Weekly Google Code Roundup for August 10th
By Dion
Almaer, Google Developer ProgramsIn API and
developer-product news...
ExtMapTypeControl
1.1 contains a smarter traffic button. In this week's release of API v2.86, there is
a "changed" event for GTrafficOverlay that sends a boolean indicating whether traffic data is
available in the current viewport. Using this event, Pamela modified the traffic button in
ExtMapTypeControl to behave exactly as the maps.google.com button does. The example below lets
you test out the new behavior - pan and zoom out to the other side of the world to see the
button disappear.
The Google Mashup Editor has a
couple
of great new mashups including
EarthQuake! which gives detailed
information on earthquakes and plots their magnitude on a Google Map. If you are a Sudoku fan,
Offline Sudoku will let you play
away even when the internet connection isn't there for you, using Google Gears.
Speaking of Gears, Arjun Kalura has created a
database
sync module that shows the progress of a sync between a remote database, and a local
one. The example also uses the worker pool to execute SQL in its own thread and hence keeping
the user interface freed up to show the progress report on how the sync process is
going.
Also, Uriel Katz
announced a new
release of GearsORM which adds basic introspection including a model that maps to
sqlite_master table.
Around Google
We feel pretty generous with
the amount of storage that we give out with our services such as Gmail and Picasa, but we
realise that
some
users would like more so we now offer a way for you to
buy more storage if you need
it.
Privacy is important to us, and our users. In order to improve
transparency we have launched
our
first experiment to explain basic privacy concepts via video on YouTube.
Joining the Open Invention
Network: "You'll often hear members of our open source team say, "Every time you use
Google, you're using Linux." It's absolutely true. Check a Google engineer's workstation, and
you'll probably find it's running Linux. Do a search on Google.com, and a Linux server will
return your results. Ever since Google got its start, Linux has given us the power and
flexibility we need to serve millions of users around the world.
In
turn, we feel a strong responsibility to the Linux community, and we're always looking for
creative ways to put our resources in the hands of Linux developers. That's why today we
became a licensee of the
Open Invention
Network (OIN), an innovative patent-sharing organization founded to create a legally
protected environment for anyone who works with Linux."
You will notice
that the search results now tell how when
fresh content
shows up via a small piece of metadata such as "13 hours ago". This is an instant
indicator of freshness, which you may, or may not, have weight depending on what you are
looking for.
Featured Projects
MapMSG lets you create an electronic note on a map. The
note can be in the form of smoke, crop circles, and more.
Walk Score is a mashup that uses the Maps and
AJAX Search APIs to show you how friendly your location is for walking.
Google Tech Talks
JSR-305:
Java annotations For Defects: This talk describes the current status of JSR-305,
Java annotations for software defect detection. This JSR will define several standard Java
annotations for properties such as @Nonnegative and @Nonnull that can be used to document your
design intentions in a way that be interpreted by multiple software tools.
Open-source-based
high-resolution cameras: Andrey Filippov explains the designs and applications of
Elphel, Inc. intelligent, network-enabled cameras based on open source hardware and software.
Google currently uses Elphel cameras for book scanning and for capturing street imagery in
Google Maps.
View
more tech talks.
