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:
Formatting spreadsheets is accomplished by creating a set of request commands in the form of JSON payloads, and sending them to the API. Here is a sample JavaScript Object made up of an array of requests (only one this time) to bold the first row of the default Sheet automatically created for you (whose ID is 0):
{"requests": [ {"repeatCell": { "range": { "sheetId": 0, "startRowIndex": 0, "endRowIndex": 1 }, "cell": { "userEnteredFormat": { "textFormat": { "bold": true } } }, "fields": "userEnteredFormat.textFormat.bold" }} ]}
SHEETS.spreadsheets().batchUpdate(spreadsheetId=SHEET_ID, body=requests).execute()
For more details on the code in the video, check out the deepdive blog post. As you can probably guess, the key challenge is in constructing the JSON payload to send to API calls—the common operations samples can really help you with this. You can also check out our JavaScript codelab where we guide you through writing a Node.js app that manages customer orders for a toy company, featuring the toy orders data we looked at today but in a relational database. While the resulting equivalent Sheet is featured prominently in today's video, we will revisit it again in an upcoming episode showing you how to generate slides with spreadsheet data using the new Google Slides API, so stay tuned for that!
We hope all these resources help developers enhance their next app using G Suite APIs! Please subscribe to our channel and tell us what topics you would like to see in other episodes of the G Suite Dev Show!
With all the exciting A.I. stuff happening, there are lots of people eager to start tinkering with machine learning technology. We want to help make it easier for anyone to do that – whether you're an engineer, hobbyist, student, or someone who's just curious. But sometimes, it can feel pretty intimidating when you're just getting started.
That's why we've created a site called A.I. Experiments. The site showcases simple experiments that let anyone play with this technology hands-on, and resources for creating your own experiments.
The experiments show how machine learning can make sense of all kinds of things – images, drawings, language, sound, and more. They were made by people with all different interests – web developers, musicians, game designers, bird sound enthusiasts, data visualizers – with everyone bringing their own ideas for how to use machine learning.
We also want to make it easier for coders to make their own experiments. Many of the projects we're featuring are built with tools anyone can use, like Cloud Vision API, Tensorflow, and other libraries from the machine learning community. The site has videos by the creators explaining how they work, and links to open-source code to help you get started. To submit something you've made, or just play with things other people are making, visit A.I. Experiments.
And if you're looking for even more inspiration for what's possible using machine learning, check out these new experiments from our friends in Google Arts & Culture.
Good morning! Only one minute to go until Darin Fisher, VP of Chrome kick's off this year's keynote at Chrome Dev Summit 2016. Join us as we take a look at the latest web advancements with over 20 sessions presented by Chrome engineers. We're live streaming all sessions and posting videos throughout the next two days.
Posted by Wesley Chun, Developer Advocate, G Suite
At Google I/O 2016, we gave developers a preview of the Google Slides API. Since then, the gears have been cranking at full speed, and we've been working with various early-access partners and developers to showcase what you can do with it. Today, we're happy to announce that the Slides API v1 is now generally available and represents the first time that developers have ever been able to programmatically access Slides!
The Slides API breaks new ground, changing the way that presentations are created. No longer do they require manual creation by users on their desktops or mobile devices. Business data on inventory items like retail merchandise, homes/property, hotels/lodging, restaurants/menus, venues/events, and other "cataloged" assets can be instantly turned into presentations based on pre-existing slide templates. Traditionally, the sheer amount of data (and of course time[!]) that went into creating these slide decks made it unwieldy if done by hand. Applications leveraging the API can easily generate presentations like these, customized as desired, and in short order.
Developers use the API by crafting a JSON payload for each request. (We recommend you batch multiple commands together to send to the API.) You can think of these as actions one can perform from the Slides user interface but available programmatically. To give you an idea of how the new API works, here are what some requests look like for several common operations:
// create new slide (title & body layout) { "createSlide": { "slideLayoutReference": { "predefinedLayout": "TITLE_AND_BODY" } } }, // insert text into textbox { "insertText": { "objectId": titleID, "text": "Hello World!" } }, // add bullets to text paragraphs { "createParagraphBullets": { "objectId": shapeID, "textRange": { "type": "ALL" } } }, // replace text "variables" with image { "replaceAllShapesWithImage": { "imageUrl": imageURL, "replaceMethod": "CENTER_INSIDE", "containsText": { "text": "{{COMPANY_LOGO}}" } } }
If you're interested in seeing what developers have already built using the API, take a look at our initial set of partner integrations by Conga, Trello, Lucidchart, Zapier and more, as described in detail in our G Suite blog post.
