live online: I/O Live

Can’t make it to an I/O Extended location? Or feel like staying in with pizza and beer? Bring the party to you with I/O Live, where the keynote and select sessions will be livestreamed on June 27-28. Bookmark developers.google.com/io where we’ll be posting the livestream schedule, as well as the video feed.

This year we’ve doubled the number of sessions that will be streamed, and we will be featuring 4 channels of programming. All sessions, including those not livestreamed, will be recorded and will be available online within 48 hours.

For more info on I/O Extended and I/O Live, keep an eye on the usual places: the Google I/O site, this blog, and +Google Developers.

Robert Do is an Associate Product Marketing Manager on the Developer Marketing Team. He works on helping developers find the tools they need on https://developers.google.com. He also produces hip hop music.

Dylin Martin works with the Developer Marketing and Developer Relations Teams on Google I/O.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

Fridaygram: Doodle competition, nasty prehistoric fleas, cupcake map

2012-05-04T12:55:00.000-07:00

By Scott Knaster, Google Developers Blog Editor

Everybody likes Google Doodles, those creative modifications of the Google logo that appear every so often on google.com and other Google search homepages. To let budding artists try their hand at doodling, we’ve hosted various Doodle 4 Google competitions around the world. This year’s Doodle 4 Google was open to U. S. students enrolled in schools serving grades K-12.

This week we announced the 50 state finalists, divided by grade group, and they’re very creative. Take a look, but more than that, you can vote for your favorites, one per grade group. Voting is open until May 10th. And after you’ve looked at this year’s student entries, you can spend time reliving old favorites on our Doodles archive site.

Now travel back in time to an age even before there were Google Doodles, when huge dinosaurs roamed the Earth. According to fossils found by Chinese scientists, these enormous beasts were bothered by Pseudopulex jurassicus and Pseudopulex magnus, giant insects 10 times the size of modern fleas that crawled on dinosaurs and packed a painful bite. So it turns out that being a dinosaur wasn’t all fun and games.

Finally, don’t you love it when two great things get mashed up together? Here’s an awesome example: a map of the world, made out of cupcakes. Enjoy!

Each week we publish Fridaygram, a post with cool Google and non-Google stuff you might have missed during the week. Fridaygram items aren’t necessarily related to developer topics; they’re just interesting to us nerds. Hat tip to Andres Ferrate and Mike Pegg for the link to the cupcake map. By the way, happy Star Wars Day, and May the 4th be with you.

Google Plugin for Eclipse now provides richer tooling for Cloud SQL and Google APIs

2012-05-04T08:11:00.000-07:00

By Sriram Saroop, Product Manager

We are pleased to announce the latest release of Google Plugin for Eclipse (GPE 2.6) with improved tooling for Cloud SQL and Google APIs. GPE 2.6 introduces the following features:

Tooling for using Java Persistence API (JPA) to access Cloud SQL

Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) frameworks are very popular in the Java community for accessing relational databases. The Eclipse Web Tools Platform offers a robust set of tools to configure and use JPA with an implementation of your choice. With the new Google Plugin for Eclipse (GPE) 2.6, you can now take advantage of these tools with Cloud SQL and Google App Engine. In any GPE project, JPA can now be enabled and configured as a project facet. The screenshot below shows the JPA facet configuration for a GPE project.

Importing the latest Google APIs into your GPE project

With GPE 2.6, you now have access to all the latest Google APIs at the click of a button within Eclipse. You can now download the latest Google APIs Java client library with the required dependencies to access Google APIs right within your App Engine project using GPE. Update notifications for API version changes will appear in your App Engine project, so you can easily keep your client libraries updated all the time. The screenshot below shows the GPE UI for adding a Google API to a GPE project.

The next time we update the App Engine Engine SDK, you will be happy to see an update notification within Eclipse prompting you to update to the latest SDK.

Please go ahead and install GPE 2.6 by following the instructions here. You can start using the ORM tooling for Cloud SQL and the latest Google APIs for your App Engine projects. We always love to hear your feedback and the GPE group is a great place to share your thoughts.

