Chrome Live How Chrome is shifting the device landscape

Posted by Rajen Sheth, Director of Product Management, Chrome for Work

Today at Chrome Live, we showed how Chrome continues to make the way we work faster, simpler and more secure, while businesses like Netflix, Pinterest and Chico’s shared how Chrome for Work is bringing innovation to their workplaces.

We also announced new Chrome products and features that make it simpler to bring Chrome to work, including:

• Chromebook integration with Box for more ways to bring your files to the cloud: Now, you can seamlessly access your Box documents from a Chromebook, just as you would access your local documents. This means that with your Chromebook, you’ll have access to even more applications, no matter where you are.

• Bringing face-to-face meetings to larger rooms: Last year, we launched Chromebox for meetings so you can have face-to-face conversations with colleagues in remote offices and still feel like you’re in the same room. Today, we announced a new version of Chromebox for meetings that powers meeting rooms fitting up to twenty people. The hardware in the bundle includes a Chromebox powered by Dell, Asus, and HP, a pan tilt zoom camera, and more; just bring your own display. From huddle rooms to large conference rooms, you can now affordably bring video meetings to more office spaces.

• Improvements to Chrome management for Chrome-dedicated devices: A few weeks ago, we announced over a dozen Chrome partners in the digital signage space. We’ve also improved ongoing reporting to monitor the health of your kiosks and signage at all times. You’ll get alerts from Chrome management if a screen goes down and can remotely reboot the device to get it back online without dispatching a technician. You can also get live updates about system usage and capture screen grabs to see exactly what viewers see.

• Bringing Chrome management pricing flexibility to more places: We’re adding pricing flexibility to Chromebook management at a subscription fee of $50/year and announcing availability in seven new countries: Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, India, UK and France.

If you weren’t able to attend the live session, you can still watch the event on demand. Feel free to share your thoughts, impressions and questions using #chromelive15 on social media.

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NFC vs Bluetooth and why Bluetooth is better

NFC is by no means a new 2013 invention, despite what the recent influx in NFC enabled phones may lead you to believe.

History of NFC

In 1983, Radio Frequency Identification was patented. This the earliest form of NFC, and features in contactless credit cards. A drawback of RFID was that it did not support two-way communication, which makes it less secure than NFC. In 2003, NFC was approved as an ISO/IEC standard; in 2004 Nokia set up the NFC Forum (which can be found <here>). Designed to promote the uses of NFC and ensure that new devices were compliant, the website now has over 170 corporate members including mobile manufacturers, banks and mobile network providers.

Unveiled in 2007 at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the Nokia 6131 NFC was the worlds first fully integrated NFC mobile device. This led the way for more NFC enabled phones, with 100 million shipped in 2012. In 2013, this rose by 156% to a total of 400 million devices globally. It is estimated that by 2015, 53% of phones will be NFC-enabled.

History of Bluetooth

Bluetooth is an older technology than NFC as the name was adopted in 1998 - a full 5 years before NFC was approved. The Bluetooth SIG (Special Interest Group) was established in the same year to promote Bluetooth and gain corporate partners. The SIG was party to 400 members by the end of 1998, and by 2013 it has reached over 19,000 members, including high profile companies such as LG and Apple. The first mobile device to have Bluetooth was the Ericsson T36 in 2000, which allowed it to pair with the first headset which was also released that year. Now in 2013, over 20 million Bluetooth enabled devices are shipped per week, with the total number exceeding 2.5 billion. This means that Bluetooth is still much more widely used than NFC, although this gap is set to narrow substantially throughout the next 5 years. Bluetooth has gone through a number of advancements over the years and is currently at version 4.0, which is supported in Android 4.3. This is not new however, and has been around since the iPhone 4S. A detailed article on the inclusions of Bluetooth 4.0 will follow.

Security

In terms of security, both NFC and Bluetooth are fairly secure. Bluetooth has a range of 9.75 meters (or 32 feet), while NFC has a maximum range of 4cm. This means that NFC has the edge, due to the fact that a hacker would need to be right next to you for an attack to work, while Bluetooth has a longer working range. 

