Ga-Ga for Gadgets

6/27/2007 06:24:00 PM

Posted by Sep Kamvar, Engineering Lead for Personalization

Sometimes I think I know a lot. I can code like a champ and also know the difference between a Monet and a Manet. But on closer inspection, maybe I don't know very much at all. When it comes to fine wines, for instance, I can't tell the difference between Châteauneuf-du-Pape and Chateau-de-Cardboard, and if you asked me who played in the Super Bowl last year, I'd probably say the Dolphins. And lots of people at Google are like me: we know some things, and have some good ideas, but we certainly don't know everything or have all the good ideas.

So when we designed iGoogle, our personalized homepage, we baked that recognition right in to the product by developing the Google Gadgets API. Google Gadgets are applications that developers can create and anyone can embed into their iGoogle homepage or their own website. In the year and a half since we launched Google Gadgets, we've seen a lot of growth in this program. The developer community has created thousands of gadgets, and the top gadgets get tens of millions of pageviews per week. This is great for our developers, as iGoogle gives the gadgets broad distribution, and it's great for our iGoogle users, as they benefit from a richer variety of options for their personalized homepage. There have been some really interesting gadgets created, from to-do lists to Zelda, from a pair of eyes that follow your mouse around the screen to an entire customer relationship management (CRM) application.

We've been hearing from a lot of gadget developers that they'd like to spend more time developing if they could, and we've been thinking about ways to help them do that. To that end, we're happy to announce Google Gadget Ventures, a new pilot program that will help fund third-party gadget development and gadget-related businesses. We plan to offer two types of funding: $5,000 grants for gadget developers who want to invest time making their already successful gadget even better, and $100,000 seed investments for new gadget-related businesses. For now, applications are restricted to gadget developers who have more than 250,000 pageviews per week on their gadget.

Our hope with Google Gadget Ventures is to help create an ecosystem where developers can spend more time doing what they love -- building great gadgets. You'll find more details on how to apply on Tom's post on the Google Code Blog and the Google Gadget Ventures web page. I'm extremely excited to see what you all come up with!

Feeds on a plane!

6/06/2007 03:35:00 PM

Posted by Chris Wetherell, Software Engineer

With last week's launch of Google Gears, we're happy to let you know that Google Reader is the first Google web application made for online and offline viewing. If you're not familiar with Google Reader, it's a feed reader for getting updates from your favorite blogs and news sites.

Now, you can read these updates whether you're on or offline. It's easy to read today's financial news from the New York Times on the train, or catch up on your favorite blog while on a plane 35,000 ft. above the Atlantic.

Once you've installed Google Gears, you can download your latest 2,000 items so they're available even when you don't have an Internet connection.



To get started, simply click the "Offline" link in the top right of Google Reader.

Please note, though, that the current version of Google Gears is a developer release, which means you may notice a few kinks here and there. We'll be working hard to iron those out over the coming months, and as always, we welcome your feedback and suggestions as we look to make Google Reader better every day.

29 hours of code

5/30/2007 04:35:00 PM

Posted by Andrew Bowers, Developer Programs

Google Code, that is. Google Developer Day has officially kicked off in Sydney, Australia, beginning our 29-hour marathon of developer activities around the world. Approximately 5,000 developers will join us today in ten countries to talk about Google's developer products, ask questions, and share their thoughts with Google engineers. For those who can't make it, we're webcasting the sessions from London and California live, and posting recorded sessions from all locations on the website.

A deep dive into technical sessions, free food, swag -- what more could a developer ask for? Well, a few new products would be a good start, and that's what we're providing.

First up is Google Gears, an open source browser extension for enabling offline web applications. Now developers will be able to create web applications that don't need a constant Internet connection to work. Users, meanwhile, can interact with Gears-enabled websites anywhere, whether they're on the couch or on an airplane. With this early release, we hope the community will provide feedback and move towards an industry standard for offline web applications. Read more on the new Gears blog.

An experimental product debuting today is the Google Mashup Editor, an online editor that enables developers to create, test, and deploy mashups and simple web applications from within a browser. Now developers can turn out those weekend projects more quickly. We've also launched a new blog where you can learn more about the Google Mashup Editor and get the latest news.