Sriram Saroop is the Product Manager for the Google Plugin for Eclipse and the Google Admin APIs. He has been a software engineer in his previous life and he is now working toward creating an awesome developer experience for Google products.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

Using Google BigQuery to learn from GitHub data

2012-05-03T11:30:00.000-07:00

By Ilya Grigorik, Web Performance Engineer

Open-source developers all over the world contribute to millions of projects every day: writing and reviewing code, filing and discussing bug reports, updating documentation and project wikis, and so forth. The data generated from this activity can reveal interesting trends across many industries, including popularity of programming languages over time, defect rates, contribution metrics, and popularity of specific frameworks and libraries.

The challenge in extracting these trends is gathering the data. Each project has its own distributed workflow, code repositories, and conventions. Having hosted dozens of my own projects on GitHub, I've long wanted to analyze the developer activity from the 2.6M+ public projects hosted on GitHub. Hence, earlier this year GitHub Archive was born!

GitHub Archive is a project to record the public GitHub timeline, archive it, and make it easily accessible for further analysis. Each day it archives over 120,000 public activities, ranging from new commits and fork events to opening and closing tickets, each with detailed metadata.

Once I collected the data, I needed a tool to analyze it, and that is when I found Google BigQuery. Based on the research behind Dremel, a popular internal tool at Google for analyzing web-scale datasets, BigQuery allowed me to easily import the entire dataset and use a familiar SQL like syntax to comb through the gigabytes of data in seconds. Plus the tool will scale to terabyte datasets, so there is plenty of room to grow!

The best news is that thanks to collaboration from the GitHub and BigQuery teams, the GitHub dataset is now public and available for you to slice and dice in any way you like. No need to worry about data gathering or database schemas: BigQuery will do all the heavy lifting, and you can just compose your queries to be executed in realtime.

Here's a real-world example. What are the most popular programming languages on GitHub over the past month?

If you are curious for more, sign up for BigQuery and follow the instructions on githubarchive.org to access the GitHub dataset. You can use the free 100GB query quota to run your analysis and perhaps even win some of the prizes from the GitHub Data Challenge!

Ilya Grigorik is a Web Performance Engineer and Advocate at Google, an open-source evangelist, and an analytics geek. You can find him on GitHub under igrigorik, and blogging about web performance at igvita.com.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

Google BigQuery brings Big Data analytics to all businesses

2012-05-01T10:00:00.000-07:00

By Ju-kay Kwek, Product Manager, BigQuery

BigQuery enables businesses and developers to gain real-time business insights from massive amounts of data without any upfront hardware or software investments. Imagine a big pharmaceutical company optimizing daily marketing spend using worldwide sales and advertisement data. Or think of a small online retailer that makes product recommendations based on user clicks. Today, we are making BigQuery publicly available, an important milestone in our effort to bring Big Data analytics to all businesses via the cloud.

Since announcing BigQuery in limited preview last November, many businesses and developers have started using it for real-time Big Data analytics in the cloud. Claritics, a social and mobile analytics company, built a web application for game developers to gain real-time insights into user behavior. Crystalloids, an Amsterdam-based analytics firm, built a cloud-based application to help a resort network analyze customer reservations, optimize marketing and maximize revenue. This just scratches the surface of use cases for BigQuery.

BigQuery is accessible via a simple UI or REST interface. It lets you take advantage of Google’s massive compute power, store as much data as needed and pay only for what you use. Your data is protected with multiple layers of security, replicated across multiple data centers and can be easily exported.

Developers and businesses can sign up for BigQuery online and query up to 100 GB of data per month for free. See our introductory pricing plan for storing and querying datasets of up to 2 TB. If you need more than that, contact a sales representative.

We hope you will be able to gain real-time business insights using BigQuery. Share your BigQuery use cases and feedback in our user forums or on our +Google Enterprise page.

Ju-kay Kwek is the Product Management Lead for Google's Cloud Big Data initiative. In this role, he focuses on creating services that enable businesses and developers to harness Google's unparalleled data processing infrastructure and algorithms to tackle Big Data needs.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

SPDY performance on mobile networks

2012-05-01T07:45:00.000-07:00

Michael

Ben

Matt

By Matt Welsh, Ben Greenstein, and Michael Piatek,
Mobile Web Performance Team

SPDY is a replacement for HTTP, designed to speed up transfers of web pages by eliminating much of the overhead associated with HTTP. SPDY supports several optimizations that give it an edge over HTTP when it comes to speed. SPDY is gaining a great deal of traction -- it has been implemented in Chrome, Firefox, and Amazon Silk, has been deployed widely by Google, and there is now SPDY support for Apache through the mod_spdy module.

