Google News

By Mike Winton, Director of Developer Relations

Last September we announced the Google+ API and introduced our Google Developers site as our planned new home for developer information. Since then, we’ve made steady progress in building developers.google.com - by migrating existing content from code.google.com, and by adding new pages and features to the new site. Our goal with the Google Developers site is to bring together all developer resources, programs, events, tools, and community into one place.

code.google.com wasn’t built in a day (it’s been around for almost 7 years), and it will take some time to make the new Google Developers site at developers.google.com your single destination for all the resources we offer. But we’re working toward that goal every day. Soon, all our information will be on this new Google Developers site, and Google Code will return to its roots as an open source project hosting service.


As part of this project, today we’re introducing a new identity, complete with a new look, to unify all of our developer offerings. Our new logo says Google Developers, and that's intentional: it reflects our focus on you, not just the tools we provide.



Another part of this update is the new blog you’re reading right now: Google Developers Blog. We’re going to use this blog to continue to provide you with useful news and updates about new developer tools and technologies, ways to speed up your apps and sites, upcoming events, and of course, fun stuff on Fridays. In addition to the blog, we’ll continue to share and converse on our +Google Developers page.

Thanks for all your support over the years, and welcome to the new Google Developers community!


Mike Winton founded and leads Google's global Developer Relations organization. He also enjoys spending time with his family and DJing electronic music.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

Posted by Vadim Gerasimov, Software Engineer

(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog, the Google Docs Blog, and the Google Mobile Blog.)

As I was sitting on the ferry commuting to Google’s Sydney office this morning, two thoughts occurred to me. First, Australia is beautiful. If you’ve never been here, you really should visit. And second, it’s amazing how productive I can be with just my Android phone and an Internet connection. I was responding to email, reading news articles, and editing documents—just like I do at the office. Only the view was better!

We want to give everyone the chance to be productive no matter where they are, so today we’re releasing a new update to the Google Docs app for Android. We've brought the collaborative experience from Google Docs on the desktop to your Android device. You'll see updates in real time as others type on their computers, tablets and phones, and you can just tap the document to join in.

We also updated the interface to make it easier to work with your documents on the go. For example, you can pinch to zoom and focus on a specific paragraph or see the whole document at a glance. We also added rich text formatting so you can do things like create a quick bullet list, add color to your documents, or just bold something important. Watch the new Google Docs app in action:




If you want to hear about the latest Docs news or send us feedback on the new app, visit Google Docs on Google+.

Gotta run—I’ve got another ferry to catch!

We’ve added My Client Center support, so you can now run Automated Rules across multiple client accounts, to help you manage many accounts more quickly, easily and efficiently. To get started, simply click the “Automate” drop-down menu on the Performance or Budget tab:

This AdWords Help Center article walks you through how to set up Automated Rules in My Client Center. As you may notice, the steps are mostly the same as for individual accounts, except that we’ve added sections for account and currency selection:


As always, remember to click the Preview results button to verify that you've set the rule up correctly. Previewing displays the time you’ve chosen for the rule to run in groups according to your clients’ timezones, and allows you to get a glimpse of the changes that the rule will make to the first account you’ve selected.


To see popular types of rules created by advertisers, please see this AdWords Help Center article. To learn more about Automated Rules, please visit Ad Innovations.

Posted by Andrew Truong, Product Marketing Manager

As I was sitting on the ferry commuting to Google’s Sydney office this morning, two thoughts occurred to me. First, Australia is beautiful. If you’ve never been here, you really should visit. And second, it’s amazing how productive I can be with just my Android phone and an Internet connection. I was responding to email, reading news articles and editing documents—just like I do at the office. Only the view was better!

We want to give everyone the chance to be productive no matter where they are, so today we’re releasing a new update to the Google Docs app for Android. We've brought the collaborative experience from Google Docs on the desktop to your Android device. You'll see updates in real time as others type on their computers, tablets and phones, and you can just tap the document to join in.

We also updated the interface to make it easier to work with your documents on the go. For example, you can pinch to zoom and focus on a specific paragraph or see the whole document at a glance. We also added rich text formatting so you can do things like create a quick bullet list, add color to your documents, or just bold something important. Watch the new Google Docs app in action:



If you want to hear about the latest Docs news or send us feedback on the new app, visit Google Docs on Google+.

Gotta run—I’ve got another ferry to catch!

Posted by Vadim Gerasimov, Software Engineer

Posted by Michael Thomas, Software Engineer

(Cross-posted from the Google Docs Blog.)

Back in October, we released a preview of a brand new version of Google presentations, designed to make it easier to share ideas with others. We've been busy polishing the app based on your feedback and today we're excited to enable the new editor for all new presentations.

We’re also introducing a number of performance improvements and making it easier for you to collaborate by bringing the discussion feature you’ve used in documents to presentations.



With discussions in presentations, you’ll be able to:
Comment on a shape or an entire slide to give context to your discussion.
Send an email notification by adding someone to a comment.

Resolve comments to let collaborators know that they’ve been addressed, and to reduce clutter in your presentation.

Plus, to make it easy to get feedback without giving up control of who can make changes, you can now give others the ability to comment on (but not edit) your presentation.

If you’d like to convert existing presentations to the new version of the editor, create a new presentation and import your slides by selecting Import slides from the File menu. To learn more about how to import your old presentations, check out these instructions.

With discussions and real time collaboration, we hope you’ll love working together in Google presentations. We’re rolling out these changes slowly over the next several hours. If you’d like to give us your feedback live, we’ll be hosting a Hangout tomorrow at 2:30 EST to talk about the latest updates to presentations. Stop by our Google+ page to find out how to participate.

