Posted by Erica Hanson, Program Manager
ARUA, UGANDA - Samuel Mugisha is a 23 year old university student with a laugh that echoes off every wall and a mind determined to make change. Recently he heard from a healthcare worker that many children at a local clinic were missing vaccinations, so he decided to take a walk. He toured his community, neighbor to neighbor, and asked one simple question: “Can I see your vaccination card?”
In response he was given dirt stained, wrinkled, torn pieces of paper, holding life or death information - all written in scribble.
He squinted, held the cards to the light, rubbed them on his pant leg, but for no use. They were impossible to read. As Samuel put it, “They were broken.”
From the few cards he could read, Samuel noted children who had missed several vaccinations - they were unknowingly playing the odds, waiting to see if disease would find them.
Without hesitation, Samuel got right to work, determined to fix the healthcare system with technology.
He first brought together his closest friends from Developer Student Clubs (DSC), a program supporting students impacting their communities through tech. He asked them: “Why can’t technology solve our problem?”
This newly formed team, including Samuel, Joshwa Benkya and Norman Acidri, came up with a twofold plan:
The idea came together right as Developer Student Clubs launched its first Solution Challenge, an open call for all members to submit projects they recently imagined. These young developers had to give it a shot. They created a model, filled out an application, and pitched the idea. After waiting a month, they heard back - their team won the competition! Their idea was selected from a pool of 170 applicants across India, Africa, and Indonesia. In other words, everything was about to change.
In a country where talent can go unnoticed and problems often go unsolved, this new team had pushed through the odds. Developer Student Clubs is a platform for these types of bold thinkers. Students who view the issues of their region not simply as obstacles to overcome, but chances to mend their home, build a better life for themselves, and transform the experiences of their people.
The goal of the Solution Challenge, and all other DSC programs, is to educate young developers early and equip them with the right skills to make an impact in their community.
In this case, office space in Uganda was expensive and hard to find. Samuel’s team previously had few chances to all work under the same roof. After winning the challenge, Developer Student Clubs helped them find a physical space of their own to come together and collaborate - a simple tool, but one that led to a turning point. As Samuel described it,
With this new space to work, DSC then brought some of Africa’s best Google Developer Group Leads directly to the young developers. In these meetings, the students were given high-level insights on how to best leverage Android, Firebase, and Presto to propel their product forward. As Samuel put it:
As a result, the team realized that with the scarcity of internet in Uganda, Firebase was the perfect technology to build with - allowing healthcare workers to use the app offline but “check in” and receive updates when they were able to find internet.
Although the app has made impressive strides since winning the competition, this young team knows they can make it even better. They want to improve its usability by implementing more visuals and are working to create a version for parents, so families can track the status of their child’s vaccination on their own.
While there is plenty of work ahead, with these gifted students and Developer Student Clubs taking each step forward together, any challenge seems solvable.
What has the team been up to recently? From August 5th-9th they attended the Startup Africa Roadtrip, an intensive training week on how best to refine a startup business model.
Posted by Erica Hanson, Google Developer Relations
This spring, Google and Developer Student Clubs are looking for new passionate student leaders from universities across the globe!
Developer Student Clubs is a program with Google Developers. Through in-person meetups, university students are empowered to learn together and use technology to solve real life problems with local businesses and start-ups.
Less than two years ago, DSC launched in parts of Asia and Africa where 90,000+ students have been trained on Google technologies; 500+ solutions built for 200+ local startups and organizations and 170+ clubs participated in our first Solution Challenge!
Bridging the gap between theory and practical application, Google aims to provide student developers with the resources, opportunities and the experience necessary to be more industry ready.
You may be wondering what the benefit of being a Developer Student Club Lead is? Well, here are a few reasons:
Apply to be a Developer Student Club Lead at g.co/dev/dsc.
Deadline to submit applications has been extended to June 15th.