We wondered what the performance of SPDY would be compared to HTTP for popular websites, using a Samsung Galaxy Nexus (running Android), a modern, SPDY-enabled browser (Chrome for Android), and a variety of pages from real websites (77 pages across 31 popular domains).

The net result is that using SPDY produced a mean page load time improvement of 23% across these sites, compared to HTTP. This is equivalent to a speedup of 1.3x for SPDY over HTTP. Much more work can be done to improve SPDY performance on 3G and 4G cellular networks, but this is a promising start.

The following graph shows the page load time for HTTP and SPDY, in milliseconds, across the 77 pages that were measured. As the graph shows, in all but one case, SPDY reduces load times, sometimes by as much as 50%.

Check out the full article for more details on the measurement methodology and results.

Matt Welsh, Ben Greenstein, and Michael Piatek are software engineers on Google’s Mobile Web Performance Team based in Seattle. They are working to speed up mobile web performance globally, and as part of their jobs, they run up impressive mobile bandwidth bills every month.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

More ways to measure your website's performance with User Timings

2012-04-30T10:31:00.000-07:00

By Satish Kambala and Mustafa M. Tikir, Google Analytics Team

Cross-posted from the Google Analytics Blog

As part of our mission to make the web faster, Google Analytics provides Site Speed reports to analyze your site’s page load times. To help you measure and diagnose the speed of your pages in a finer grain, we’re happy to extend the collection of Site Speed reports in Google Analytics with User Timings.

With User Timings, you can track and visualize user defined custom timings about websites. The report shows the execution speed or load time of any discrete hit, event, or user interaction that you want to track. This can include measuring how quickly specific images and/or resources load, how long it takes for your site to respond to specific button clicks, timings for AJAX actions before and after onLoad event, etc. User timings will not alter your pageview count, hence, makes it the preferred method for tracking a variety of timings for actions in your site.

To collect User Timings data, you'll need to add JavaScript timing code to the interactions you want to track using the new _trackTiming API included in ga.js (version 5.2.6+) for reporting custom timings. This API allows you to track timings of visitor actions that don't correspond directly to pageviews (like Event Tracking). User timings are defined using a set of Categories, Variables, and optional Labels for better organization. You can create various categories and track several timings for each of these categories. Please refer to the developers guide for more details about the _trackTiming API.

Here are some sample use cases for User Timings

To track timings for AJAX actions before and after onLoad event.
A site can have their own definition of "User Perceived Load Time", which can be recorded and tracked with user timings. As an example, news websites can record time for showing the above fold content as their main metric instead of onLoad time.
Detailed performance measurement and optimization of sub components on a page, such as time to load all images, CSS or Javascript, download PDF files and time it takes to upload a file.

Want to check out User Timings Report in your account?

Go to the content section and click the User Timings report under Content section. There are three tabs within the User Timings report for you to review: Explorer, Performance, and Map Overlay. Each provides a slightly different view of user timings reported.

The Explorer tab on the User Timings report shows the following metrics by Timing Category, Timing Variable, or Timing Label (all of which you define in your timing code).

Avg. User Timing—the average amount of time (in seconds) it takes for the timed code to execute
User Timing Sample—the number of samples taken

The Explorer tab also provides controls that you can use to change the tabular data. For example, you can choose a secondary dimension—such as browser— to get an idea of how speed changes by browser.

To learn more about which timings are most common for user timings, switch to the Performance tab. This tab shows timing buckets, providing you with more insight into how speed can vary for user reported timings for selected category, variable and label combinations. You may switch to Performance tab at any point of navigation in the Explorer tab, such as after drilling down on a specific category and variable, to visualize distribution of user reported timings. The bucket boundaries for histograms in Performance Tab are chosen to be flexible so that users can analyze data at low values ranging from 10 milliseconds granularity to 1 minute granularity with addition of sub-bucketing for further analysis.

The Map Overlay tab provides a view of your site speed experienced by users in different geographical regions (cities, countries, continents).

