Chrome Dev Summit 2015 That’s a wrap!

Originally posted on Chromium Blog

Posted by Darin Fisher, VP Engineering, Chrome

The last sessions of the Chrome Dev Summit 2015 are coming to a close, so it’s the perfect time to reflect on the event. We started our annual summit back in 2012, where we first introduced Chrome on Android. Today, there are more than 800 million monthly active users on Chrome for Android.

The greatest power of the Web is in its reach—not just across devices and operating systems, but in reaching users. Top mobile web properties are seeing 2.5 times the number of monthly unique visitors compared to the top mobile apps, and mobile web reach is growing at more than twice the rate of mobile app reach. This reach offers a unique opportunity to engage with more users.  

We believe this is a pivotal moment for the web platform, as early adopters of a set of key enabling technologies and tools are seeing success. During the keynote, we covered the evolution of the mobile platform and the shift towards “progressive web apps,” which are fast, robust, app-like experiences built using modern web capabilities. The web has come a long way, and building immersive apps with web technology on mobile no longer requires giving up properties of the web you’ve come to love. Flipkart’s new mobile web experience is a great example of a progressive web app that uses the new capabilities to provide a next-generation user experience.



In practice, progressive web apps have three main aspects that separate them from traditional websites: reliability, performance, and engagement.

Reliability

Every web app should load quickly, regardless of whether a user is connected to fast Wi-Fi, a 2G cell network, or no connection at all. We envision service workers as the ideal way for developers to build web apps that are resilient despite changing and unreliable networks. Weve released two libraries to help take the work out of writing your own service worker: sw-precache and sw-toolbox for your App Shell and dynamic content, respectively. Once your implementation is up and running, you can easily test it on different network connections using Chrome DevTools and WebPageTest. Service workers are already seeing great adoption by developers: there are currently 2.2 billion page loads a day using service workers, not counting its use in the New Tab page in Chrome.

Performance

The RAIL performance model helps you figure out what a user expects from each interaction with your site or app, breaking down performance into four key goals: 

• Responses (tap to response) should be less than 100ms 
• Animations (scrolling, gestures, and transitions) should run at 60 frames per second
• Idle time should be used to opportunistically schedule non-essential work in 50ms chunks
• Loading should be finished in under 1 second

In practice, weve found improving even just one area of RAIL performance can make a dramatic difference on the user experience. For example, a one second difference in loading time can have as much as an 11% impact on overall page views and a 16% impact on customer satisfaction.

Engagement

Traditionally, users have had a hard time re-engaging with sites on the web. Push notifications enable you to build experiences that users can engage with "outside of the tab"--they don’t need to have the browser open, or even be actively using your web app, in order to engage with your experience. Best of all, these notifications appear just like other app notifications. Currently we’re seeing over 350 million push notifications sent every day in Chrome, and it’s growing quickly. Beyond the Rack has found that users arriving to their site by push notifications browse 72% longer than average users and spend 26% more.

Tools for Success

Finally, Google is committed to making web developers successful. As our generalized library for building components on the web, Polymer is also deeply focused on helping developers achieve RAIL. Since its 1.0 release at Google I/O earlier this year, it has grown to be used on over 1 million web pages, including more than 300 projects within Google. Polymer 1.0 was 3 to 4 times faster than the previous 0.5 version, and the latest 1.2 release is even 20% faster than that. To get started with this modern way of thinking about web development, take a quick tour of Polymer, watch the Polymer Summit talks, check out the Polymer codelabs, or try the Polymer Starter Kit.

We already have great resources like Web Fundamentals that we continue to expand and improve.  We’re also committed to documenting each new feature we ship on the Mozilla Developer Network. In the past year alone, we’ve made 2,800 individual edits to MDN and created 212 new pages. To further our commitment to educating web developers, we’ve partnered with Udacity to offer a senior web nanodegree, an education credential focused on modern web technologies and techniques like service workers, Promises, HTTP/2 and more.

For all the details on Chrome Dev Summit 2015, you can watch full session videos, which we will continue to upload as they’re ready. Thanks for coming, thanks for watching, and most of all, thank you for developing for the web!

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A final farewell to ClientLogin OAuth 1 0 3LO AuthSub and OpenID 2 0

Posted by William Denniss, Product Manager, Identity and Authentication

Support for ClientLogin, OAuth 1.0 (3LO¹), AuthSub, and OpenID 2.0 has ended, and the shutdown process has begun. Clients attempting to use these services will begin to fail and must be migrated to OAuth 2.0 or OpenID Connect immediately.

To migrate a sign-in system, the easiest path is to use the Google Sign-in SDKs (see the migration documentation). Google Sign-in is built on top of our standards-based OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect infrastructure and provides a single interface for authentication and authorization flows on Web, Android and iOS. To migrate server API use, we recommend using one of our OAuth 2.0 client libraries.

We are moving away from legacy authentication protocols, focusing our support on OpenID Connect and OAuth 2.0. These modern open standards enhance the security of Google accounts, and are generally easier for developers to integrate with.

¹3LO stands for 3-legged OAuth where theres an end-user that provides consent. In contrast, 2-legged (2LO) correspond to Enterprise authorization scenarios such as organizational-wide policies control access. Both OAuth1 3LO and 2LO flows are deprecated, but this announcement is specific to OAuth1 3LO.