Africa's digital journey is rapidly gaining speed. According to the recent data, over 73 million people came online in Africa for the first time in 2017- that's more than the population of the UK! This means there are now about 435 million people on the continent using the Web to engage, connect and access information online. That's a good thing! But with this growth comes with an increased need to scale efforts to make the Web more relevant and useful to African users. This will require more skilled hands working with individuals and local businesses to develop content and platforms that will support Africa's digital growth.
In July 2017, Google's CEO, Sundar Pichai, announced a pledge to provide digital skills training to ten million people in Africa, and also to provide mobile developer training to 100,000 Africans. Today, in line with that commitment, we're excited to announce the launch of our new Africa Web and Android Scholarship program aimed at providing 15,000 scholarships to developers resident in Africa countries.
Working in partnership with Udacity and Andela, we will be offering 15,000 2-month 'single course' scholarships and 500 6-month nanodegree scholarships to aspiring and professional developers across Africa. The training will be available online via the Udacity training website, and the Andela Learning Community will support the students (in Nigeria and Kenya) through mentorship, in-person meet-ups, and online communities.
In order to access the full nanodegree scholarships, learners will have to complete lessons and quizzes courses being offered under the Udacity single course scholarships (also known as challenge courses) in addition to their active participation and support of classmates in the student community. We will be offering 10,000 scholarships to beginners (with little or no programming experience) and 5,000 to professional developers (with +1 year of experience) spread across Android and mobile web development tracks. The 10,000 beginner scholarships will include Android beginner courses and basic introduction to HTML & CSS; while the 5,000 intermediate scholarships include Android fundamentals for intermediate and building offline web applications courses respectively. Both courses are taught in English through an online program on Udacity open to Africa residence. The top 500 students at the end of the challenge will earn a full Nanodegree scholarship to one of four Nanodegree programs in Android or web development.
The application period closes on April 24th. Interested or want to learn more, visit https://www.udacity.com/google-africa-scholarships?utm_source=devblog
Posted by Wesley Chun (@wescpy), Developer Advocate, G Suite
It's common knowledge that presentations utilize a set of images to impart ideas to the audience. As a result, one of the best practices for creating great slide decks is to minimize the overall amount of text. It means that if you do have text in a presentation, the (few) words you use must have higher impact and be visually appealing. This is even more true when the slides are generated by a software application, say using the Google Slides API, rather than being crafted by hand.
The G Suite team recently launched the first Slides API, opening up a whole new category of applications. Since then, we've published several videos to help you realize some of those possibilities, showing you how to replace text and images in slides as well as how to generate slides from spreadsheet data. To round out this trifecta of key API use cases, we're adding text formatting to the conversation.
Developers manipulate text in Google Slides by sending API requests. Similar to the Google Sheets API, these requests come in the form of JSON payloads sent to the API's batchUpdate() method. Here's the JavaScript for inserting text in some shape (shapeID) on a slide:
batchUpdate()
shapeID
{ "insertText": { "objectId": shapeID, "text": "Hello World!\n" }
In the video, developers learn that writing text, such as the request above, is less complex than reading or formatting because both the latter require developers to know how text on a slide is structured. Notice for writing that just the copy, and optionally an index, are all that's required. (That index defaults to zero if not provided.)
Assuming "Hello World!" has been successfully inserted in a shape on a slide, a request to bold just the "Hello" looks like this:
{ "updateTextStyle": { "objectId": shapeID, "style": { "bold": true }, "textRange": { "type": "FIXED_RANGE", "startIndex": 0, "endIndex": 5 }, "fields": "bold" }
requests
SLIDES
deckID)
SLIDES.presentations().batchUpdate(presentationId=deckID, body=requests).execute()
To better understand text structure & styling in Google Slides, check out the text concepts guide in the documentation. For a detailed look at the complete code sample featured in the DevByte, check out the deep dive post. To see more samples for common API operations, take a look at this page. We hope the videos and all these developer resources help you create that next great app that automates producing highly impactful presentations for your users!
