Weekly Google Code Roundup: Learning to Remember The Milk offline, flying
over Earth, and searching your feeds
By Dion
Almaer, Google Developer ProgramsOn the back of the
stream of developer releases last week, we had some interesting activity in the community, and
from our own product teams.
Omar Kilani, of the Remember The Milk team,
did a
fantastic,
thorough write-up of his experience getting his product working offline with Gears.
The article moves past an introduction to delve into the design decisions around an
offline-capable architecture, and user messaging and presentation of state. We learn why Omar
decided to go with the explicit offline mode, and then the five steps to offline
conversion.
The Google Mashup Editor team has also been churning out
new
features based on your feedback. As a developer you can now enable public read only
$user feed so that applications can share $user feeds to create social applications, edit XML,
CSS and HTML files uploaded into the editor, work with Gadget files, and much more.
The cool easter egg of the week goes to the
flight
simulator that is in the most recent Google Earth application. There is something
special about
flying
around the grand canyon, or over manhattan. Give it a
try.
Flying is cool, but we all love searching. The Google Reader team released
the much anticipated feature of
being able to search
across your feeds. If you knew that you had read about something a few days ago but
couldn't find it, now you can.
Sharing is a kin to searching, and the
Google Book Search, which had a significant Ajax facelift a year ago, has joined the two. A
summer intern
added the ability to
save snippets from public domain books, and embed them to your website. It is as
simple as selecting the text you want, and how you want to show it (an image of just
text).
Featured MediaMark
Stahl, tech lead of the Google data APIs,
talked
to us about GData, the history behind it, the parts and pieces, and how people are
implementing applications on top of it.
Quicksilver is a
keyboard-driven launcher that is the first application that I install when I get a new Mac.
Nicholas Jitkoff, creator of Quicksilver, is a Google employee on the Mac team, and they
finally got him to
talk
all about Quicksilver: past, present, and future.
Mark Utting
came to talk about
Model-Based
Testing and he compares two different kinds of test model: black-box models and
white-box models.
As always,
check
out the latest tech talks,
subscribe to the Google Developer
Podcast and visit
the Google
Code YouTube channel.