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The first ever Chrome Live Coming to a screen near you on April 22nd

Posted by Casey Le, Product Marketing Manager, Chrome for Work

Chrome was a big bet when it was introduced six years ago and has since grown to provide a simpler, speedier and safer web for more than 750 million users around the world. Today, Chrome is an integrated hardware and software solution for work that meets the challenges of and innovates upon traditional platforms.

Join us online April 22nd at 10:00am PDT at Chrome Live, our first-ever online event, to hear from Googlers, technical experts and our customers about how Chrome is meeting the needs of a more mobile, social and cloud-oriented workplace. At Chrome Live, you’ll:

• Have a front-row seat to two keynotes from:

• Amit Singh, President of Google for Work, who’ll share how Chrome for Work is part of the transformational agenda of many businesses today. He’ll also be announcing a number of new products coming to the Chrome for Work family.

• Rajen Sheth, Director of Product Management for Chrome for Work, who’ll discuss how devices have revolutionized the way we work. He’ll also uncover a few pathways of our top-secret roadmap and may have a few surprises in store.

• Learn how the web, meeting technology and digital displays are being reimagined with Chrome for Work product managers Saswat Panigrahi and Vidya Nagarajan

• See live deployment and management demos by Chrome team experts

• Hear from IT leaders at Netflix, Pinterest and Chico’s about integrating devices with the cloud and enabling IT admins at top companies to streamline day-to-day operations

• Get a sneak peek at the team’s plans to continue innovating and addressing new needs in the market

To be a part of Chrome Live, all you need is a comfortable seat, an Internet connection and a computer, tablet or phone; pants are optional but recommended. You’ll be able to interact with Google experts and ask questions.

Register now to learn all this and more at the first Chrome Live event on Wednesday, April 22nd at 10:00am PDT. And even if you can’t attend on the scheduled dates, be sure to register to stay up to date on all things Chrome. Feel free to share your thoughts, impressions and questions using #chromelive15 on social media.

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How to Generate a kernel log after random reboot

Once in a while, a software bug in the kernel will cause a random reboot, so in order to help kernel developers to fix and troubleshoot the reboots, a kernel log need to be submitted to the developer for further analysis and hopefully lead to a bug fix.

Most Android kernels have "RAM Consoles" to save the necessary kernel logs immediately after reboot in the RAM.  The users can then retrieve this RAM log on a subsequent reboot to submit to kernel developers. Here is a quick tour on how to do that.

[ Using ADB ]

1. adb shell
2. su
3. cat /proc/last_kmsg > /sdcard/last_kmsg.txt
4. exit
5. exit
6. adb pull /sdcard/last_kmsg.txt

File last_kmsg.txt will be located in the same location as adb.exe executable.

[ Using android terminal app ]

1. su
2. cat /proc/last_kmsg > /sdcard/last_kmsg.txt
3. exit
4. exit
5. adb pull /sdcard/last_kmsg.txt

File last_kmsg.txt will be located on your SD-card.

[ Using Root Explorer / ES Explorer with Root ]

1. go to /proc folder
2. copy last_kmsg to /sdcard/
3. rename last_kmsg to last_kmsg.txt

File last_kmsg.txt will be located on your SD-card.

The best method to share the last_kmsg.txt content is to upload it to pastebin.com and send a link to the developer.

Source: faux123 (Google +)

Have any questions or comments? Feel free to share! Also, if you like this article, please use media sharing buttons (Twitter, G+, Facebook) below this post!

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Working better together – a study of innovation and collaboration at work

Posted by Sebastien Marotte, VP, Google Apps for Work


Editors note: Today we share a few of the most enlightening insights from our study on the impact of collaboration and innovation on a company’s success. Read on for some highlights of what we learned from business leaders at companies of all sizes and industries, then check out the full report here.

As a culture, and in business, we’ve become increasingly conscious of the positive impact of collaboration, group interaction and free exchange of information. And with the word “social” tied to many of the ways we now spend our time — social media, social apps, social gaming, social software — we’re often reminded of the power of connecting and sharing.

The numbers reflect this trend. Over the last decade, Google search volume for the term “social collaboration” has grown globally by more than 300 percent, while interest for the term “social innovation” has jumped more than 200 percent. And the money trail is headed in the same direction: business leaders are directing focus and budget on tools and strategies that foster collaboration.

So how exactly does collaboration stack up against other business objectives in the eyes of today’s business leaders? We teamed up with Raconteur to find out. We surveyed senior staff and C-suite executives at 258 North American companies of all sizes and industries about a wide range of business concerns, from changes that impact profitability, to barriers and drivers of innovation, to the most formidable organizational threats they’re facing, to the tools they’re using to address their challenges. Here’s what those business leaders told us.

Collaboration is good business

Our research shows that the benefits of collaboration extend far beyond the success of any single project. An overwhelming 73% of business leaders said their organization would be more successful if employees could work in more flexible and collaborative ways. In fact, they tell us that “employees working together more collaboratively in person” is the number one factor impacting profitability.

Another eye-opening discovery was that collaboration and employee happiness go hand in hand: 88% of business leaders who believe their company fosters a culture of knowledge sharing and collaboration also say employee morale and job satisfaction are high.

Business leaders also told us that the most serious people management-related threats to organizations are failure to attract enough talent (25%), inability to retain the best talent (18%), and concerns about a disengaged workforce (14%). While we haven’t proven a direct causation, it appears that a culture of collaboration could potentially help address these threats by creating a more desirable work environment.

Who can spark change?

While business leaders look to departments across the organization for innovation and collaboration, they consider IT the greatest changemaker. Twenty-six percent named IT the leading department for driving innovation, and 28% named IT the department that best collaborates with internal and external teams. So we weren’t surprised when leaders also told us that investing in technology, which IT manages, has the biggest impact on knowledge sharing and collaboration. We saw that companies of all sizes rely on IT and technology for the tools to share, innovate and transform.

Business teams with access to the right technologies and tools and the support of IT and leadership can work better together, with greater mobility. And this paves the way for a collaborative culture that may bring a host of benefits, including greater profitability, happier employees and more consistent innovation. We may continue to be surprised by what results when teams truly sync.

See the full report on collaboration here.

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Launching Salesforce Lightning with a global community a live event and Hangouts

Posted by Sarah Franklin, VP of Admin Marketing, Salesforce

Editors note: Today we hear from Sarah Franklin, VP of Admin Marketing at Salesforce, the leader in enterprise cloud computing and the sixth largest software company in the world. See how the company brought its community together and announced a recent product release using Google Hangouts. 

It’s not every day that we have the opportunity to bring together people from 119 locations across the globe. The Salesforce marketing team put our heads together to decide how to announce Salesforce Lightning — a metadata-driven platform that is highly customizable, and empowers people to work faster and smarter — differently than previous product releases. We decided to focus on what’s always been at the center of our company: our customers. For us, the solution was simple and collaborative. We chose Google Hangouts to introduce Lightning, so we could share this exciting announcement with our community of developers and users in 20 countries via live video.

We chose Hangouts because we wanted to show our community that we’re committed to using innovative tools. We’d already been using Hangouts in a variety of ways, such as connecting with colleagues in different offices (and sending each other emojis) and hosting webinars with our admin community, so we knew it was a great choice to bring many people together from around the world.

Whether it was 7 a.m. or midnight in their local timezone, people gathered at universities, community centers and local pubs to join the product launch. The day after our announcement, we also hosted a second private Hangout with over 200 people across Europe, the Middle East and Africa in case they missed the launch due to timing. These events created a deeper sense of camaraderie among an already strong community. We sent our community leaders a webcam and tripod, so it was easy and cost effective to get a group together since all they needed was an internet connection. Hangouts gave us the opportunity to encourage dialogue between admins, developers, partners and users in a fun and immediate way.

Many companies measure the success of a product launch based on the press they receive or the number of website visits they get in a single day. We flipped that. Our goal was how could we involve our community and put our customers at the center of this launch. We defined success by the number of customers we involved. More than 19,000 people from our community, from Bangalore to Tokyo to New York City to Paris and hundreds of places in between, tuned in to join the launch.

Our executives were floored when they saw people from all around the world on the screen. We overcame the language barrier by having translators onsite in some of the non-English speaking countries to make sure everyone felt included. We created a personal connection with customers who spoke different languages and brought together engineers, users, executives and the marketing team who have a common passion for our customers’ success.

By focusing on forward-looking technology, we hosted an event that made more than 19,000 people feel like they were in the same room. And with our core focus on connecting companies to their customers, we couldnt think of a better way to introduce our products to the world than with Hangouts.

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Episode 27 A Couple of Tools

This time, Tor and Chet are joined by... nobody. Instead, we just talk among ourselves about tools. From Android Studio to performance debugging tools to IDE shortcuts to memory analysis tools to Lint rules to animation debugging tools and back to Android Studio, we talk about lots of tools and then some.

Favorite quotes:
"How do you learn IntelliJ power commands?"
"You just have to read the source code."

"We have a Lint rule for that."
(This should be Tors superhero catch phrase if its not already)


IDE shortcuts: Killing the joy of programming one keystroke at a time.


Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly.

Relevant Links:
(Not many links this time; the best way to learn about the various tools is to use them)
Android Studio

Tor: google.com/+TorNorbye
Chet: google.com/+ChetHaase

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Port forwarding on your router a suggested tutorial

Its a good tutorial explain "How To Forward Ports on Your Router".

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No map is an island Introducing a connected JavaScript Maps API experience

Cross-posted from the Google Geo Developers blog

Our digital lives are increasingly connected. We research on our laptops, look up directions on our phones and even navigate with our watches. And by creating maps unique to each user and offering features such as saved places, Google Maps has been making it easier to continue these tasks as we move from device to device.

However, although maps embedded from Google Maps are now built uniquely for every Google user, most of the now two million active sites and apps using the Maps APIs are still islands. When I look for a place to eat on Zagat, I can’t see how far away it is from work. When I look at a travel map in the New York Times, I can’t save those places in order to navigate to them later.

Today we’re taking a step towards connecting these two million sites and apps by introducing a signed-in JavaScript Maps API experience and a feature called attributed save. To help illustrate, we’ve partnered with the New York Times to bring this experience to their 36 hours travel column.

A connected JavaScript Maps API

When you add &signed_in=true to the Google Maps JavaScript API source url, your end users will have the option to sign into the map with their Google account. When they do so, your users will receive a map built for them, in the context of your app. Their saved places — including home and work addresses (if set by the end user) as well as other relevant places — will appear automatically on their map, providing a layer of context that anchors your content and makes it stand out even more.

Attributed save

Once users are signed into the Google Maps in your app, we can together create an integrated experience between your map content and Google Maps. With attributed save, signed-in users can save places from your app to be accessed later, with attribution and linkbacks, on Google Maps for the web, Android and iOS.

What’s more, you can also enable deep links into your mobile applications. For instance, users can save a place from your desktop app (such as Zagat.com), open up the place on Google Maps on their Android device, and deep link directly into your Android app.

Enabling attributed save is easy — just specify your app name, a link and a place search string or place ID when creating a marker and info window. Or use our SaveWidget to enable attributed save in your own custom info window.

In addition, we’re also launching attributed save across all embedded maps today. Attribution and linkback parameter will be inferred automatically from the domain and referrer of the host site, so if you’re using our embedded maps, you don’t need to do anything! If you’re using the Google Maps Embed API, you may customize the source and link back parameters yourself.

One final point: we’ve stated in the past that the JavaScript Maps API is cookieless if loaded from maps.googleapis.com. As of today, to enable the signed in maps experience on sites across the web, the signed-in version of the JavaScript Maps API now does rely on cookies to detect the end user’s signed-in state. Please review our documentation for further details.

That’s all for now. Go try it out. And remember, no map is an island, entire of itself...

Posted by Ken Hoetmer, Product Manager, Google Maps APIs

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We throw pie with a little help from our friends

Posted by Jon Simantov, Fun Propulsion Labs at Google

Originally posted to the Google Open Source blog

Fun Propulsion Labs at Google* is back today with some new releases for game developers. We’ve updated Pie Noon (our open source Android TV game) with networked multi-screen action, and we’ve also added some delicious new libraries we’ve been baking since the original release: the Pindrop audio library and the Motive animation system.

Pie Noon multi-screen action

Got an Android TV and up to 4 friends with Android phones or tablets? You’re ready for some strategic multi-player mayhem in this updated game mode. Plan your next move in secret on your Android phone: will you throw at an opponent, block an incoming attack, or take the risky approach and wait for a larger pie? Choose your target and action, then watch the Android TV to see what happens!

We used the NearbyConnections API from the most recent version of Google Play Games services to easily connect smartphones to your Android TV and turn our original Pie Noon party game into a game of turn-based strategy. You can grab the latest version of Pie Noon from Google Play to try it out, or crack open the source code and take a look at how we used FlatBuffers to encode data across the network in a fast, portable, bandwidth-efficient way.

Pindrop: an open source game audio library

Pindrop is a cross-platform C++ library for managing your in-game audio. It supports cross compilation to Android, Linux, iOS and OSX. An early version of this code was part of the first Pie Noon release, but it’s now available as a separate library that you can use in your own games. Pindrop handles loading and unloading sound banks, tracking sound locations and listeners, prioritization of your audio channels, and more.

Pindrop is built on top of several other pieces of open source technology:

• SDL Mixer is used as a backend for actually playing the audio.
• The loading of data and configuration files is handled by our serialization library, FlatBuffers.
• Our own math library, MathFu, is used for a number of under-the-hood calculations.

You can download the latest open source release from our GitHub page. Documentation is available here and a sample project is included in the source tree. Please feel free to post any questions in our discussion list.

Motive: an open source animation system

The Motive animation system can breathe life into your static scenes. It does this by applying motion to simple variables. For example, if you’d like a flashlight to shine on a constantly-moving target, Motive can animate the flashlight so that it moves smoothly yet responsively.

Motive animates both spline-based motion and procedural motion. These types of motion are not technically difficult, but they are artistically subtle. Its easy to get the math wrong. Its easy to end up with something that moves as required but doesnt quite feel right. Motive does the math and lets you focus on the feeling.

Motive is scalable. Its designed to be extremely fast. It also has a tight memory footprint -- smaller than traditional animation compression -- thats based on Dual Cubic Splines. Our hope is that you might consider using Motive as a high-performance back-end to your existing full-featured animation systems.

This initial release of Motive is feature-light since we focused our early efforts on doing something simple very quickly. We support procedural and spline-based animation, but we dont yet support data export from animation packages like Blender or Maya. Motive 1.0 is suitable for props -- trees, cameras, extremities -- but not fully rigged character models. Like all FPL technologies, Motive is open source and cross-platform. Please check out the discussion list, too.

What’s Fun Propulsion Labs at Google?

You might remember us from such Android games as Pie Noon, LiquidFun Paint, and VoltAir, and such cross-platform libraries as MathFu, LiquidFun, and FlatBuffers.

Want to learn more about our team? Check out this recent episode of Game On! with Todd Kerpelman for the scoop!

* Fun Propulsion Labs is a team within Google thats dedicated to advancing gaming on Android and other platforms.

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charity water unifies a global team with Chromebox for Meetings

Posted by Ian Cook, head of IT, charity: water

Editors note: Today’s post comes from Ian Cook, head of IT at charity: water, a non-profit organization that provides clean and safe drinking water to people in developing nations. Learn about how the organization is using Chromebox for meetings to keep the team connected, from its New York City HQ to onsite in Cambodia. 

At charity: water, our mission is to bring clean and safe drinking water to every person on the planet. We have a “100 percent model,” which means every dollar donated goes directly to the field to fund clean water projects. This is made possible by a small group of passionate and dedicated supporters who cover all of our operating costs: everything from staff salaries, to flights to the field, to the ink in our printer.

At charity: water transparency is one of our core values, and with the help of Google we maintain transparency in two major ways. We use the Google Maps APIs to show every supporter exactly what weve done with their donation by giving them the GPS coordinates, photos and community information of the exact projects they made possible. We also rely heavily on tools like Chromebox for Meetings to communicate with our global team; our headquarters is in New York, but we have staff that work remotely in Europe, Asia, and Africa.

We switched to Chromebox for Meetings after testing different products, and gathering feedback from our employees. They found Chromebox for Meetings to be the best solution: powerful, easy to use and seamlessly integrated with Google Apps. When we moved into a new, custom office space, we opted to include screens connected to Chromebox for Meetings in all nine of our conference rooms.

We like when technology enables, rather than interrupts, our natural flow of working. At any time, more than half our conference rooms are booked for virtual meetings, allowing us to connect instantly with colleagues around the world. We even have a 48-inch TV mounted at standing height on a media cart, which we move into the common area for company wide meetings. Remote employees can join via Hangouts and participate as if they were standing beside their colleagues. In fact, our first UK-based employee is connected with our New York City headquarters on Google Hangouts almost every day.

With simpler video conferencing, we’ve improved work-life balance by giving everyone, from interns to executive staff, more flexibility to work from anywhere at any time. Chromebox for Meetings is easy to scale and mobile-friendly, which is important since travel is core to what we do. Using Hangouts in conjunction with Chrome device management also allows us to help out employees with IT issues in real time, which is essential for a global team that often works remotely. I can share screens and fix problems whether at the office, at home or on the road.

Our team’s made up of excited, passionate people, running a non-profit much like a fast-paced technology startup. We need tools that help us work more collaboratively, even when a number of our team members are dispersed across the globe. We’ve even started an initiative to hire the best talent for the job, regardless of physical location. We wouldn’t be able to do this without powerful video conferencing technology and work tools that enable mobility. With Chromebox for Meetings and Google Apps, we can work better at achieving our mission while maintaining the transparency that’s at the core of our values.

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Announcing Expeditions taking students places a school bus can’t go

Posted by Jennifer Holland, Program Manager, Google for Education

(Cross-posted on the Google for Education Blog.)

On a frigid spring morning in Ontario, Canada, a classroom full of fifth-graders visited the Galapagos Islands, discovering and classifying animals for a lesson on Charles Darwin. Students at Mariano Azuela Elementary in Chicago toured the Great Wall of China in their math class, calculating how long it would take to walk from one tower to the next. And high school students in Accra, Ghana, explored Singapore to gather ideas for a paper on urban economic development.

These trips were all made possible by Expeditions, a new educational tool coming this fall that allows teachers to take their classes on field trips to anywhere. From the Expeditions app on their tablet, a teacher is able to send synchronized three-dimensional 360° panoramas to each student’s Cardboard viewer, pointing out areas of interest in real time and instantly pausing the trip when needed. Used in conjunction with existing lessons and curriculum, Expeditions immerses students in experiences that bring abstract concepts to life and provide a deeper understanding of the world beyond the classroom.

Expeditions will combine three things: software built with input from teachers and students, immersive virtual reality content and off-the-shelf devices.

The content
Expedition trips are collections of virtual reality panoramas — 360° photo spheres, 3D images and video, ambient sounds — annotated with details, points of interest and questions that make them easy to integrate into curriculum already used in schools. Partners like the American Museum of Natural History, the Planetary Society, David Attenborough with production company Alchemy VR and many of the museums and other partners of the Google Cultural Institute are helping us to create custom educational content for Expeditions.

The app
Expeditions trips are accessed and viewed through an app that allows a teacher to choose a trip and lead a group of students through a virtual field trip by choosing what content they’re viewing and by pointing out specific points of interest along the way. Teachers are able to pause trips to get the class’s attention, play ambient sounds to make the experience even more immersive and let students freely explore on their own.

The hardware
While Expeditions can be used on devices already in the classroom, they come alive with Google Cardboard. Our pilot kit is a collection of all the hardware needed to go on Expeditions in full virtual reality — a tablet for the guide, VR viewers for each student, a speaker to provide ambient sounds and a durable box to transport, charge, and store it all. We know many schools don’t have great Internet service (or any at all) so we built Expeditions to work without it. The kit includes a router that allows Expeditions to run over its own local Wi-Fi network so there’s no buffering, dropped connections or lengthy loading times.

“So many times, Ive wished that I could take my students on a journey and tell them the kinds of stories that got me excited about social studies,” says Hector Camacho, who took his Economics class at St. Francis High School in Mountain View on an Expedition to Wall Street. “I never imagined that very trip could take place within the walls of our classroom. Expeditions helped create an experience I could never have created using just words, and it helped my students develop a fascination with economics.”

More than 1,000 students have already used Expeditions in their classes, and we’d like to thank the teachers and students in these schools who’ve helped us test and improve the product this spring.

Sign up to get more information about Expeditions as it becomes available this fall, and let us know where you’d like to take your students — we’re excited to hear your wish list.

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FlatBuffers 1 1 a memory efficient serialization library

Posted by Wouter van Oortmerssen, Fun Propulsion Labs at Google*

Originally posted to the Google Open Source blog

After months in development, the FlatBuffers 1.1 update is here. Originally released in June 2014, it’s a highly efficient open source cross-platform serialization library that allows you to read data without parsing/unpacking or allocating additional memory. It supports schema evolution (forwards/backwards compatibility) and optional JSON conversion. We primarily created it for games written in C++ where performance is critical, but it’s also useful more broadly. This update brings:

• an extensive overhaul to the Java API
• out-of-the-box support for C# and Go
• an optional verifier to make FlatBuffers practical in untrusted scenarios
• .proto parsing for easier migration from Protocol Buffers
• optional manual assignment of field IDs
• dictionary functionality through binary search on a key field
• bug fixes and other improvements thanks to 200+ commits from 28 contributors -- thank you!

Download the latest release from our github page and join our discussion list for more details.

*Fun Propulsion Labs is a team within Google thats dedicated to advancing gaming on Android and other platforms.

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The importance of teachers and stories in the life of a reader

Posted by LeVar Burton

(Cross-posted on the Google for Education Blog.)

Editors note: Through his work with Reading Rainbow, LeVar Burton continues to inspire generations of students to love reading. Getting an early start on celebrating Teacher Appreciation Week, we asked LeVar about educators that inspired him. He shares some stories from his childhood in today’s guest post, and he’ll share more during his keynote, “The power of storytelling to inspire students,” during our Education on Air conference. Register today and tune in for LeVar’s talk on May 8th at 11:15am ET.

Teachers seem to run in my family. My elder sister, my son and two nieces are all educators, and my mother, Erma Gene Christian, was a high school English teacher before becoming my first teacher. I know firsthand how hard these unsung heroes work, and especially how important a teacher can be in a child’s life.

One of the most indelible memories from my childhood happened one day when I was learning to read. My favorite aunt Hope, my mother’s youngest sister, was visiting from Kansas City. We were sitting together in a chair in the living room and I was reading aloud while my mother listened from the kitchen where she was preparing a family meal. Things were going fine until I got stuck on a word. I stopped cold in the middle of a sentence. The word was one I thought I knew, but I didn’t yet have the inner confidence to know that I could read it. I will never forget the infinite patience that Aunt Hope displayed and the gentle nudges of support she gave me. “Go on,” she’d whisper, “You know this word. I know you can sound it out.”

I still remember the word —it was “pretty” — and when my aunt finally said the word to me it was a revelation. She gave me the confidence I needed to trust myself; to trust that I did know these words. I was a reader. This is what teachers do for their students every day.

It’s from my mother, Erma Gene, that I learned the allure of storytelling. Throughout my childhood, mom always had several books going simultaneously, switching from one to the other seamlessly, deriving pleasure from each turn of the page, no matter what the genre. I learned from my mom—and eventually from my own experiences reading, and from exposing children to the joy of books through Reading Rainbow—that storytelling is an elemental part of the human experience, regardless of whether the medium is a print book or a digital book. We know that kids are reading more than 200,000 books a week on the Reading Rainbow App. They are using their devices not just for games or movies, but to read.

Heres me with the first educator who inspired me, my mother.

Children are drawn to stories, and with good storytelling we can teach kids anything. I have seen the light go on in a child’s eyes when he or she falls in love with a story. I’ve seen that light get brighter when they realize that they can read the stories for themselves. This light is the beginning of a lifelong love of reading, and from there a lifelong love of learning. For me, literacy means freedom, and literacy begins with storytelling. You get a child’s attention when you give them a good story. If we fail to take advantage of this, we are letting the opportunity of a lifetime—of our lifetime and theirs—pass us by.

Hear more about the power of storytelling from LeVar Burton during his Education on Air keynote on May 8 at 11:15am ET or check out his Reading Rainbow website.

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SDK setup error a folder failed to be renamed or moved

During updating your Android SDK components from eclipse (running in windows) you may receive the following error message:
a folder failed to be renamed or moved...

the message suggests that you turn of your anti-virus.
I did so but still recieved the error.
I terminated the adb.exe from the processes but still not solved.

the problem is that the update batch is rin from android.bat file inside tools directory. update requires that this folder is renamed temporarily but since Windows 7 locks it the process halts with this error.
so a workaround for this is to copy the tools folder, paste it in te sdk directory, name it tools_temp for example and run android.bat from this directory.

the update shall go smooth, after finishing delete this temp folder and launch eclipse and it will work fine.

note:
after restarting eclipse you may recieve this error
This Android SDK requires Android Developer Toolkit version 10.xxxxxxxxxx the current version is 9.xxxxxxxxxxxxxx.

this is because the ADT plugin needs to be update after updating software components, go to http://developer.android.com/sdk/eclipse-adt.html and follow the instructions and everything will work after this.

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Connecting to a web service over a Secure Sockets Layer SSL protocol

Android default HttpClinet does not support SSL connections, so if you have a secured web service, you need to connect to it via javax.net.ssl.HttpsURLConnection.
if you want to call a SSL SOAP web service:

String CallWebService(String url,
 String soapAction,
 String envelope) throws IOException {
 URL address=new URL(url);
 URLConnection connection=address.openConnection();
 HttpsURLConnection post=(HttpsURLConnection)connection;
 post.setDoInput(true);
 post.setDoOutput(true);
 post.setRequestMethod("POST");
 post.setRequestProperty("SOAPAction", soapAction);
 post.setRequestProperty( "Content-type", "text/xml; charset=utf-8" );
 post.setRequestProperty( "Content-Length", String.valueOf(envelope.length()));
 post.setReadTimeout(4000);
 
 OutputStream outStream=post.getOutputStream();
 Writer out=new OutputStreamWriter(outStream);
 out.write(envelope);
 out.flush();
 out.close();
 
 
 InputStream inStream = post.getInputStream();
 BufferedInputStream in = new BufferedInputStream(inStream,4);
 StringBuffer buffer=new StringBuffer();
 // read 4 bytes a time
 byte[] buffArray=new byte[4];
 int c=0;
 while((c=in.read(buffArray))!=-1){
 for(int i=0;i<c;i++)
 buffer.append((char)buffArray[i]);
 }

 return buffer.toString();
 }

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A new kind of Classroom for 10 million students and teachers

Posted by Cinthya Mohr, User Experience Lead, Google for Education

(Cross-posted on the Google for Education Blog.)

In a junior high class in Queens, New York, Ross Berman is teaching fractions. He wants to know whether his students are getting the key concept, so he posts a question in Google Classroom and instantly reviews their answers. It’s his favorite way to check for understanding before anyone has the chance to fall behind.

Across the country, in Bakersfield, California, Terri Parker Rodman is waiting at the dentist’s office. She wonders how her class is doing with their sub. With a few swipes on her phone, she finds out which students have finished their in-class assignment and sends a gentle reminder to those who haven’t.

Google Classroom launched last August, and now more than 10 million educators and students across the globe actively use it to teach and learn together, save time, and stay organized. We worked with teachers and students to create Classroom because they told us they needed a mission control – a central place for creating and tracking assignments, sharing ideas and resources, turning in completed work and exchanging feedback. Classroom is part of Google’s lineup of tools for education, which also includes the Google Apps for Education suite – now used by more than 50 million students, teachers and administrators around the world – and Chromebooks, the best-selling device in U.S. K-12 schools.

Here are a few of the stories we’ve heard from teachers and students who are using Classroom.

Learning better together 

We built Classroom to help educators spend less time on paperwork and administrative tasks. But it’s also proven to be highly effective at bringing students and teachers closer together. In London, fifth grader Kamal Nsudoh-Parish stays connected with his Spanish teacher while he does his homework. “If I don’t understand something, I can ask him and he’d be able to answer rather than having to wait until my next Spanish lesson,” Kamal says.

Terri, who teaches sixth grade at Old River Elementary School, also observes that Classroom can strengthen ties and improve communication. “When a student doesnt turn something in, I can see how close they are,” she says. “In the past, I couldnt tell why they didnt finish their work. I was grading them on bringing back a piece of paper instead of what their ability was.”

Resource room teacher Diane Basanese of Black River Middle School in Chester, New Jersey, says that Classroom lets her see her students’ minds at work. “I’m in the moment with them,” she explains. “We have dialogue, like, ‘Oh, are you saying I should use a transition?’ We’re talking to each other. It’s a better way.”

Removing the mundane 

By helping them cut down on busywork, Classroom empowers teachers to do even more with every school day. “I no longer waste time figuring out paper jams at the school photocopier,” says Tom Mullaney, who teaches in Efland, North Carolina. “Absent students no longer email or ask, ‘What did we do yesterday?’ These time savers may not sound like much, but they free me to spend time on things that I consider transcendent in my teaching practice.”

In Mexico City, teachers at Tec de Monterrey high school and university switched to Classroom from an online learning management system that often added complexity to their workflow instead of simplifying it. Professor Vicente Cubells says he’s found the new question feature in Classroom particularly useful for short quizzes, because he can quickly assess learning and have an automatic record of their responses and grades. “The Classroom mobile apps have also become essential for our faculty and students, we use them to stay connected even when we’re not in front of a laptop,” Cubells said.

Giving teachers superpowers 

Teachers are some of the most innovative thinkers in the world, so it’s no surprise that they’ve used Classroom in ways we never even imagined.

Elementary school teacher Christopher Conant of Boise, Idaho, says his students are usually eager to leave school behind during summer break. But after using Classroom last year, they wanted to keep their class open as a way to stay in touch. “Classroom is a tool that keeps kids connected and learning as a community, well beyond the school day, school year and school walls,” said Christopher, who continued to post videos and questions for his students all summer long.

These endless possibilities are the reason why Diane Basanese, a 30-year teaching veteran, says that Classroom is the tool she’s been looking for throughout her career. “It has made me hungrier,” she explains. “I look at how I can make every lesson a hit-it-out-of-the-ballpark lesson.”

Growing our Classroom 

Ever since we began working with teachers and students, its been rewarding and encouraging to hear their stories, collaborate to find answers to their problems, and watch those solutions come to life at schools and universities around the world. Lucky for us, we’re just getting started.

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Let’s build a new work Inbox together

Posted by Alex Gawley, Director of Product Management, Gmail and Inbox by Gmail

Have you ever felt like your inbox was someone else’s to-do list? Requests, project updates and action items stream in all day. You move between your computer and the phone in your pocket to try to manage, and instead of focusing on the most important things, you find yourself focusing on the most recent things. No matter the device, email should feel like a time saver, but instead it feels like a chore.

This is why we created Inbox by Gmail, to help you focus on the things that matter to you. Since we launched five months ago, one of the biggest pieces of feedback we’ve received is that Google Apps customers want access to Inbox at work. That’s why were excited to kick off the next phase of our journey: collaborating with you to bring Inbox to work.

Even before the first invitations went out to use Inbox for your own email, Googlers have been using it to get more done at work. Whether it’s snoozing the expense report notification until after the big presentation, or adding a reminder to schedule lunch with a favorite client, Inbox helps put email on your terms. And since Inbox was built on the same infrastructure as Gmail, it meets the same high security standards you expect from email.

Of course, every company and every person is different, so we want to get more input on how Inbox will work at your company. Starting next month, we’ll begin enabling Inbox for a small group of Google Apps customers to learn about their needs, challenges and use cases.

• Do you want to use Inbox as your primary email at work?
• Are employees at your company heavy mobile users?
• Most importantly, do you want to partner with Google on user studies to help build the new work Inbox?

If you answered “yes, yes and yes!” then email inboxforwork@google.com from your Google Apps for Work administrator account to apply for an invitation to the early adopter program. To start, we plan to work very closely with the early adopter companies, so not everyone that applies will be accepted right away, but the program will continue to expand over the coming months.

Inbox wasn’t created to reinvent email, Inbox was created to help you reinvent the way you get things done. This means we need to understand more about how things get done (or don’t) today. And with your feedback, who knows, we could reinvent the way people work.

Note: Only the Google Apps administrator can apply for entry to the Inbox for work early adopter program.

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Introducing gRPC a new open source HTTP 2 RPC Framework

Today, we are open sourcing gRPC, a brand new framework for handling remote procedure calls. It’s BSD licensed, based on the recently finalized HTTP/2 standard, and enables easy creation of highly performant, scalable APIs and microservices in many popular programming languages and platforms. Internally at Google, we are starting to use gRPC to expose most of our public services through gRPC endpoints as part of our long term commitment to HTTP/2.

Over the years, Google has developed underlying systems and technologies to support the largest ecosystem of micro-services in the world; our servers make tens of billions of calls per second within our global datacenters. At this scale, nanoseconds matter. Efficiency, scalability and reliability are at the core of building Google’s APIs.

gRPC is based on many years of experience in building distributed systems. With the new framework, we want to bring to the developer community a modern, bandwidth and CPU efficient, low latency way to create massively distributed systems that span data centers, as well as power mobile apps, real-time communications, IoT devices and APIs.

Building on HTTP/2 standards brings many capabilities such as bidirectional streaming, flow control, header compression, multiplexing requests over a single TCP connection and more. These features save battery life and data usage on mobile while speeding up services and web applications running in the cloud.

Developers can write more responsive real-time applications, which scale more easily and make the web more efficient. Read more about the features and benefits in the FAQ.

Alongside gRPC, we are releasing a new version of Protocol Buffers, a high performance, open source binary serialization protocol that allows easy definition of services and automatic generation of client libraries. Proto 3 adds new features, is easier to use compared to previous versions, adds support for more languages and provides canonical mapping of Proto to JSON.

The project has support for C, C++, Java, Go, Node.js, Python, and Ruby. Libraries for Objective-C, PHP and C# are in development. To start contributing, please fork the Github repositories and start submitting pull requests. Also, be sure to check out the documentation, join us on the mailing list, visit the IRC #grpc channel on Freenode and tag StackOverflow questions with the “grpc” tag.

Google has been working closely with Square and other organizations on the gRPC project. We’re all excited for the potential of this technology to improve the web and look forward to further developing the project in the open with the help, direction and contributions of the community.

Post by Mugur Marculescu, Product Manager

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IT makes a difference in improving patient care at Wyoming Medical Center

Posted by Rob Pettigrew, Information Technology Director, Wyoming Medical Center

Editors note: Today’s guest author is Rob Pettigrew, Information Technology Director at Wyoming Medical Center — the first hospital in the United States to go Google. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.


As the IT team at a medical facility, we’re here to help caregivers keep people healthy. Google Apps for Work provides superb reliability and security so we can empower our 1,219 staff members and 233 partner physicians to provide exceptional care. The IT team can now focus on maintaining and improving nearly 200 clinical applications that support services such as cardiology and neurological specialties, instead of worrying about email maintenance.

This is especially important in a rural setting like ours. The state has only about 600,000 people spread over 100 square miles, and we serve as a hub of medical expertise. Even with only 217 beds, we can offer the same services as many larger hospitals by working efficiently. In 2014, we saw 9,000 patients, conducted 5,000 surgeries and welcomed 1,200 new babies into the world.

We previously used Novell GroupWise for calendaring and email, but it was expensive, difficult to support and suffered frequent outages. My crew often spent many late hours trying to get GroupWise working after a server outage. We considered other alternatives. Microsoft SharePoint was too expensive, as were dedicated applications for telemedicine and video conferencing. Microsoft’s cloud offering was a possible contender for email, but it was much more expensive and a less mature product than we would have liked. We made up our minds that Google was the way to go. We trusted their exceptional security and privacy procedures and signed on.

Switching to Google Apps has resulted in six figure savings year after year, including decommissioning multiple physical servers. The flexibility of Google Apps helps us collaborate in ways we never could before. Google Hangouts has helped us advance the quality and reach of care. Now clinicians in remote areas can get advice from specialists, such as our neurosurgeons and cardiologists, helping us spread the wealth of expertise across the state, We also use Google Hangouts to streamline the recruiting and hiring process. Candidates submit resumes by Gmail, and HR staff interviews potential hires via Hangouts.

Nurses also use Google Apps to communicate instantly. With Google Drive and Google Docs they discuss and share data on topics such as medication delivery, credentials, blood-borne pathogens, education and so on. With Google Groups, the medical center uses SMS email addresses to communicate directly to users’ cell phones for staffing requests, trauma calls and other communications that require instant responses.

Much has changed since I joined Wyoming Medical Center in 2006. When I started in 2006, reporting and spotting trends was difficult because data was trapped in rigid enterprise systems such as our electronic medical records (EMR) and human resources (HR) software. Today, we can surface and report on large blocks of data from our electronic medical records and HR databases by using Google Sheets. This agility is a big win for strategic activities like spotting population health trends. It’s clear that Google Apps has been among the most positive shifts in helping our IT team make greater contributions that further the health and well-being of people across Wyoming.

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