Satish Kambala and Mustafa M. Tikir are on the Google Analytics Team.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

Fridaygram: translation birthday, photos in trees, giants on streets

2012-04-27T12:20:00.000-07:00

By Scott Knaster, Google Developers Blog Editor

One of my favorite "living in the future" moments happens when I visit a webpage that’s not written in English. As you probably know, when this happens, Chrome figures out which language the page is using, and offers to translate it for me. That’s really cool. This week we celebrated the 6th anniversary of Google Translate’s statistical machine translation technology, which powers the Chrome translation scenario and many others.

Google Translate now works across 64 different languages, with more added from time to time. From modest beginnings, Google Translate now performs most of the translation work on Earth, translating one million books’ worth of text every day.

When words are not enough, we turn to pictures. What makes the LOOK3 Festival of the Photograph unusual is that it displays images high among the trees in an outdoor mall in Charlottesville, Virginia. Also known as "three days of peace, love and photography", this festival promotes environmental awareness and conservation, and also just looks really awesome.

Finally, what’s more lifelike than words and pictures? How about giant marionettes walking through the streets of Liverpool to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Titanic? There are plenty of YouTube videos of the giants’ visit for you to enjoy.

Fridaygram posts are made for fun, not technical value. They have been designed for your Friday and weekend enjoyment. Items that are interesting to us nerds are published in these posts. By the way, today has been declared Passive Voice Day 2012, so make sure that fun is had!

African developers finding success with Google technologies

2012-04-25T13:05:00.001-07:00

By Chukwuemeka Afigbo, Program Manager, Sub-Saharan Africa

Cross-posted from the Google Africa Blog

Creating applications and services that use Google platforms to make the internet more relevant to Africans is a big part of Google’s vision in Africa. This is why we are always excited whenever we come across individuals or companies whose efforts are in line with this vision. Here are a few of the interesting applications we have seen in recent months.

Battabox, co founded by Christian Purefoy and Yemisi Ilo, is an online social television platform developed in Nigeria that aims to provide everything Nigerian from music, film, street-life to news, comedy and cooking using the YouTube platform. Crowdsourcing videos is an important part of the Battabox strategy and they were able to achieve this using YouTube Direct running on Google App Engine integrated into their website. They also provided an Android App that enables users to upload videos directly from their Android phones.

Battabox website screenshot

There are many other examples from further afield. In South Africa we met Nomanini who have a Google App Engine backend for Lula, their airtime vending device, which promises to change the way airtime is distributed in the region. Envaya SMS is an amazing application that turns your Android phone into an SMS gateway and has been used by many NGOs in East Africa. SAF SMS is a school management solution built with Google Web Toolkit that has been adopted in more than 100 schools in Nigeria. We also met Serengeti Advisers, a consultancy firm in Tanzania that uses Google Chart Tools to create interactive reports on their website.

Nomanini’s Lula terminal communicates with a backend powered by Google App Engine

As part of our drive to meet and interact with app developers in Africa, our Android Developer Relations team also recently hosted the developers of AfriNolly and the Nigerian Constitution Android app on their weekly Android DevRel office hours hangout on Google+ for Europe, Middle East and Africa. At the hangout, these African developers shared information about their apps with other Android developers.

You can follow the exploits of these and more developers in Sub Saharan Africa as they continue to make things happen with Google APIs and platforms by keeping an eye on our case studies page.

Do you feel your app should be featured here? 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

Introducing Google Drive and the Google Drive SDK

2012-04-24T09:32:00.001-07:00

By Mike Procopio, Software Engineer

Today, we're announcing Google Drive—a place where people can create, share, collaborate and keep all of their stuff. Drive is a natural step in the evolution of Google Docs. Drive is built to work seamlessly with other Google applications like Google+, Docs and Gmail, and your app can too. Joining the launch today are 18 web apps that have integrated with Drive using the Google Drive SDK.

Integrating your application with Google Drive makes it available to millions of users. Drive apps are distributed from the Chrome Web Store, and can be used with any modern browser. Plus, your app can take advantage of Google's sharing, storage, and identity management features.

Create and collaborate

Google Drive allows for more than storage. Google Docs is built right into Drive, and your app can join the party. For example, Lucidchart is an online visual diagramming tool integrated with Google Drive. You can start a new Lucidchart or share your diagrams with friends or coworkers straight from Drive, just like a Google document or spreadsheet.