To help you get started, check out the DevByte above from our new series dedicated to G Suite developers. In the video, we demonstrate how to take "variables" or placeholders in a template deck and use the API to generate new decks replacing those proxies with the desired text or image. Want to dive deeper into its code sample? Check out this blogpost. If you're not a Python developer, it'll be your pseudocode as you can use any language supported by the Google APIs Client Libraries. Regardless of your development environment, you can use similar "scaffolding" to generate many presentations with varying content for your users. Stay tuned for more videos that highlight other Slides API features.
The Slides API is available to projects in your Google Developers console today. Developers can find out more in the official documentation which features an API overview plus Quickstarts, sample code in multiple languages and environments, to bootstrap your next project. We look forward to seeing all the amazing slide deck generating applications you build with our first ever API!
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.
Posted by Francis Ma, Firebase Product Manager
Originally posted to the Firebase blog
Our goal with Firebase is to help developers build better apps and grow them into successful businesses. Six months ago at Google I/O, we took our well-loved backend-as-a-service (BaaS) and expanded it to 15 features to make it Google’s unified app development platform, available across iOS, Android, and the web.
We launched many new features at Google I/O, but our work didn’t stop there. Since then, we’ve learned a lot from you (750,000+ projects created on Firebase to date!) about how you’re using our platform and how we can improve it. Thanks to your feedback, today we’re launching a number of enhancements to Crash Reporting, Analytics, support for game developers and more. For more information on our announcements, tune in to the livestream video from Firebase Dev Summit in Berlin. They’re also listed here:
Often the hardest part about fixing an issue is reproducing it, so we’ve added rich context to each crash to make the process simple. Firebase Crash Reporting now shows Firebase Analytics event data in the logs for each crash. This gives you clarity into the state of your app leading up to an error. Things like which screens of your app were visited are automatically logged with no instrumentation code required. Crash logs will also display any custom events and parameters you explicitly log using Firebase Analytics. Firebase Crash Reporting works for both iOS and Android apps.
Glide, a popular live video messaging app, relies on Firebase Crash Reporting to ensure user quality and release agility. “No matter how much effort you put into testing, it will never be as thorough as millions of active users in different locations, experiencing a variety of network conditions and real life situations. Firebase allows us to rapidly gain trust in our new version during phased release, as well as accelerate the process of identifying core issues and providing quick solutions.” - Roi Ginat, Founder, Glide.
We want to help you deliver high-quality experiences, so testing your app before it goes into the wild is incredibly important. Firebase Test Lab allows you to easily test your app on many physical and virtual devices in the cloud, without writing a single line of test code. Beginning today, developers on the Spark service tier (which is free!) can run five tests per day on physical devices and ten tests per day on virtual devices—with no credit card setup required. We’ve also heard that you want more device options, so we’ve added 11 new popular Android device models to Test Lab, available today.
We know that your data is most actionable when you can see and process it as quickly as possible. Therefore, we’re announcing a number of features to help you maximize the potential of your analytics events:
We were happy to give you a sneak preview at the Firebase Dev Summit of a new feature we are now building, StreamView, which will offer a live, dynamic view of your analytics data as it streams in.
To further enhance your targeting options, we’ve improved the connection between Firebase Analytics and other Firebase features, such as Dynamic Links and Remote Config. For example, you can now use Dynamic Links on your Facebook business page, and we can identify Facebook as a source in Firebase Analytics reporting. Also, you can now target Remote Config changes by User Properties, in addition to Audiences.
Game developers are building great apps, and we want Firebase to work for you, too. We’ve built an entirely new plugin for Unity that supports Analytics, the Realtime Database, Authentication, Dynamic Links, Remote Config, Notifications and more. We've also expanded our C++ SDK with Realtime Database support.
FirebaseUI is a library that provides common UI elements when building apps, and it’s a quick way to integrate with Firebase. FirebaseUI 1.0 includes a drop-in UI flow for Firebase Authentication, with common identity providers such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter. FirebaseUI 1.0 also added features such as client-side joins and intersections for the Realtime Database, plus integrations with Glide and SDWebImage that make downloading and displaying images from Firebase Storage a cinch. Follow our progress or contribute to our Android, iOS, and Web components on Github.
We want to provide the best tool for developers, but it’s also important that we give resources and training to help you get more out of the platform. As such, we’ve created a new Udacity course: Firebase in a Weekend! It’s an instructor-led video course to help all developers get up and running with Firebase on iOS and Android, in two days.
Finally, to help wrap your head around all our announcements, we’ve created a new demo app. This is an easy way to see how Analytics, Crash Reporting, Test Lab, Notifications, and Remote Config work in a live environment, without having to write a line of code.
Helping developers build better apps and successful businesses is at the core of Firebase. We work hard on it every day. We love hearing your feedback and ideas for new features and improvements—and we hope you can see from the length of this post that we take them to heart! Follow us on Twitter, join our Slack channel, participate in our Google Group, and let us know what you think. We’re excited to see what you’ll build next!