Finally, we released Google Mapplets yesterday at the Where 2.0 conference. Mapplets are mini-applications that any developer can build on top of Google Maps so that users can easily discover the creative genius and usefulness of the mashup development community. You'll find more about Mapplets here. And we're also quite excited about the interest that has been shown in Google Web Toolkit (GWT). Since its launch last May, there have been over 1 million downloads. You can read more on the GWT blog.

Between Developer Day, the product launches, and GWT's activity, we hope to keep developers around the world busy for a while. But if you run out of things to build, you can always find more ideas on Google Code.

May 31 is Google Developer Day

4/11/2007 12:27:00 PM

Posted by Andrew Bowers, Google Developer Programs

As some of you may remember, last June at the Googleplex we held a Geo Developer Day alongside the Where 2.0 conference. We invited a bunch of developers from Where 2.0 to come to campus and meet the Google Maps and Earth teams. Everyone at Google had a great time interacting with the more than 200 developers who came, and we knew we wanted to do something like it again.

When we started thinking about plans for this year, two things came to mind. First, we’ve released a number of new developer products over the past 12 months which we’re excited to talk more about, including the Google Web Toolkit, the Google data APIs, the AJAX Search API, and Google Gadgets. Second, as much as we love the Googleplex, we realize that not everyone can travel to Mountain View to hang out with us.

Put those two considerations together and what you have is this year’s Google Developer Day. Many developer products, 10 countries, one day: May 31^st.

The day itself will vary in format from location to location, but the goal is the same: bring Google’s developer community closer together, share our knowledge, and of course have fun in the process. We’ll be posting more details on the sessions as we finalize them, but in the meantime, here are just a few of the Googlers we have lined up across the globe:

• Guido Van Rossum, Google software engineer and creator of the Python programming language (Beijing);
  
• Chris DiBona, Google open source programs manager (London);
  
• Mark Stahl, Google data APIs tech lead (Madrid);
  
• Bruce Johnson and Joel Webber, co-creators of the Google Web Toolkit™ (Mountain View);
  
• Bret Taylor, group product manager for Google developer products (Mountain View);
  
• Lars Rasmussen, Google Maps™ senior engineer (Sydney); and
  
• Greg Stein, Google engineering manager and chairman of the Apache Software Foundation (Tokyo).
  

We’re excited to be inviting everyone. To find out more, and to let us know if you can make it, please visit the Google Developer Day site.

Web APIs, web mashups and accessibility

2/02/2007 03:11:00 PM

Posted by T.V. Raman, Research Scientist

From time to time, our own T.V. Raman shares his tips on how to use Google from his perspective as a technologist who cannot see—tips that sighted people, among others, may also find useful. - Ed.

Wikipedia defines mashup in the context of web applications as a "(web application hybrid), a website or web application that combines content from more than one source."

More generally, web mashups are created by leveraging web APIs to present data in new and innovative ways—often, such innovation comes about by combining data from a multiplicity of sources. However, notice that combining multiple data sources into new and innovative views is not the only possible use of web APIs; in particular, you can also leverage these APIs to produce alternative views of a given data source. Newer uses of web APIs such as those provided by Google Maps, Google Calendar or Google Search often fall into this category of providing convenient user access. Thus, it is possible to embed a Google Calendar or the map for a given location into one's website.

Moving from the above scenario to leveraging web APIs in the context of mashups for enabling better accessibility is but one step away. As an example, envision a very basic Google Maps mashup that embeds a map on a web page—but with zoom level set to twice the normal default. This might make a very interesting starting point for a low-vision user. Given the expressiveness of web APIs, we can go a lot further. I believe web mashups provide a very rich platform for building creative accessibility solutions with the goals of:

• Providing the ability to build highly optimized custom views for cases where a "one size fits all" solution does not work
• Experimenting with different accessibility approaches to discover solutions that work for inclusion into the mainstream

To get a sense of what is possible, see how other web developers are leveraging these APIs to provide innovative access solutions. As an example of what can be done with GData-based APIs provided by applications like Google Calendar and friends, see this trip report—Mashup Camp 3 - A Googler's Experience. In particular, notice RoboCal a mashup that provides spoken access to your calendar.