Store everything safely and access it everywhere

With Google Drive you can store all of your files and access them from anywhere. For example, MindMeister, an app for creating mind maps online, also lets you open files from popular desktop mind mapping applications. By integrating with Google Drive, MindMeister users can open their mind maps stored in Drive from any modern browser.

Search everything

Your app can also take advantage of Drive's storage, indexing, and document viewers. For example, HelloFax is a web application that lets you sign and fax documents from your browser. HelloFax users can now store all their inbound and outbound faxes in Google Drive, making them easy to find later. Plus, with automatic OCR, users can even search and find text in faxed images. Your application can store files of any type up to 10 GB in size or create file-like shortcuts to your application's data.

Want your application to work with Google Drive? Full documentation on the Google Drive SDK is available at developers.google.com/drive, or if you're itching to start building, head to our Getting Started guide. Our team will be on Stack Overflow to answer any questions you have when integrating your app with Google Drive. You can also bring your questions to our Hangout this Thursday at 10:30 AM PDT / 17:30 UTC.

Look for more posts about working with the Drive SDK on the Google Apps Developer Blog in the coming weeks.

Mike Procopio is a Software Engineer for Google Drive, focusing on all things Drive apps. He gets to leverage his passion for the developer and user experience by working on the next-generation APIs that help unleash Google Drive. Before joining Google in 2010, he was a machine learning researcher, and enjoys engaging in illuminating statistical discussions at every opportunity.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

Fridaygram: student photographers, space video, shuttle sights

2012-04-20T16:02:00.000-07:00

By Scott Knaster, Google Developers Blog Editor

As regular Fridaygram readers know, at Google we love to get students involved in coding and other pursuits. For example, last fall we announced the Google Photography Prize, which was open to student photographers around the world. More than 20,000 students from 146 countries submitted entries in the few months the competition was open.

A panel of judges whittled these entries to 100, and then to 10 finalists. You can read more about the competition and see a slideshow of the amazing work of these photographers.

Photo by Sasha Tamarin

Let’s move from still photos to video – and out into space, with a look at what video creator Alex Rivest calls "the best view in the solar system". This video shows what astronauts see from the International Space Station, from various points of view. When you watch this video, you can really see what Alex means. And it kind of makes you want to go check it out for yourself.

As long as we’re already out in space, we can’t resist a final mention of one of our favorite Fridaygram topics, the U. S. Space Shuttle. Earlier this week, shuttle Discovery was flown to its new home at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC, producing some incredible sights before arriving. Happy retirement, Discovery.

On the land or in the sky, Fridaygram posts are just for fun. They're designed for your Friday and weekend enjoyment. Each Fridaygram item must pass only one test: it has to be interesting to us nerds.

Changes to deprecation policies and API spring cleaning

2012-04-20T12:35:00.001-07:00

By Adam Feldman, APIs Product Manager

It’s 2012. These days technology moves fast and we want to keep our developer products moving and innovating fast, too. In an effort to align our pace of development with the market, we did a careful analysis of our API deprecation policies. Based on our conclusions, we've decided to adopt a one-year policy for some APIs, remove the policy for other APIs and make the policy itself simpler and clearer. This doesn't mean we have changed the way we think about our APIs - we are more committed than ever to offering stable and relevant APIs to our developer community.

Most of these changes will happen over the next several years, but today we are giving you advance notice. As always, we will strive to keep changes to a minimum and announce them in a timely manner.

One-year API deprecation policies

As part of our effort to evolve our developer platform (like introducing the Google APIs Terms of Service), we are moving some services to a one-year deprecation policy, a common industry practice among similar APIs. The four services moving to a one-year policy are:

Google App Engine, Google Maps/Earth APIs and YouTube API will wind down their current 3-year deprecation policy and will transition to the one-year policy in April 2014. Google Cloud Storage keeps its current one-year policy. To be very clear, we are not deprecating the APIs themselves.

Clearer deprecation policy language

For the above APIs, we've shortened our deprecation policy to be clearer and more concise. The new policy simply states that we will strive to provide one year notice before making breaking changes. For details, see each API's Terms of Service, such as the Google Maps/Earth APIs.