NFC doesnt come with built-in security measures, however the limited range offers great protection. NFC is also extremely sensitive to direction, and even a slight directional movement on the device will disrupt the signal. NFC is only active when it needs to be, meaning that even if you leave it on in your pocket, the NFC chip isnt actually functioning. This further increases security.

Unfortunately, NFC can be exploited in other ways. Take a smart tag in a magazine, programmed to open the webpage on your phone. A hacker can manipulate this and change the code to instead make it send premium text messages, costing you hundreds in a matter of minutes. The worst part of this is that you wouldnt even know until your monthly bill arrived. To avoid scams such as these, try to avoid using tags which arent behind a barrier, as these are less easily accessible and harder to tamper with.

Another concern with NFC is privacy. When you pay for a product in-store, you are identified and your purchase information is stored. The shop then uses this information to send you advertisements based on products you may find desirable. The privacy concern is that shops can then sell this information to third parties, who may in return send unsolicited spam. 

Bluetooth implements an authentication mechanism based on the SAFER+ block cipher. This means that when two devices attempt to connect, they will both need to enter the same numeric PIN code for the transfer or connection to take place. This ensures that a malicious connection cannot take place without the victims knowledge and acceptance. Two devices can be paired which means that they will no longer require entry of a code. This is useful for allowing a trusted device to connect easily, but can open security risks if a paired device is compromised.

Bluejacking is the process of sending a file to an unsuspecting victim, which is usually harmless (like rick rolling) but can occasionally be malicious such as the ability to take control of a device and call premium rate phonelines. A number of Bluetooth vulnerabilities have been found in its history, however most have since been patched. A major bug in 2007 meant that a hacker could open a remote root shell on any Mac running OS X 10.4. This shell could then modify the contents of the hard drive, and reveal sensitive documents. 

Ease of Use

NFC allows a fast and easy connection between two enabled devices. The lack of authentication makes a file transfer as simple as quick bump. While this opens a security hole, it means that NFC is very easy to use, and requires much less knowledge than Bluetooth. Once turned on, NFC will be automatically enabled when needed, and doesnt require any further setup. One advantage of this is that there is very minimal battery drain with NFC left on. Bluetooth can drain an excessive chunk of power even when powered off. Bluetooth requires the entry of a PIN code first, and has many settings to configure such as device name and pairings. This ultimately makes Bluetooth file transfer less intuitive than the simple bump needed with NFC, however it ensures that transfers are secure.

(Note: most file transfers initiated using NFC take place over Bluetooth - NFC has no capability to transfer data bigger than a few short instructions or a small amount such as a contact card).

Abilities

NFC transfers files at a maximum data transfer rate of 424 kbit/s, which is much slower than the theoretical 24 Mbit/s rate of Bluetooth 4.0. NFC is only suitable for small files, and Bluetooth shouldnt really be used for files over ~ 150mb. For large files, Wi-Fi Direct is recommended, which is a different matter entirely.

Bluetooth allows a connection to headsets and speakers: a feature which NFC doesnt support. This means that for people wishing to stream their music through their car speakers or headphones, Bluetooth is the only option. NFC simply lacks the range required and does not support audio streaming. Bluetooth is also used with smart watches, which display texts and other information directly on your wrist.

NFC can be used with tags. When the phone touches the tag it can activate a number of commands, which include opening an application on the phone, loading a webpage or even changing settings such as toggling Wi-Fi. This is useful as it means that 4G can be activated as you leave the house, and Wi-Fi can be turned back on when you enter, which can potentially save a lot of battery. In regards to battery life, NFC typically draws around 50mA of current when powered on. This is reduced by a couple of features baked into the Android OS: 

NFC polling is limited to 10Hz, meaning the transceiver will only looks for tags at certain intervals and not consistently, which helps battery life greatly. This polling is completely disabled when the screen is turned off, which means that when your device is in standby, so is NFC. When the screen is merely locked, polling ceases but card emulation doesnt, which allows apps such as Google wallet to function.