Spreading the AJAX love

11/16/2006 10:27:00 AM

Posted by Dan Peterson, Product Manager

You may have heard that the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) makes AJAX development easier, but now we've made it even easier to dive into AJAX. GWT 1.2 supports development on Mac OS X. While GWT has always supported targeting a wide variety of web browsers and production systems, with today's announcement, GWT fanatics are now free to develop on the operating system of their choice.

So if you or a friend have an ambitious web application in mind -- especially if you're already familiar with Java development -- feel the AJAX love: check out GWT.

This year's CodeJam

10/27/2006 05:23:00 PM

Posted by Craig Nevill-Manning, Engineering Director

What took 6 weeks, required sizzling brainpower, and drew a global audience of programmers? The fourth Google CodeJam, that's what. More than 21,000 coders from 100 countries registered in early September and have competed two rounds (they could code in Java, C++, C#, Python or VB.NET). Today was the grand finale, which just ended at our New York City office. The 100 finalists convened in New York to play this last round together. Screens glowed, fingers flew, and gears spun. Our top three winners are:

Petr Mitrichev, Russia - $10,000
Ying Wang, China - $,5000
Andrey Stankevich, Russia - $5,000

Additional cash prizes went to all the finalists, who represent 24 different countries. (Here's the full release.) This is the fourth annual Global Code Jam, which we produce in conjunction with TopCoder. Our best wishes, congratulations and thanks to everyone who celebrates the joys of coding.

Update: Ying Wang is studying in the U.S., but comes from China.

More developer love with Google Code Search

10/05/2006 09:59:00 AM

Posted by Bret Taylor, Senior Product Manager

Today we launched Google Code Search, which gives programmers a single place to search publicly accessible source code. I am really excited about this launch, as it caps off a long sequence of Google product launches for developers in the past year, including Google Maps API v2, Google Calendar API, Google Web Toolkit, Google AJAX Search API, Google Checkout API, project hosting on Google Code, Google Base API, and Google Gadgets for Your Page. Google's developer team is focused on building tools that help developers extend and improve Google's products and improve their own applications, and we are really excited to see all the amazing things that have been created already (traffic map for your Google homepage, anyone?).

The success of the Google Maps API taught us that an API doesn't need to be complex to be powerful, and that principle has formed the basis of our API design. If you haven't seen how far cut-and-paste can get you, check out the list of sample applications we've published for the AJAX Search API. Or check out the Google Calendar API examples; to get a feed of your calendar entries, you just need to fetch a single URL from Google's servers.

We have also launched a number of general-purpose developer and open-source tools like Google Web Toolkit and project hosting on Google Code. Our view is what's good for the web is good for Google -- we want users to have the best online experience possible, and we hope these tools will help developers create compelling applications for their users.

So if you haven't been to Google Code lately, check it out. We are continuously adding useful tools to our suite of developer products, and it's a great way to leverage the power of Google's infrastructure in your own projects.

Create web apps on top of Google search

10/03/2006 11:35:00 AM

Posted by Tom Stocky, Product Manager

We just launched a new version of the Google AJAX Search API, which is designed to make it easier for webmasters and developers to do two things:

• Add a search box to your site that displays Google Web, Video, News, Maps, and Blog Search results without taking users to a separate page.

• Build powerful web apps on top of Google search. (See some samples.)

Read more about this release on the Google AJAX Search API Blog.

Towards a more efficient computing infrastructure

9/26/2006 11:05:00 AM

Posted by Luiz Barroso, Distinguished Engineer

Intel CTO Justin Rattner was kind enough to invite me on stage today during his R&D keynote at the Intel Developers' Forum to talk about some of the computing platform challenges we face in building large-scale Internet services. Talking to industrial colleagues and the academic community about some of our most important platform-level requirements is something I always make time for. If you're trying to build interesting systems, life is easier when hardware vendors are aware of what works for you and what doesn't.

Chip multiprocessing -- the idea that multiple simpler processing units in one chip can be a better choice than a single hulking one -- is an example of a technology we've been vocal supporters of for quite a while. See for example "Web Search for a Planet" and "Price of Performance." We're happy to see this thinking being embraced by several vendors.

The focus of our message at IDF today was efficiency: power efficiency and programming efficiency. There are several hard technical problems surrounding power efficiency of computers, but we've found one that is actually not particularly challenging and could have a huge impact on the energy used by home computers and low-end servers: increasing power supply efficiency. All computers, including personal computers and servers, have power supplies to convert the alternating current (AC) from the outlet to the direct current (DC) needed by the machine. Typical power supplies waste 30-45% of their input power, and relatively simple modifications can bring this waste down to 10%. Others, like 80 PLUS, have also identified and targeted these inefficiencies. We believe that the development of a new open standard is necessary to achieve very high efficiencies at low costs, so we have begun discussions with Intel and other vendors that we hope might lead to significantly more efficient power supplies. Here's a short white paper describing this in more detail (PDF). If you'd like us to keep you posted on our progress, please send us a note at efficient-psu@google.com.

Programming for systems with many computers can be a daunting task, but one that our engineers have to face every day. Simplifying this task has a direct impact on programmer productivity, and consequently the rate of innovation. Software tools such as MapReduce have been very successful at Google by making it easier to process huge amounts of data quickly by spreading it over many computers. However, the efficiency of the computation can still suffer because of the limitations of the underlying computer platform. For example, programmers only have two major storage options that are widely available: memory (DRAM, specifically) and disk drives. Latency of disk accesses is about 100,000 times slower than memory, while memory is approximately 200 times more expensive (per gigabyte) than disks. These two alternatives are so far apart that programmers are forced to choose from two extremes, making some computations very difficult. I suggested to the IDF audience that there might be an opportunity for intermediate solutions in this space, faster than disks but cheaper than memory. Some forms of FLASH memory might soon be possible solutions, for example.

It's always rewarding to exchange notes with our friends in industry and academia, whether through participation in events or by publishing papers. I expect we'll continue to do that.

Students: Get your gadget on

9/20/2006 03:48:00 PM

Posted by Samantha Crow, Product Marketing, Google Gadgets

When was the last time you tried to write HTML, build your resume and strut your stuff all at once? Well, now's your chance. We recently launched the Google Gadget Awards, a program designed to challenge U.S. college students to create clever Google Gadgets. It's easy for anyone with even a little bit of web design experience to create one. They can be fun (like one of my personal favorites, this radio gadget), useful (like this to-do gadget), or just really, really simple (like this facts and trivia gadget). And anyone can add the gadgets to their Google personalized homepage or to Google Desktop.

If you're not a university student in the U.S., you can still create Google Gadgets. Although they won't be entered in the Awards, if they're clever enough you just might find them on Google homepages around the world.

And the Desktop Gadget winners are…

9/05/2006 06:17:00 PM

Posted by Mendel Chuang, Product Marketing Manager

With all the great entries we received for the Google Desktop Gadget Contest, we've learned that there are some very talented developers out there. Amongst all the gadgets submitted, these three really stood out:

• diGGGadget by Marius and Yannick Stucki – Stay on top of the latest stories from digg.com. Click on a few buttons and you'll know why we think it's so great. It also takes advantage of our advanced APIs to enable sharing news with friends plus personalization based on your interests.
• Multiplayer Reversi Game by Turhan Aydin – Immerse yourself in the fun game Reversi with this visually rich gadget. Not only can you play against the computer, but this gadget takes advantage of our Google Talk API so that you can also play with your friends.
• Day/Night World Clock by Beatrix Gottanka – We couldn't have designed a better world clock. Not only does this clock show you the local time, but there's also a map that indicates whether it's night or day at any given hour. And if you want options, this gadget has them.

For more on the winners and the honorable mentions, read the Google Desktop Blog, and don't forget to check out all the other great gadgets you can add to your desktop.

Don't miss this chance to prove yourself

8/31/2006 09:39:00 AM

Posted by Jeanne Williams, Staffing Programs

There are only 5 days left until registration closes for Google Code Jam 2006. So far, about 16,000 competitors have signed up to show off their programming skills -- and perhaps win an all-expenses paid trip to our New York City engineering office to compete in the finals on October 27. The winner gets $10,000 and global bragging rights: people have registered in huge numbers not only from the U.S., but from India, China, Canada, Brazil, the Russian Federation, Poland, Pakistan, Iran, Australia, the U.K., Germany, Singapore, Japan, Hungary -- you get the idea.