Posted by Champika Fernando, Product Manager, Google, and Kasia Chmielinski, Product Lead, MIT Scratch Team
We want to empower developers to build great creative learning apps for kids. That's why, earlier this year, we announced Scratch Blocks, a free, open-source project created by the MIT Scratch and Google Kids Coding teams. Together, we are building this highly tinkerable and playful block-based programming grammar based on MIT's popular Scratch language and Blockly's architecture. With Scratch Blocks, developers can integrate Scratch-style coding into apps for kids.
Today, we're excited to share our progress in a number of areas:
1. Designing for tinkerability
Research from the MIT Media Lab has highlighted the importance of providing children with opportunities for quick experimentation and rapid cycles of iteration. For example, the Scratch programming environment makes it easy for kids to adjust the code while it's running, as well as try coding blocks by just tapping on them. Since our initial announcement in May, we've focused on supporting this type of tinkerability in the Scratch Blocks project by making it very easy for developers to connect Scratch Blocks directly to the Scratch VM (a related open-source project being developed by MIT). In this model, instead of blocks being converted to a text-based language like JavaScript which is then interpreted, the blocks themselves are the code. The result is a more tinkerable experience for the end-user.
2. Designing for all levels
Computational thinking1 is a valuable skill for everyone. In order to support developers building a wide diversity of coding experiences with Scratch Blocks, we've designed two related block grammars that can be used in a variety of contexts. One grammar uses icon-based blocks that connect horizontally, while the other uses text-based blocks that connect vertically.
We started by developing the horizontal grammar, which is well-suited for beginners of all ages due to its simplicity and limited number of blocks; additionally, this grammar is easier to manipulate on small screens. You can see an example of the horizontal icon-based grammar in Code a Snowflake (an activity in this year's Google Santa Tracker) built by the Google Kids Coding Team. More recently, we've added the vertical grammar, which supports a wider range of complex concepts. The horizontal grammar can also be translated into vertical blocks, making it possible to transition between the grammars. We imagine this will be useful in a number of situations, including designing for multiple screen sizes, or as an element of the app's learning experience.
3. Designing for all devices
We're building Scratch Blocks for a world that is increasingly mobile, where people of all ages will tinker with code in a variety of environments. We've improved the mobile experience in many key areas, both in Scratch Blocks as well as the underlying Blockly project:
How to get involved
These first six months of Scratch Blocks have been a lot of work - and a ton of fun. To stay up to date on the project, check out our Github project, and learn more on our Developer Page.
[1] Learn more about Computational Thinking
Posted by Jason Douglas, PM Director for Actions on Google
The Google Assistant brings together all of the technology and smarts we've been building for years, from the Knowledge Graph to Natural Language Processing. To be a truly successful Assistant, it should be able to connect users across the apps and services in their lives. This makes enabling an ecosystem where developers can bring diverse and unique services to users through the Google Assistant really important.
In October, we previewed Actions on Google, the developer platform for the Google Assistant. Actions on Google further enhances the Assistant user experience by enabling you to bring your services to the Assistant. Starting today, you can build Conversation Actions for Google Home and request to become an early access partner for upcoming platform features.
Conversation Actions for Google Home
Conversation Actions let you engage your users to deliver information, services, and assistance. And the best part? It really is a conversation -- users won't need to enable a skill or install an app, they can just ask to talk to your action. For now, we've provided two developer samples of what's possible, just say "Ok Google, talk to Number Genie " or try "Ok Google, talk to Eliza' for the classic 1960s AI exercise.
You can get started today by visiting the Actions on Google website for developers. To help create a smooth, straightforward development experience, we worked with a number of development partners, including conversational interaction development tools API.AI and Gupshup, analytics tools DashBot and VoiceLabs and consulting companies such as Assist, Notify.IO, Witlingo and Spoken Layer. We also created a collection of samples and voice user interface (VUI) resources or you can check out the integrations from our early access partners as they roll out over the coming weeks.
Coming soon: Actions for Pixel and Allo + Support for Purchases and Bookings
Today is just the start, and we're excited to see what you build for the Google Assistant. We'll continue to add more platform capabilities over time, including the ability to make your integrations available across the various Assistant surfaces like Pixel phones and Google Allo. We'll also enable support for purchases and bookings as well as deeper Assistant integrations across verticals. Developers who are interested in creating actions using these upcoming features should register for our early access partner program and help shape the future of the platform.
Posted by John Coiner, Software Engineer
Today we are announcing a change to the domain scheme of the Google AMP Cache. Beginning soon, the Google AMP Cache will serve each site from its own subdomain of https://cdn.ampproject.org. This change will allow content served from the Google AMP Cache to be protected by the fundamental security model of the web: the HTML5 origin.
https://cdn.ampproject.org
No immediate changes are required for most publishers of AMP documents. However, to benefit from the additional security, it is recommended that all AMP publishers update their CORS implementation in preparation for the new Google AMP Cache URL scheme. The Google AMP Cache will continue to support existing URLs, but those URLs will eventually redirect to the new URL scheme.
The subdomains created by the Google AMP Cache will be human-readable when character limits and technical specs allow, and will closely resemble the publisher's own domain.
When possible, the Google AMP Cache will create each subdomain by first converting the AMP document domain from IDN (punycode) to UTF-8. Every "-" (dash) will be replaced with "--"(2 dashes) and every "." (dot) will be replaced with a "-" (dash). For example, pub.com will map to pub-com.cdn.ampproject.org. Where technical limitations prevent a human readable subdomain, a one-way hash will be used instead.
pub.com
pub-com.cdn.ampproject.org
Due to the changes described above, CORS endpoints will begin seeing requests with new origins. The following updates will be required:
https://[pub-com].cdn.ampproject.org
https://*.ampproject.org
https://ampbyexample-com.cdn.ampproject.org
For platforms that display AMP documents and serve from the Google AMP Cache, the best way to retrieve Google AMP Cache URLs is to continue using the Google AMP Cache URL API. The Google AMP Cache URL API will be updated in Q1 2017 to return the new cache URL scheme that includes the subdomain.
You can use an interactive tool to find the Google AMP Cache subdomain generated for each site over at ampbyexample.com.
Google Search is planning to begin using the new URL scheme as soon as possible and is monitoring sites' compatibility.
In addition, a developer testing sandbox is available at g.co/ampdemo/cache to help ensure a smooth transition. After making the updates described above, please use the sandbox to test accessing your site via Google Search. The sandbox loads AMP pages using the new domain scheme, so if you spot CORS-related errors in this configuration, these issues should be addressed to avoid errors when the domain scheme change is fully rolled out.
The G Suite team recently launched the very first Google Slides API, opening up a whole new set of possibilities, including leveraging data already sitting in a spreadsheet or database, and programmatically generating slide decks or slide content based on that data. Why is this a big deal? One of the key advantages of slide decks is that they can take database or spreadsheet data and make it more presentable for human consumption. This is useful when the need arises to communicate the information reflected by that data to management or potential customers.
Walking developers through a short application demonstrating both the Sheets and Slides APIs to make this happen is the topic of today's DevByte video. The sample app starts by reading all the necessary data from the spreadsheet using the Sheets API. The Slides API takes over from there, creating new slides for the data, then populating those slides with the Sheets data.
Developers interact with Slides by sending API requests. Similar to the Google Sheets API, these requests come in the form of JSON payloads. You create an array like in the JavaScript pseudocode below featuring requests to create a cell table on a slide and import a chart from a Sheet:
sheetID
chartID
slideID
presentations().batchUpdate()
Creating tables is fairly straightforward. Creating charts has some magical features, one of those being the linkingMode. A value of "LINKED" means that if the Sheet data changes (altering the chart in the Sheet), the same chart in a slide presentation can be refreshed to match the latest image, either by the API or in the Slides user interface! You can also request a plain old static image that doesn't change with the data by selecting a value of "NOT_LINKED_IMAGE" for linkingMode. More on this can be found in the documentation on creating charts, and check out the video where you'll see both those API requests in action.
linkingMode
For a detailed look at the complete code sample featured in the video, check out the deep dive post. We look forward to seeing the interesting integrations you build with the power of both APIs!