NFC will generally consume minimal amounts of battery, with the general consensus being around 0.5% a day with no use, which wouldnt be missed. Bluetooth drain is slightly more, perhaps around 4% per day, however this is also barely noticeable in real world use. 

Final words

In conclusion, I still feel that NFC has a long way to go before it will match Bluetooth, due to limited range and low file transfer speeds. It is easier to use than Bluetooth, however has limited use, only being useful for small file transfers. Bluetooth is great for streaming music to an external speaker, and for transferring files from a PC to Phone. Not many PCs have NFC, but all can be fitted with a Bluetooth dongle, and all Apple laptops have Bluetooth 4.0 inbuilt.

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

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This is Material Design Lite

Posted by Addy Osmani, Staff Developer Platform Engineer

Back in 2014, Google published the material design specification with a goal to provide guidelines for good design and beautiful UI across all device form factors. Today we are releasing our first effort to bring this to websites using vanilla CSS, HTML and JavaScript. We’re calling it Material Design Lite (MDL).

MDL makes it easy to add a material design look and feel to your websites. The “Lite” part of MDL comes from several key design goals: MDL has few dependencies, making it easy to install and use. It is framework-agnostic, meaning MDL can be used with any of the rapidly changing landscape of front-end tool chains. MDL has a low overhead in terms of code size (~27KB gzipped), and a narrow focus—enabling material design styling for websites.

Get started now and give it a spin or try one of our examples on CodePen.

MDL is a complimentary implementation to the Paper elements built with Polymer. The Paper elements are fully encapsulated components that can be used individually or composed together to create a material design-style site, and support more advanced user interaction. That said, MDL can be used alongside the Polymer element counterparts.

Out-of-the-box Templates

MDL optimises for websites heavy on content such as marketing pages, text articles and blogs. Weve built responsive templates to show the broadness of sites that can be created using MDL that can be downloaded from our Templates page. We hope these inspire you to build great looking sites.

Blogs:

Text-heavy content sites:

Dashboards:

Standalone articles:

and more.

Technical details and browser support

MDL includes a rich set of components, including material design buttons, text-fields, tooltips, spinners and many more. It also include a responsive grid and breakpoints that adhere to the new material design adaptive UI guidelines.

The MDL sources are written in Sass using BEM. While we hope youll use our theme customizer or pre-built CSS, you can also download the MDL sources from GitHub and build your own version. The easiest way to use MDL is by referencing our CDN, but you can also download the CSS or import MDL via npm or Bower.

The complete MDL experience works in all modern evergreen browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Edge) and Safari, but gracefully degrades to CSS-only in browsers like IE9 that don’t pass our Cutting-the-mustard test. Our browser compatibility matrix has the most up to date information on the browsers MDL officially supports.

More questions?

Weve been working with the designers evolving material design to build in additional thinking for the web. This includes working on solutions for responsive templates, high-performance typography and missing components like badges. MDL is spec compliant for today and provides guidance on aspects of the spec that are still being evolved. As with the material design spec itself, your feedback and questions will help us evolve MDL, and in turn, how material design works on the web.

We’re sure you have plenty of questions and we have tried to cover some of them in our FAQ. Feel free to hit us up on GitHub or Stack Overflow if you have more. :)

Wrapping up

MDL is built on the core technologies of the web you already know and use every day—CSS, HTML and JS. By adopting MDL into your projects, you gain access to an authoritative and highly curated implementation of material design for the web. We can’t wait to see the beautiful, modern, responsive websites you’re going to build with Material Design Lite.

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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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How to check if the phone is connected to the Internet

to check whether your phone is connected to the Internet, use the following code:

ConnectivityManager con=(ConnectivityManager)getSystemService(Activity.CONNECTIVITY_SERVICE);
 boolean wifi=con.getNetworkInfo(ConnectivityManager.TYPE_WIFI).isConnectedOrConnecting();
 boolean internet=con.getNetworkInfo(ConnectivityManager.TYPE_MOBILE).isConnectedOrConnecting();

these lines check for internet connection whether it is through WiFi or Mobile Internet.

you need to add the following permission to the AndroidManifest.xml file

<uses-permission android_name="android.permission.ACCESS_NETWORK_STATE" />

Another method is what our freind Kevin mentioned in the comments, is to check if a certain website is reachable or not like this:

public static boolean isOnline() {
try {
InetAddress.getByName("google.ca").isReachable(3);
return true;
} catch (UnknownHostException e){
return false;
} catch (IOException e){
return false;
}
}

we check if a site is reachable within a certain timeout or not.