Removal of deprecation policies

For Google's other APIs, we are removing the deprecation policy - not the API. In most cases, this change will not take effect until April 2015. Check the following affected APIs' Terms of Service for details: Accounts API, AdSense Host API, Chart Tools API, Checkout API, Contacts API, Custom Search API, Documents API, Doubleclick for Publishers API, Feed API, Google Apps Admin APIs, Libraries API, Orkut API, Picasa Web Albums API, and Prediction API.

During the remainder of the deprecation period, these APIs will also benefit from the clearer deprecation policy language. Our commitment to the underlying APIs remains unchanged. We will continue to work very hard to communicate any changes to our APIs well in advance, regardless of the APIs' deprecation policy.

Retirement of older APIs

In addition, we are announcing the deprecation of several older APIs and versions. Please visit the documentation for each API for more information about the deprecation period and suggested alternatives:

We are deprecating the Moderator API and Legacy Portable Contacts API, as well as part of the Account Authentication APIs (ClientLogin, AuthSub and OAuth 1.0) and Google Chart Tools (Image Charts and Infographics).
We are also deprecating the non-current versions of the Spreadsheets, Contacts, Documents List and Freebase APIs.
Finally, we are adding a shutdown date for the Finance API and Feedburner Administrative APIs, which were deprecated last year.

Our commitment to developers

Our change in policy is designed to make it easier for us to bring you the technology you’ve come to expect from Google: technology that excels at ease-of-use and scalability, and enables you to focus on building your unique application. Our team remains committed to existing APIs as well as building powerful new Google technology into our developer platform.

Adam Feldman is a Product Manager, focusing on all of Google's APIs and making sure Google provides the best possible platform to developers.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

Code Jam’s Sprint to Google I/O

2012-04-18T21:25:00.000-07:00

By Igor Naverniouk, Software Engineer, Code Jam

Last Friday, we kicked off our Code Jam qualification round where over 36,000 programmers from around the world competed for a chance to be one of the 25 finalists invited to New York for the final showdown. While registration for Code Jam is now closed, we didn’t want to keep you waiting a whole year to re-try your luck.

Starting tomorrow, April 19 at 7:00 AM PDT / 14:00 UTC, we will be running a Code Jam sprint. The stakes, you ask? The 100 top scoring developers to solve at least one two-part challenge will be given the opportunity to purchase tickets to Google I/O, which sold out in just over 20 minutes this year.

You don’t have to be a seasoned Code Jam veteran to participate, but you’ll want to register in advance. This ensures that the only thing between you and your ticket to Google I/O is a single challenge and a few quick clicks. In case you want a warm up, check out our Code Jam quick-start guide and practice questions.

The URL for the challenge will be posted to our +Google Developers page promptly tomorrow, April 19 at 7:00 AM, so don’t miss your chance to code your way to Google I/O this year!

Update 9:20 PM: We've edited this post to clarify exactly how the successful entries will be determined. Please read the bold sentence above for details.

Code Jam is a worldwide programming competition in which contestants may use any programming language to solve algorithmic problems. Although registration for Code Jam 2012 is now closed, developers can still compete in our Sprint to Google I/O for a chance to purchase a ticket to the conference for $900.

As his main job, Igor Naverniouk builds analytics for Google Play. In his 20% time, he works on programming challenges for Code Jam.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

Back to Morocco: g|maroc 2012

2012-04-17T22:00:00.000-07:00

By Rania Hadi, MENA Outreach Manager

View this post in Arabic

Last May, I joined the MENA Outreach team and was swiftly transported to Rabat for my first event (as an organizer) in Morocco. it is hard to believe that a year has passed, but here we are again, preparing for our upcoming g|maroc event!

Our first g|day of 2012 was in Jeddah, and we had a great time learning from, and interacting with, the vibrant tech and business communities - and I even got to exercise my Arabic skills on stage. We hope the fun and energy continues at g|maroc 2012, to be held in the city of Mohammedia, on June 7-8. We chose this location to be between Casablanca and Rabat, but we look forward to having many people attend from all around Morocco.

I’m looking forward to a few things: interacting with participants, testing my French and Arabic skills (fingers crossed), and especially, the new and updated sessions. Based on participant feedback from our previous events, we’re changing the content and format this time to make sure we cover topics that are useful for advanced users. We’ll also have Google engineers, product managers, and business leaders available to answer any questions.

g|maroc isn’t just about us, though; we also want to showcase Moroccan talent! If you have created or built something cool using a Google product, technology, or tool, be sure to tell us about it while registering. You may get the chance to present at g|maroc, so be detailed and show us what you’ve got.