Posted by Matteo Vallone, Google Play Partner Development Manager
To build awareness of the awesome innovation and art that indie game developers are bringing to users on Google Play, we have invested heavily over the past year in programs like Indie Corner, as well as events like the Google Play Indie Games Festivals in North America and Korea.
As part of that sustained effort, we also want to celebrate the passion and innovation of indie game developers with the introduction of the first-ever Google Play Indie Games Contest in Europe. The contest will recognize the best indie talent in several countries and offer prizes that will help you get your game noticed by industry experts and gamers worldwide.
Prizes for the finalists and winners:
Entering the contest:
If you're based in Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France (coming soon), Germany, Iceland, Israel, Netherlands, Norway, Poland (coming soon), Romania, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, or UK (excl. Northern Ireland), have 15 or less full time employees, and published a new game on Google Play after 1 January 2016, you may now be eligible to enter the contest. If you're planning on publishing a new game soon, you can also enter by submitting a private beta. Check out all the details in the terms and conditions. Submissions close on 31 December 2016.
The process:
Up to 20 finalists will get to showcase their games at an open event at the Saatchi Gallery in London on the 16th February 2017. At the event, the top 10 will be selected by the event attendees and the Google Play team. The top 10 will then get the opportunity to pitch to a jury of industry experts, from which the final winner and runners up will be selected.
Even if someone is NOT entering the contest:
Even if you're not eligible to enter the contest, you can still register to attend the final showcase event in London on 16 February 2017, check out some great indie games, and have fun with various industry experts and indie developers. We will also be hosting a workshop for all indie games developers from across EMEA in the new Google office in Kings Cross the next day, so this will be a packed week.
Get started:
Enter the Indie Games Contest now and visit the contest site to find out more about the contest, the event, and the workshop.
We're always working to make Google Sign-In a better experience for developers and end users. Over the last year, we've simplified the user experience by reducing the default amount of information requested from the user and updated the branding. Major apps like The Guardian have taken advantage of these updates and we now see over twice as many people use Google Sign-In with their app.
The more streamlined experience begins with updated sign-in buttons that show the standard Google logo. We've updated the sign in button to reflect our new Google logo design. Furthermore, Google Sign-in now works for all users, not just those with a G+ profile. The consent screen has been redesigned so that the user sees inline the information that will be provided to the app (name, email, and profile photo) on Android and the web and iOS soon, too.
With these improvements in place, we are now announcing the migration from our Google+ Sign-In product to the new model. Making this change for your app is simple: just use the latest libraries with default sign-in configuration, or replace the "https://www.googleapis.com/auth/plus.login" scope with "profile" and update branding of the Google Sign-in button (your existing users will not be asked to sign-in again).
For developers who continue to use Google+ Sign-In scopes, expect some changes in behavior. New users going through the older sign-in flow will no longer be asked to share social graph data with your app. In the upcoming versions of SDKs on all platforms, we'll replace the Google+ branded assets with the new Google branding. So, if your app uses the default button, expect a new look and improved user experience with Google Sign-In. And after January 2017, calling our Plus People or Games Players APIs for users who had previously granted you access may begin returning empty results.
With these changes, we are deprecating the Plus People API. You can read the deprecation notes here: Android, Web. If your app needs social information and more extensive profile data, we have better alternatives for you. The new contacts-based People API provides a rich set of users' connections. To enhance the distribution of your app through the social graphs of your app's userbase, use the recently launched Firebase Invites, a cross-platform solution for sending personalized email and SMS invitations. On Android, you may also get rich cloud and device-based Contacts data from the Contacts Provider.