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2015 is The Year of Your Launch

Posted by Amir Shevat, Google Developers Launchpad Program Manager

With new events, improved courses and an expanded mentorship network - Startup Launch is now Google Developers Launchpad. We’re changing our program name to emphasize how you can use our resources as a launch pad to scale and monetize your app business. Read on to learn about our upcoming events and how you can apply to participate.

Events: Launchpad Week goes global

Launchpad Week, Launchpad’s weeklong in-person bootcamp for early-stage apps, continues to expand, with new 2015 programs planned in Munich, Mexico City, Helsinki, Bogota, and Sydney, to name a few. We’ll also regularly host these events in Tel Aviv, London, Berlin, and Paris.

We kicked off Launchpad Week in Bengaluru, India and Bordeaux, France last month. 32 startups and 80 experts from these communities gathered at Idiom Design Center and Le Node for a week of product, UX, and technology sprints designed to help transform ideas into validated, scalable businesses.

Featured startups from Bengaluru included iReff, an app that helps pre-paid mobile users find the best recharge plan for their specific needs. In Bordeaux, Google Developer Expert David Gageot volunteered as a tech mentor, helping startups “ship early, ship often” through testing and continuous integration.

Events: Google Developers Summits

For later-stage startups, we’re providing some of the best tech experts to help optimize apps for Material Design, Android TV, and Google Cast at two-day Google Developer Summits. At an event in Buenos Aires, Argentina, last week, we had participants such as game developer Etermax, the team behind Trivia Crack. Similar events happened in Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, and Bengaluru this month, and we’re looking forward to inviting more startups to this program in London, Tokyo, Tel Aviv, and New York in 2015.

Products: Your app, powered by Google

In 2014, we helped over 5,000 developers in 170 countries get their ideas off the ground by providing the infrastructure back-end that allows developers to build incredible products. For example, our program delivered software architecture reviews and Google Cloud Platform credits to help entrepreneurs in the program build businesses that scale with them. Check out how Fansino is using Google Cloud Platform to let artists interact with their fans.

We’ve also expanded our product offer for early-stage startups to include AdWords promotional offers for new accounts. Whatever your monetization plan, we’re making it easy to get started with tools like the new In-app Billing API and instruction from the AdMob team.

Courses: Upskilling you and your app

Starting this month, we’ll offer a virtual curriculum of how Google products can help your startup. We’re kicking things off with new Launchpad Online videos covering Google Analytics - are you observing how your users use your app? How do different promotional channels perform?

The series continues in April 2015 with AdMob products, and will expand with instruction in implementing material design and conducting user research later in the year.

If you can’t wait, we’ve also built courses together with Udacity to take your technical skills to the next level on topics, including Android, Java, Web Fundamentals, and UX.

Apply to get involved

Apply to Google Developers Launchpad program to take advantage of these offers - g.co/launchpad. Here’s to a great launch!

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2010 is Here!!

Here We Go!

2010 is here, Everyone! Thank-you for visiting with me, here at Widgets and Gadgets, and tweeting with me at Twitter.com/Chaella in 2009. Lets have an extraordinarily good year together, this year! Here are three animated New Year e-cards for you to enjoy. Take care!

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AT T is selling HTC 8X VZW takes pre orders for it and Lumia 822

Windows Phone 8s race to the top in the US has officially started - the HTC Windows Phone 8X is available today from AT&T and is on pre-order from Verizon, who are also taking pre-orders for the Nokia Lumia 822.