Registration opens today, and it’s free. So register now, tell your friends about it, and let us know what you want to see at the event. Morocco was a fantastic first start for me, and I hope the tradition continues!

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

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

Add SPDY support to your Apache server with mod_spdy

2012-04-17T11:32:00.000-07:00

Bryan

Matthew

By Matthew Steele and Bryan McQuade,
PageSpeed Insights Team

At Google, we strive to make the whole web fast. Our work in this area includes PageSpeed, Google Chrome, and the SPDY protocol, among other efforts. In December of 2011, to make it easy for you to enable the SPDY (pronounced "SPeeDY") protocol on your sites, we released an early beta of mod_spdy, an Apache module that adds SPDY support to the Apache HTTPD server. We’ve spent the last few months working with our early adopters to fix bugs and tune performance of the module. Today, we’re launching a version of mod_spdy that we encourage you to try on your web server.

Installing mod_spdy

To install mod_spdy on your Apache 2.2 server, simply download the appropriate mod_spdy Debian or RPM package for your platform, or compile from source. Once installed, your Apache server will begin using SPDY to communicate with SPDY-compatible browsers (e.g. Google Chrome, Android, and recent versions of Firefox). SPDY runs over HTTPS, so any HTTP (non-HTTPS) traffic on your site will not be affected by mod_spdy. Further, since SPDY requires server-side support for the NPN TLS HTTPS extension, which is not available in most current Apache environments, a version of mod_ssl with NPN support is included with the mod_spdy packages.

Enabling SPDY for your site improves performance in several ways:

The server and browser can compress HTTP headers, saving bytes on the network.
Multiple resource requests can be multiplexed over a single TCP connection, saving connections on the network.
The browser can request all page resources at once instead of a few at a time, which reduces the number of network round-trips needed between server and client.

We've tested mod_spdy using locally-mirrored pages from popular websites, and have seen significant speedups compared to serving via plain HTTPS – comparable to the gains that Google’s own servers achieve by using SPDY – with no extra configuration and negligible effect on Apache’s CPU and memory usage. In extreme cases, for example, pages with many small resources, we’ve seen mod_spdy reduce load times by more than 50%.

How mod_spdy works in Apache

Implementing SPDY in Apache posed several interesting challenges. For example, multiplexing is an important performance feature of SPDY which allows for multiple requests in a single SPDY session to be processed concurrently, and their responses interleaved down the wire. However, due to the serialized nature of the HTTP/1.1 protocol, the Apache HTTP server provides a one-request-per-connection architecture. Apache’s connection and request processing normally happens in a single thread, like so:

This works well for HTTP, but it presents a problem for multiplexed protocols like SPDY because in this flow, each connection can only process one request at a time. Once Apache starts processing a request, control is transferred to the request handler and does not return to the connection handler until the request is complete.

To allow for SPDY multiplexing, mod_spdy separates connection processing and request processing into different threads. The connection thread is responsible for decoding SPDY frames and dispatching new SPDY requests to the mod_spdy request thread pool. Each request thread can process a different HTTP request concurrently. The diagram below shows the high-level architecture.

Happily, all this is almost completely invisible to users and server administrators alike--you can continue to use your existing Apache modules and configurations.

Download mod_spdy for your platform and give it a try, and let us know what you think on our mailing list. mod_spdy is an open-source project and we welcome contributions. We are continuing to add new features, tune performance, and improve support for up-and-coming versions of the SPDY protocol.

Matthew Steele and Bryan McQuade are Software Engineers on the Google PageSpeed Insights Team in Cambridge, MA. When not working on mod_spdy, they focus on developing tools to help site owners understand how to speed up their sites.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

Register now for the global Dart hackathon

2012-04-16T10:30:00.000-07:00

By Seth Ladd, Developer Advocate

Cross-posted with the Chromium Blog

The Dart team invites you to the first global Dart hackathon, a collaboration between the Dart team and the developer community. Sign up and have fun hacking on Dart to build modern client and server side web apps and libraries.