In addition to these user facing changes, we've also overhauled our Identity/authentication APIs to simplify implementation on both the client and server. Please check out our previous blog posts if you missed them:
Posted by Paul Kinlan, Chrome Developer Relations
Chrome Dev Summit is almost here! We'll kick off live from San Francisco at the SFJAZZ Center, at 10:00 AM PT this coming Thursday, Nov 10th. This year's summit will focus on key themes that matter to you: Progressive, to build high quality web apps; Performance, to increase user engagement; and What's Next, a look at how the Chrome team is thinking about the future of the web.
While we're putting the finishing touches on the keynote, sessions, and code labs, we wanted to provide you with some tips to get ready to experience Chrome Dev Summit, either in-person or via the livestream.
Navigate the summit with notifications
To get the most out of Chrome Dev Summit, make sure to check out the schedule and set up notifications for the sessions you don't want to miss. These will help you plan your schedule whether you're in person or tuning in via the livestream.
Can't join us in person?
Don't worry, we've got you covered! Here are some ways you can connect with Chrome Dev Summit in real-time:
We're looking forward to having you with us you for 2 days of web fun, soon!
Don't forget to join the social conversation at #ChromeDevSummit.
Originally posted on Google Analytics blog
In the digital world, whether you’re writing stories for your loyal readers, creating creative content that your fans love, helping the digital community, or providing items and services for your customer, understanding your audience is at the heart of it all. Key to unlocking that information is access to tools for measuring your audience and understanding their behavior. In addition to making your page load faster, Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) provides multiple analytics options without compromising on performance.
You can choose to use a solution like amp-pixel that behaves like a simple tracking pixel. It uses a single URL that allows variable substitutions, so it’s very customizable. See the amp-pixel documentation for more detail.
The amp-analytics component, on the other hand, is a powerful solution that recognizes many types of event triggers to help you collect specific metrics. Since amp-analytics is supported by multiple analytics providers, this means you can use amp-analytics to configure multiple endpoints and data sets. AMP then manages all of the instrumentation to come up with the data specified and shares it with these analytics solution providers.
To use amp-analytics, include the component library in your document's <head>:
<head>
<script async custom-element="amp-analytics" src="https://cdn.ampproject.org/v0/amp-analytics-0.1.js"></script>
And then include the component as follows (for these examples, make sure to specify your own account number instead of the placeholder):
<amp-analytics type="googleanalytics"> <script type="application/json"> { "vars": { "account": "UA-YYYY-Y" }, "triggers": { "defaultPageview": { "on": "visible", "request": "pageview", "vars": { "title": "Name of the Article" } } } } </script> </amp-analytics>
The JSON format is super flexible for describing several different types of events and it does not include any JavaScript code which could potentially lead to mistakes.
Expanding the above example, we can add another trigger, clickOnHeader:
clickOnHeader
<amp-analytics type="googleanalytics"> <script type="application/json"> { "vars": { "account": "UA-YYYY-Y" }, "triggers": { "defaultPageview": { "on": "visible", "request": "pageview", "vars": { "title": "Name of the Article" } }, "clickOnHeader": { "on": "click", "selector": "#header", "request": "event", "vars": { "eventCategory": "examples", "eventAction": "clicked-header" } } } } </script> </amp-analytics>
For a detailed description of data sets you can request, as well as the complete list of analytics providers supporting amp-analytics, check out the amp-analytics documentation. You can also see more implementation examples in the Amp By Example site.
If you want to conduct a user experience experiment on your AMP pages, such as an A/B test, you can use the amp-experiment element. Any configurations done in this element will also be exposed to amp-analytics and amp-pixel, so you can easily do a statistical analysis of your experiment.
There are still plenty of ongoing developments for AMP analytics to help you gain insights as you AMPlify the user experience on your site. Visit the AMP Project roadmap to see a summary of what the team is cooking up. If you see some features missing, please file a request on GitHub.
Back in May at Google I/O, we announced the expansion Firebase, a mobile platform that enables you to quickly develop high-quality applications, grow your user base and earn more money. To help developers better understand the range of features in Firebase, our Developer Relations team in Sub-Saharan Africa will be hosting the Launchpad Build Event Series in Sub-Saharan Africa The first leg will be held in Lagos (22nd Sep), followed by Nairobi (26th Sep) and finally Cape Town (29th Sep).
