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The last several days
have been exciting. We are seeing great new technology that can enable us to do new things,
and have old things run a lot better.
Mozilla announced
TraceMonkey, which promises large JavaScript performance improvements based on their
trace based JIT technique. This, which backs on to the earlier SquirrelFish announcement from
Apple and the WebKit team, and IE8 beta 2 arriving today with performance improvements
too.
Running a new browser and seeing Gmail get a lot faster is just as
good as buying a new computer to get a speed up!
Gears 0.4 has been released
and people have picked up on the main points.
As an experiment, I wrote a shim that would bridge the W3C Geolocation API that Andrei
Popescu of the Gears team is editing, and the other APIs. This is shown via a simple Where are
you? sample application.
Giving you access to location
information is fantastic, but this isn't all Gears 0.4 has to offer.
The new YouTube multi-file
upload page gives you the ability to upload many files, with progress on the upload,
and the ability to resume uploads after a connectivity problem. Brad Neuberg wrote a sample
that ties together the new APIs (Blob, HTTPRequest improvements, Desktop API file system
addition) and shows how you
could create the experience too.
For more of this content,
you can follow our two
new series: Open Web Podcast, and the State of HTML 5.
Mobile News
A much awaited SDK
update from Android that includes the new Home screen and many UI changes. New
applications are also added (Alarm Clock, Calculator, Music player, etc) and new APIs and
developer tools.
We also continue to add iPhone-friendly views of the
Google world. THe latest is the Google
Translate view.
Been playing with Google App Engine? If so,
you should be aware of datastore
updates that give you the ability to do batch updates, and discussions of indexing
improvements. It is fascinating to watch cool new applications: from mini-services, to full
applications, to platforms themselves, giving App Engine a go.
Open Source
The Google Summer of Code is moving
along, and since we are now in August we get to see the progress that the students that have
been flipping bits and not burgers this summer. One example is the work
of 6 students working on the Git version control system.
Steve Weis has released Keyczar,
a "toolkit that makes cryptography safer and easier to use". We all commonly make mistakes
including the wrong cipher modes, bad algorithms, or working with keys incorrectly. Keyczar
has got your back, is there to help keep your code secure.
Speaking of
security, Thomas Duebendorfer of our Swiss office gave a talk titled Are
internet users at risk? that delves into the practices of browsers and plugins, and
how they update themselves. This just reaffirmed my desire to have silent updates getting
pushed to me to keep me more secure!
Another video that we published
that caught my eye was Where
the hell is Matt?. Matt Harding is the guy who you may have seen on YouTube dancing
badly around the world. We got him to the office and he chatted on his adventures. If you find
yourself waiting for a compile (or a Map Reduce) this Friday, give it a watch while you
wait.
Finally, registration
opened up for the Google Developer Day events in India, Italy, the Czech Republic,
and Russia. These join the first wave of events in the UK, France, Germany, and Spain. I
really hope that we get to see you at one of those locations!
As
always, thanks for reading, listening, or watching, and let us know if there is anything that
you would like to see.