The top 100 finalists will be flown to NYC to show us what they've got. Have you got what it takes to Code Jam? Then by all means register here.

Map Search gadget for the homepage

8/15/2006 03:21:00 PM

Posted by Tom Stocky, Product Manager

We just released a Google Map Search gadget for the personalized homepage -- an easy way do local searches and then quickly scroll through the results on a map. You programmers might like to know that this makes use of three Google APIs at the same time: the Google AJAX Search API, the Google Maps API, and the Google Gadgets API. The next challenge? Let's go for four...

Code your way to Gotham

8/14/2006 09:54:00 AM

Posted by Craig Nevill-Manning, Engineering Director

New York, New York -- A place so nice, we're holding the Google Code Jam finals here! I'm excited to tell you about our fourth annual competition, the 2006 Google International Code Jam. This year the last round will be held at our second-largest development center, right in downtown Manhattan. The best coders in the world (and that includes you, if you're up for the challenge) compete on speed and accuracy to solve challenging problems with only their brains, fingers, and a computer. If this is your idea of fun, then sign up -- registration opens today. We'll fly the best 100 coders to New York in October, all expenses paid, for the final competition, to meet Google software engineers and to experience Manhattan. First prize is $10,000; all finalists are guaranteed a minimum prize of $750.

Of course, we'll be on the lookout for future Googlers -- those who love solving tricky coding challenges, and are excited about solving the Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal of organizing the world's information.

Registration opens today, so sign up, test your mettle, and we'll save you a place in New York!

London conference on test automation

7/25/2006 03:04:00 PM

Posted by Allen Hutchison, Engineering Manager

Earlier we announced a first-time conference on test automation, something of interest to an admittedly select group. Just a reminder to those of you who work in this area that our deadline for requesting a spot at the London meeting this fall is coming up at the end of the week. Here's more information if you'd like to sign up.

Update: Google Desktop Gadget Contest

7/20/2006 01:19:00 PM

Posted by Mendel Chuang, Product Marketing Manager

Just a quick update to let all you know that, due to popular demand, we've extended the Google Desktop Gadget Contest another two weeks. So if you have a great idea for a gadget, and want to enter it for a chance to prove your brilliance and creativity, you now have until August 14 to do so.

And if you're interested in some tips and tricks on creating Desktop Gadgets, have a look at the Inside Google Desktop blog. Good luck!

Code Jamming in Dublin

7/06/2006 02:09:00 PM

Posted by Jeanne Williams and Anne Driscoll, Staffing Programs Team

On June 29th, Google Dublin hosted the onsite finals for Code Jam Europe 2006. This is the third of four code competitions slated for this year, with China in January, India in April and a Global Code Jam this fall.

After nearly 10,000 registrants and three intense online rounds, the top 50 finalists persevered and flew to Dublin for the final challenge. ACM members also joined the coding community fun, traveling from countries as far afield as Kazakhstan, Russia, Sweden, Egypt, Spain, France, Poland and Bulgaria to celebrate the success of the finalists. Several of the ACMers had qualified for the Code Jam Finals in their own right, and having them in Dublin added a real buzz to the proceedings.

Over 15 countries were represented in the finals, and 31 of the top 50 are from Eastern Europe. We celebrate the success of the top finishers: Tomasz Czajka from Poland took home the €2500 grand prize; second- and third-prize winners were Petr Mitricheve and Roman Elizarov, both from Russia, who won €1000 each.

Watch the fun that defined Code Jam Europe in this short clip from the 3-day event -- and keep on coding to prepare for the next one!

Spend your summer with Google Desktop

6/28/2006 08:19:00 AM

Posted by Mendel Chuang, Product Marketing Manager

If you're a Google Desktop fan looking for something to do this summer, it's time to get your creative juices flowing and create a submission for the Google Desktop Gadget Contest. Winning a cool T-shirt almost goes without saying, but you could also win the top prize of $5,000. To help you along, there's the Google Desktop Gadget Designer, a WYSIWYG development environment.