Posted by AdWords Community Team

Posted by David Harper, Head of University Relations, EMEA

As part of EMEA’s 2011 Android Educational Outreach program, we recently granted over 300 Android-powered mobile phones to 40 universities across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. These phones will be used to support mobile related project work in university teaching and research. Our steering committee reviewed applications from 77 universities in 24 countries across the region and selected finalists based on each proposal’s scope to generate interest in mobile engineering, reach many students, and be applicable both within and outside the university.

This is the second year we have awarded mobile phones to universities. This is largely attributable to the enthusiastic feedback from last year’s recipients who were interested in continued support for Android project work. The phones donated last year were used in a range of interesting projects, including:

• George Candea, EPFL (Switzerland): The Pocket Campus, an application that helps students, graduates, staff and visitors to find their way around the EPFL campus was created as a course project. After the course, some of the students decided to continue development of the application. It has become so successful that it’s now EPFL’s campus-wide smartphone app.
• Andrew Rice, University of Cambridge (United Kingdom): Students in the summer programme developed Learn!, a flashcard-based learning application that is available in Android Market. This project investigated how one might incorporate features of modern phones such as multimedia capture and playback, data communications and significant computation power into a learning application.
• Alan Smeaton and colleagues, Dublin City University (Ireland): Undergraduate, master’s, and PhD students embarked on a wide variety of projects, which included lifelogging (recording everyday activities using the phone); measuring the strengths of wireless networks as an aid to mapping wireless propagation; and interface design for an augmented reality application.
• Nicolae Tapus, University Politehnica of Bucharest (Romania): Numerous applications were developed by students, including: TaxiFinder, an application that finds the closest taxi number with the lowest price, and Viewlity, an augmented reality engine for showing nearby points of interest (e.g., gas stations, restaurants, ATMs, places of worship) on an Android phone.
• Gerhard Tröster, ETH Zurich (Switzerland): Martin Wirz and his team are using mobile phones to conduct research in the field of wearable computing and machine learning. The devices are used to collect all kinds of sensor information (e.g., accelerometer, magnetometer, microphone, GPS) to infer personal activities, psychological behaviors and social phenomena.

We are looking forward to sharing the great projects resulting from this year’s Android Educational Outreach program early next summer.

The newest version of the DFA API is now available: v1.17. This release includes a variety of bug fixes, many of which resolve issues that you reported on our forum. It also pares down a few outdated and unused operations.

Bug Fix Highlights

Some of the bugs tackled in this release include:

• Placement end date validation has been fixed. [Reported on our forum]
• The activeFilter field of AdSearchCritera is no longer ignored. [Reported on our forum]
• Attempting to save an incorrect DefaultAd now gives a more descriptive error message. [Reported on our forum]
• The expectedUrl field of SpotlightActivity is now required. Passing in a null value used to result in a default URL of "http://". It now results in an invalid URL error.

Deprecation and Sunset of v1.15

With this new release, our friend v1.15--the version from two releases ago--is now deprecated. As previously announced, we will continue to support it until March 3rd, 2012 at which time it will be entirely removed from service. Be sure to migrate any applications currently using v1.15 to one of the two supported versions by this time. Come benefit from the v1.17 fixes!

Sunset of v1.16 in Early June

Keeping with our standard release cycle, v1.16 will be sunset in early June. Please use this time window to make arrangements for migrating any v1.16 implementations before it is retired.

Complete Release Notes

This post reflects just some of the changes in the release. Our updated release notes page gives you a more in-depth breakdown of what has changed since the previous version. Please refer to this page when upgrading your applications.

As always, we highly value your feedback and questions. Please join us on our forum whenever you’d like to reach us.

 - Joseph DiLallo, DFA API Team

Posted by Michael Walsh, CIO, D-Link

Editors note: D-Link is a global leader in providing network connectivity solutions to small and medium businesses. The company has more than 90 global offices to serve North America, Asia, and Europe. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

D-Link is headquartered in Taiwan, but has more than 90 global offices serving North America, Asia, and Europe, each of which operates almost like an independent business unit. Prior to Google Apps, there were multiple IT support groups each with different email systems and no collaboration platform to allow the business units to work together. The old platforms couldn’t keep up with the rate of innovation of cloud-based solutions or the massive storage requirements that are now needed to run a business.

As we looked at our options, it was clear that we wanted to be in the cloud. We had been using an old version of Lotus Notes and I was already familiar with Microsoft® Exchange so I figured we’d just migrate over to Microsoft’s BPOS (currently Microsoft Office 365). In the spirit of democracy, I threw the discussion wide open to the technology team at our North American headquarters and had a bake-off to evaluate Microsoft versus Google Apps. We looked at cost, usability, feature set and the global reach of each platform’s infrastructure. In the end the affordability, infrastructure and features made Google the clear winner.

After surveying our American employees, we found 67% were already using Gmail in their personal lives, so we knew the transition would be pretty easy. Immediately after implementation we saw a 35% reduction in our help desk calls. Just the support resources we saved paid for Google Apps in less than 12 months.

Initially we moved 550 North American employees to Google Apps a year ago and we’re adding 350 more users as we roll out Google Apps to our European offices. We have been supported in our efforts by our Google Apps partner, SADA Systems. The move to Google Apps has fundamentally changed how we communicate. Once people collaborate online to edit a document at the same time, they never want to go back to the old way of edit and email changes around. We use Google Talk and Google Video, both of which are total game-changers. To look your staff in the eye on a daily basis, no matter where they live, creates a real sense of belonging for those remote employees. People want to be social even at work and video interaction enables that.

Since Google Apps is web-based, we no longer have issues with storage and I know that wherever I roam, I can access my data and connect with people with the push of a button. I’m constantly blown away by Google’s rate of feature development. I don’t even have to spend more money; Google just keeps on giving us great new features at no extra cost!