Current hackathon locations include:

North America:

Silicon Valley, California, USA

South America:

São Paulo, Brazil

Europe and Middle East:

London, England
Prague, Czech Republic
Tel Aviv, Israel

Asia:

Bacolod City, Philippines
Chandigarh, India
Goa, India
Karnataka, India
Manipal, India
New Delhi, India
Seoul, Korea
Tokyo, Japan

Hackathon dates vary by location. Check out the full list for the schedule.

The Dart project is still in technology preview, which means you’ll be hacking on early access code, but that’s all part of the fun. We’re eager to see what you build, and we hope you can make it. Register today!

Seth Ladd is a Developer Advocate with the Chrome team, and is having a grand ol' time learning Dart.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

Fridaygram: Chrome tools, Goldberg machines, Lehrer songs

2012-04-13T08:48:00.000-07:00

By Scott Knaster, Google Developers Blog Editor

If you use Google Chrome and you like to live on the edge, you might want to try Google Chrome Canary. There's a new version of Chrome Canary pretty much every day, and it gets the latest features. Of course, because it's built every day, sometimes it’s not very stable and it falls right off the leading edge it's balanced on. That’s why, for safety, you can install and run the stable version of Chrome alongside the Canary version.

Recent Canary builds have added cool new features to the developer tools section of Chrome. Specifically, you can now test mobile environments by simulating different screen sizes and by emulating touch events using the mouse. These features are on the Settings page of developer tools.

If you haven’t visited Chrome's developer tools before, you might be pleasantly surprised at all the nifty things available there. To get to developer tools, click the Wrench in Chrome, then choose Tools > Developer Tools. Have a look around – if you need a guide, see the documentation.

Some developers make hardware too, and a bunch of them competed in this year’s Rube Goldberg Machine Contest at Purdue University. The winning team broke a record – their own record – by building a machine that takes 300 steps to inflate and pop a balloon. When you consider that 14 people spent 5000 hours on this project, you realize the power of creativity mixed with craziness.

Finally, take a moment to celebrate Tom Lehrer's birthday week by listening to some of his classic tunes. As a math professor / musician / parodist, nobody expresses the spirit of Fridaygrams better than Tom Lehrer.

Fridaygram posts are just for fun. They're designed for your Friday and weekend enjoyment. Each Fridaygram item must pass only one test: it has to be interesting to us nerds. Disclaimer: we do not advocating poisoning pigeons, whether in the park or elsewhere.

Join Hack4Kids, the second edition of the EUHackathon in Brussels

2012-04-12T09:34:00.002-07:00

By Marco Pancini, Senior Policy Counsel

This year, the second edition of the EUhackathon is taking place on 20 and 21 June, and the theme is Hack4Kids. The event is organised again in conjunction with the European Institutions in Brussels.

The EUhackathon concept aims to build a bridge between the "old" (the European Institutions and lawmakers) and the "new" world (the Internet and coders). The 2012 edition adds the dimension of putting children at the center of the event as end-users and as members of the jury.

The Hack4Kids EUhackathon revolves around two tracks: 1) child safety and 2) child creativity.

The first track offers developers a chance to create or improve tools that enhance the Internet experience of children and parents. Ideas include providing simple and robust reporting tools for harmful online content or behaviour, crowdsourcing content classification, creating easier parental control tools, and education and awareness raising.

The second track invites developers to explore how industry can support and improve children's creativity online and offline. For example, this could include enabling children to easily create new online content, from building their own 3D game environment to producing their own hit single.

Selected applicants will have their travel and accommodation costs covered and the winner or winning team in each track will be awarded €5,000. Not to forget, there will also be free food and WiFi.

Interested candidates can submit an online application until Monday the 30th of April 2012 at noon CET.

More information is available at http://www.euhackathon.eu.

No time to join the fun and excitement with us, but full of great ideas? Don’t hesitate to share your ideas on useful tools for kids, parents and teachers with us, or just go vote on other people’s suggestions at http://suggestions.euhackathon.eu .

Marco Pancini was part of the start-up project iBazar, the first online auction web site in Europe, and after that he joined eBay from 2002 to 2007. In July 2007 he joined the Google team as policy counsel in charge of government relationship for the Italian market. Since February 2011 he has been a member of the Google policy team in Brussels.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor