You might be using the Google Calendar API, or alternatively email markup, to insert events into your users' calendars. Thankfully, these tools allow your apps to do this seamlessly and automatically, which saves your users a lot of time. But what happens if plans change? You need your apps to also be able to modify an event.
While email markup does support this update, it's limited in what it can do, so in today's video, we'll show you how to modify events with the Calendar API. We'll also show you how to create repeating events. Check it out:
Imagine a potential customer being interested in your product, so you set up one or two meetings with them. As their interest grows, they request regularly-scheduled syncs as your product makes their short list—your CRM should be able to make these adjustments in your calendar without much work on your part. Similarly, a "dinner with friends" event can go from a "rain check" to a bi-monthly dining experience with friends you've grown closer to. Both of these events can be updated with a JSON request payload like what you see below to adjust the date and make it repeating:
JSON
var TIMEZONE = "America/Los_Angeles"; var EVENT = { "start": {"dateTime": "2017-07-01T19:00:00", "timeZone": TIMEZONE}, "end": {"dateTime": "2017-07-01T22:00:00", "timeZone": TIMEZONE}, "recurrence": ["RRULE:FREQ=MONTHLY;INTERVAL=2;UNTIL=20171231"] };
This event can then be updated with a single call to the Calendar API's events().patch() method, which in Python would look like the following given the request data above, GCAL as the API service endpoint, and a valid EVENT_ID to update:
events().patch()
GCAL
EVENT_ID
GCAL.events().patch(calendarId='primary', eventId=EVENT_ID, sendNotifications=True, body=EVENT).execute()
If you want to dive deeper into the code sample, check out this blog post. Also, if you missed it, check out this video that shows how you can insert events into Google Calendar as well as the official API documentation. Finally, if you have a Google Apps Script app, you can access Google Calendar programmatically with its Calendar service.
We hope you can use this information to enhance your apps to give your users an even better and timely experience.
At Area 120, Google's internal workshop for experimental ideas, we're working on early-stage projects and quickly iterate to test concepts. We heard from developers that they're looking at how to make money to fund their VR applications, so we started experimenting with what a native, mobile VR ad format might look like.
Developers and users have told us they want to avoid disruptive, hard-to-implement ad experiences in VR. So our first idea for a potential format presents a cube to users, with the option to engage with it and then see a video ad. By tapping on the cube or gazing at it for a few seconds, the cube opens a video player where the user can watch, and then easily close, the video. Here's how it works:
Our work focuses on a few key principles - VR ad formats should be easy for developers to implement, native to VR, flexible enough to customize, and useful and non-intrusive for users. Our Area 120 team has seen some encouraging results with a few test partners, and would love to work with the developer community as this work evolves - across Cardboard (on Android and iOS), Daydream and Samsung Gear VR.
If you're a VR developer (or want to be one) and are interested in testing this format with us, please fill out this form to apply for our early access program. We have an early-stage SDK available and you can get up and running easily. We're excited to continue experimenting with this format and hope you'll join us for the ride!
Our goal is to help publishers monetize their content and build sustainable businesses through advertising products that allow sites to load as fast as possible to minimize impact to user experience.
Almost two years ago, our compression team announced a new compression algorithm called Brotli. Today, we are happy to announce that the Brotli compression algorithm is now being used to compress Google Display Ads whenever possible. In our experiments, we see data savings of 15% in aggregate over standard gzip compression, and in some instances, a savings of over 40%! This reduces the amount of data sent to end users by tens of thousands of gigabytes every day! This also results in faster page loads and less battery consumption.
We hope results like this will encourage wider adoption and will advance web standards such as Brotli compression.
Enterprises are always looking for ways to operate more efficiently, and equipping developers with the right tools can make a difference. We launched Team Drives this year to bring the best of what users love about Drive to enterprise teams. We also updated the Google Drive API, so that developers can leverage Team Drives in the apps they build.
In this latest G Suite Dev Show video, we cover how you can leverage the functionality of Team Drives in your apps. The good news is you don't have to learn a completely new API—Team Drives features are built into the Drive API so you can build on what you already know. Check it out:
By the end of this video, you'll be familiar with four basic operations to help you build Team Drives functionality right into your apps:
Want to explore the code further? Check out the deep dive blog post. In all, the Drive API can help a variety of developers create solutions that work with both Google Drive and Team Drives. Whether you're an Independent Software Vendor (ISV), System Integrator (SI) or work in IT, there are many ways to use the Drive API to enhance productivity, help your company migrate to G Suite, or build tools to automate workflows.
Team Drives features are available in both Drive API v2 and v3, and more details can be found in the Drive API documentation. We look forward to seeing what you build with Team Drives!
Over the past five years, developers have created hundreds of projects with Blockly, our open source library for creating block-based coding experiences. These have ranged from education platforms like Code.org to electronics kits like littleBits and even Android app creation tools like MIT App Inventor. Last year, we also announced our collaboration with the Scratch Team to develop Scratch Blocks—a fork of Blockly optimized for creating coding apps for kids.
Today, we're finalizing our 1.0 release of Blockly on Android and iOS. These versions have everything you need to use Blockly natively in your mobile app, including:
While our 1.0 update today is focused on native mobile, we've also made several updates to the web project over the past six months. We've made major improvements to performance and testing, added more structured APIs, and improved touch support for the mobile web. In addition, we improved Internet Explorer and Edge support; Blockly is fully supported on IE10+.
We've done a lot of work to ease cross platform development, too! All blocks can now be defined by JSON, allowing a single set of block definitions to be used for web, iOS, and Android. Check out the documentation for more details on all three platforms.
Get started right away with our iOS Codelab (Android coming soon)! To learn more about Blockly, check out the above intro video, visit our developer site, join our mailing list, or jump right into the code for web, Android, or iOS.
Recently we announced the addition of Brotli compression to the Google AMP Cache. All AMP documents served from the Google AMP Cache can now be served with Brotli, which will save a considerable amount of bandwidth for our users and further our goal of improving the mobile experience.
Brotli is a newer, more efficient compression algorithm created by Jyrki Alakuijala and Zoltán Szabadka with the Google Research Europe Compression Team. Launched in 2015, it has already been used to enable considerable savings in other areas of Google. While it is a generic compression algorithm, it has particularly impressive performance when applied to web documents; we have seen an average decrease in document size of around 10% when using Brotli instead of gzip, which has amounted to hundreds of gigabytes of bandwidth saved per day across the Google AMP Cache.
With smaller document sizes, pages load faster while also saving bandwidth which can amount to noticeable savings for users on limited data plans. The Google AMP Cache is just the beginning though, as engineering teams are working on Brotli support in many other products which can enable bandwidth savings throughout Google.