Verizon has exclusivity on some HTC 8X features - ita model supports wireless charging like its key opponent, the Nokia Lumia 920 for AT&T. The charging mat is sold separately. Verizons Windows Phone 8X also comes in exclusive colors - Black and Red.

The HTC Windows Phone 8X (16GB) from Verizon will set you back $200 if you sign a 2-year contract and $550 if you dont. Verizons web site notes that the HTC 8X will ship by November 13.

AT&T has the HTC 8X on sale already - $200 with 2-year contract, $550 without - and the carrier counters Verizons exclusive features with an exclusive 8GB version of the phone, which is $100 on contract and $450 off contract (note that the 8X doesn’t have a microSD card slot). AT&T has exclusive colors too - California Blue and Limelight.

Back to Verizon, the carrier will ship the Nokia Lumia 822 by November 13 and has priced it $200 with contract (2-years) and $450 SIM-free.

The GSM version of the phone - the Lumia 820 - is already on sale by AT&T, who undercut Verizons prices by $50 (both on and off contract). It has exclusivity on the Nokia flagship too, the Lumia 920, which also goes on sale today.

Source 1 • Source 2 | Via

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PiPad is a Do it yourself RaspBerry PI Linux tablet which you can basically make with plywood

Meet Michael Castor – a DIY enthusiast, who thinks that tablets are unnecessarily overpriced, dont provide a lot of customization options to the user, and actually "look about the same and accomplish roughly the same thing". So, he decided to create something unusual and different – his own homemade tablet.

Called the PiPad, Michael Castors homebrewed creation is one of a kind tablet prototype. The device is powered by the minimalistic Raspberry Pi, a $35, credit-card-sized, fully-functioning computer that is very popular among DIY fanatics. However, the Raspberry Pi SoC is not very powerful (it comes with a 700MHz ARM11 CPU and 512MB of RAM on board), so the PiPad doesnt offer stellar performance and cant rival the iPad or the Galaxy Note 10.1, for example. But, according to Castor, the device does everything he needs it to do. The PiPad runs Raspbmc – a custom Linux distribution for the Raspberry Pi. Although minimalistic, Raspbmc is quite multimedia-oriented and supports both 1080p video playback and HTML5. Thanks to Raspbmc, the PiPad can also access the Raspberry Pi Store, which has a small number of open-source apps and games.

According to Castor, it was very difficult to find a display for the PiPad, because it had to run at 5V, just like the Raspberry Pi SoC. Eventually, the enthusiast laid his hands on a 10-inch capacitive touchscreen, which met the important requirement. Due to the excessive thickness of the PiPad, Castor has managed to fit a large 10,000mAh external battery pack in his tablet. This battery provides roughly 6 hours of life and can be charged via a cell phone charger. The insides of the tablet also house a bunch of Raspberry Pi heat sinks, a Wi-Fi adapter, a Bluetooth dongle, several USB ports, a microSD card slot, a headphone amplifier and an audio jack.

But the most interesting thing about the PiPad is its enclosure. Michael Castor says that he wanted to use the homemade tablet during flights without attracting unnecessary attention from the TSA, so the PiPad had to look like it came out of a factory The sides of the PiPad are made of polished baltic birch plywood, while the back is actually a large sheet of scrap carbon fiber. Thanks to two hinges on one of the sides, the tablet can be opened just like a chess box, exposing the inner layout and providing easy access to the tablets hardware. The PiPad is significantly bulkier than most tablets – the device is 10.75 inches long, 7.5 inches wide, and 1 inch thick.

"I like simplistic, functional design. I don’t like extra crap that doesn’t do anything and I enjoy fun, hidden features. I also like for my projects to look as “sexy” as possible. I thought about hollowing out a book and putting it in there (like Penny’s book computer from Inspector Gadget) but decided to go with a stand-alone tablet form-factor." - said the PiPads creator.

Castor says that the whole project cost him about $350. He claims that he "could have bought an iPad or an Android tablet for that (or less) but what’s the fun in that?”. Of course, the PiPad is not for sale, but Michael Castor has provided a full step-by-step guide for people who want to create a similar gadget on their own. The guide can be found here.

Source-PhoneArena

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