Launchpad Build is an event series aimed at raising awareness, amongst intermediate and expert developers with an existing Web or Android application, around important tools available today.
At this event, engage in talks and hands-on codelabs focused on Firebase Analytics, Firebase Cloud Messaging, Firebase Crash Reporting, Firebase Test Lab, Pirate Metrics, Serverless with Firebase, Tensor Flow and much more. Through the Launchpad Build event, developers will get skills and resources necessary to start using Firebase in their applications.
This is a technical event, with multiple sessions on Firebase, facilitated by Googlers and Google Developer Experts from around the world.
For further information, visit the Launchpad Build Event Series Sub-Saharan Africa Website.
Register now: bit.ly/lpbuildssa2016
Applicants will be contacted with necessary details.
The Closure Compiler was originally released, in Java, back in 2009. Today, we're announcing the very same Closure Compiler is now available in pure JavaScript, for use without Java. It's designed to run under NodeJS with support for some popular build tools.
If you've not heard of the Closure Compiler, it's a JavaScript optimizer, transpiler and type checker, which compiles your code into a high-performance, minified version. Nearly every web frontend at Google uses it to serve the smallest, fastest code possible.
It supports new features in ES2015, such as let, const, arrow functions, and provides polyfills for ES2015 methods not supported everywhere. To help you write better, maintainable and scalable code, the compiler also checks syntax, correct use of types, and provides warnings for many JavaScript gotchas. To find out more about the compiler itself, including tutorials, head to Google Developers.
This isn't a rewrite of Closure in JavaScript. Instead, we compile the Java source to JS to run under Node, or even inside a plain old browser. Every post or resource you see about Closure Compiler will also apply to this version.
To find out more about Closure Compiler's internals, be sure to check out this post by Dimitris (who works on the Closure team at Google), other posts on the Closure Tools blog, or read an exploratory post about Closure and how it can help your project in 2016.
Note that the JS version is experimental. It may not perform in the same way as the native Java version, but we believe it's an interesting new addition to the compiler landscape, and the Closure team will be working to improve and support it over time.
To include the JS version of Closure Compiler in your project, you should add it as a dependency of your project via NPM-
npm install --save-dev google-closure-compiler-js
To then use the compiler with Gulp, you can add a task like this-
const compiler = require('google-closure-compiler-js').gulp(); gulp.task('script', function() { // select your JS code here return gulp.src('./src/**/*.js', {base: './'}) .pipe(compiler({ compilation_level: 'SIMPLE', warning_level: 'VERBOSE', output_wrapper: '(function(){\n%output%\n}).call(this)', js_output_file: 'output.min.js', // outputs single file create_source_map: true })) .pipe(gulp.dest('./dist')); });
If you'd like to migrate from google-closure-compiler (which requires Java), you'll have to use gulp.src() or equivalents to load your JavaScript before it can be compiled. As this compiler runs in pure JavaScript, the compiler cannot load or save files from your filesystem directly.
For more information, check out Usage, supported Flags, or a demo project. Not all flags supported in the Java release are currently available in this experimental version. However, the compiler will let you know via exception if you've hit any missing ones.
Posted by Eitan Marder-Eppstein, Senior Software Engineer for Tango
Technology helps us connect and communicate with others -- from sharing commentary and photos on social media to a posting a video with breaking news, digital tools enable us to craft stories and share them with the world.
Tango can enhance storytelling by bringing augmented reality into our surroundings. Recently, the Tango team hosted a three-day developer workshop around how to use this technology to tell incredible stories through mobile devices. The workshop included a wide range of participants, from independent filmmakers and developers to producers and creatives at major media companies. By the end of the workshop, a number of new app prototypes had been created. Here are some of the workshop highlights:
We even had an independent developer use Tango to create realtime video stabilization tool. We’re looking forward to seeing these apps—and many more—come to life. If you want to start building your own storytelling and visual communication apps for augmented reality, check out our developer page and join our G+ community.
Posted by Roy Glasberg Global Lead, Launchpad Accelerator
We’re heading to the city of San Francisco this September to open a new space for developers and startups. With over 14,000 sq. ft. at 301 Howard Street, we’ll have more than enough elbow room to train, educate and collaborate with local and international developers and startups.
The space will hold a range of events: Google Developer Group community meetups, Codelabs, Design Sprints, and Tech Talks. It will also host the third class of Launchpad Accelerator, our equity-free accelerator for startups in emerging markets. During each class, over 20 Google teams provide comprehensive mentoring to late-stage app startups who seek to scale and become leaders in their local markets. The 3-month program starts with an all-expenses-paid two week bootcamp at Google HQ.
Developers are in an ever-changing landscape and seek technical training. We’ve also seen a huge surge in the number of developers starting their own companies. Lastly, this is an unique opportunity to bridge the gap between Silicon Valley and emerging markets. To date Launchpad Accelerator has nearly 50 alumni in India, Indonesia, Brazil and Mexico. Startups in these markets are tackling critical local problems, but they often lack access to the resources and network we have here. This dedicated space will enable us to regularly engage with developers and serve their evolving needs, whether that is to build a product, grow a company or make revenue.
We can’t wait to get started and work with developers to build successful businesses that have a positive impact locally and globally.
Sam Thorogood, Developer Programs Engineer
Today, we're announcing that the open source version of Google's Santa Tracker has been updated with the Android and web experiences that ran in December 2015. We extended, enhanced and upgraded our code, and you can see how we used our developer products - including Firebase and Polymer - to build a fun, educational and engaging experience.
To get started, you can check out the code on GitHub at google/santa-tracker-web and google/santa-tracker-android. Both repositories include instructions so you can build your own version.
Santa Tracker isn’t just about watching Santa’s progress as he delivers presents on December 24. Visitors can also have fun with the winter-inspired experiences, games and educational content by exploring Santa's Village while Santa prepares for his big journey throughout the holidays.
Below is a summary of what we’ve released as open source.
We hope that this update inspires you to make your own magical experiences based on all the interesting and exciting components that came together to make Santa Tracker!
Roy Glasberg, Global Lead, Launchpad and Launchpad Accelerator
Last month, the second cohort of Launchpad Accelerator, Google’s high-touch global program for late-stage startups, came and conquered their app challenges with the help of mentors at Google HQ.
What did they learn that they’d like to share with developers across the world? Check out the video below for solutions from 3 different startups, and an in-depth review of MagicPin’s mobile web challenge and solution.
Startup:
MagicPin from India is a social network app that curates a local user base around locations, allowing merchants to connect with these specific audiences.
Mobile web challenge:
In India, downloading an app requires a high commitment. On average a user would keep 5 or 6 apps on their phone. According to Anshoo Sharma, Co-Founder and CEO, MagicPin, “If you want to be the next app that they download, there is a high barrier.”
Jordan Adler, Google Developer Advocate: “Devices in markets like India have limited space--on average 128 MB of memory--and when you add in system features only 40 bytes of user space is left. And if a typical APK is a few megabytes, you can only have a few apps before you have to stop downloading.”
Solution:
Jordan Adler: “One of the great things about Progressive Web Apps is you don’t have to request the commitment (to download an app) upfront. You can start to build a relationship with the user through the web interface, and over time the web app can become more like a native app, it can be housed on a device, cache content and work offline.”
Anshoo Sharma: “In the last 1.5 weeks we have been here we have already launched a micro version of our platform on Progressive Web Apps. And the experience is great! Without using the (mobile) app people can get as good an experience.”
About Launchpad Accelerator
Launchpad Accelerator is a six-month accelerator that enables late-stage app startups from emerging markets to successfully scale. Here's a two-minute video about the Accelerator.