And since Google Desktop 4 is now available in traditional Chinese, simplified Chinese, Korean, Russian, Swedish, Finnish, Danish, Norwegian, Polish, Turkish, Hungarian, Czech, Slovenian, Greek, Slovak, Croatian, Catalan, and Bulgarian, be sure to think globally as you design your gadget. And speaking of version 4, thanks to all the testers who gave us feedback, we're now able to bring the English version out of beta. So if you've been waiting to easily search and personalize your desktop, here's your chance.

Lastly, if you need some inspiration for the contest, check out our list of Google Gadgets. You might be surprised at what you find...

Happy Birthday, Google Earth

6/12/2006 02:25:00 PM

Posted by John Hanke, Director, Google Earth and Google Maps

We got so excited around here about the first anniversary of Google Earth that we decided to celebrate a bit early. Beginning today, you can download a brand new version, Google Earth 4. Running on OS X? Feel the love. Prefer Linux? Ditto. Yes, we're releasing simultaneously for PC, Mac (universal binary for full performance on both Intel and PowerPC based Macs) and for the first time ever, native support for popular Linux distributions. And we should say "salut," "ciao," "hallo," and "hola" to our French, Italian, German and Spanish users, because Google Earth is now fully localized for those languages in addition to English. This includes a UI localized to French, Italian, German, and Spanish, as well as local search, driving directions, geo-coding, and unique local information layers for those countries.

Got data?
The streamlined new UI is bound to make you crave new places to explore, so we put together a little update to our database — we increased our global coverage by about 4X. Google Earth now covers more than 20 percent of the landmass of the entire globe with high-resolution satellite imagery (soon Google Maps will too). When we say "high resolution," we mean the good stuff: you can see cars, houses, buildings in more than 200 countries and territories. Not every house is covered, only about two billion of them. That's our best estimate, anyway — that about 1/3 of the population of the Earth can now see their homes in high-resolution. Google Earth has had medium resolution global satellite coverage since the beginning. But that was at 15 meters per pixel. This new global coverage was produced in conjunction with our exclusive satellite partner, Digital Globe, and is at approximately 70 cm per pixel. We have even better data for many countries, up to 10 cm per pixel.

What global insights can this new data produce? Google Earth has already helped save tsunami, hurricane, and earthquake victims, not to mention find a lost Roman villa, track severe storms, discover new meteor craters, track the outbreak of avian flu, visually index magazine articles and photos, host travel videos, redefine the house-shopping process, track airplanes in flight, recognize every Medal of Honor recipient, and many other uses we never expected. Only time will tell what it will bring, and it will only be fully realized when energetic and creative people use powerful tools like KML to exploit the new data and features.

Why not KML in Maps?
We asked that too. KML is such an amazingly flexible way to create and share geographic information - whether it's sharing vacation photos with your friends or publishing important data like the realtime earthquake feed from the U.S. Geological Survey — we thought it would be useful to be able to view KML in Google Maps. So here it is! You can now view KML in Maps by entering the URL for your KML file. To browse hundreds of thousands of interesting KML files, see what the half million members of the Google Earth Community have created.

Feeling inspired?
Google SketchUp and Google 3D Warehouse have enabled creative individuals around the world to model their world in 3D. A new version of SketchUp is available today that enables the export of fully-textured 3D models to 3D Warehouse and Google Earth. This will bring even more realism to the collectively-authored 3D world SketchUp users are creating.

Ready to mashup?
Our legion of Maps API developers asked us to support geocoding. So we decided to push that out today too. Street-level geocoding is now available for the U.S., Canada, Japan, France, Italy, Germany and Spain. Let the mashing begin.
Correction: Street-level geocoding is not available in Japan.

Are you enterprising?
Finally, now there's Google Maps for Enterprise, offering a fee-based service and support for businesses that want to embed a Google Maps experience in their websites or internal applications. It leverages the Google Maps API to enable businesses to map customer locations, track shipments, manage facilities or view any other data source in a geographic context.

Whew. I'm exhausted from writing all of that. Our first year has been a busy one. We hope you enjoy these latest efforts in our mission to geographically organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.