scoutie's new bling.
he's high styling now.
i tried making grilled cheese...
it took a few tries, but they were good :)
ryan looked so dapper on his first day of work!
oh, and lastly...
ok, that's all.
When we find tools that work well for us at Google, we like to share them with our customers. That's what we're doing today as we launch Labs for Google Apps, a place for us to deliver cool new experimental features to our Google Apps enterprise users. The applications we're launching today into Labs for Google Apps are:
Here's a peek under the hood of these new Labs tools.
Since Google App Engine launched in April, Googlers have been using it to build and port a number of useful applications--some of which are the apps we're launching today into Google Labs.
The challenge in building these features was to design a system to centrally deploy a single application to many (many!) Google Apps customers, each on a separate domain. We needed to create data sandboxes for each customer within the app. We needed to add domain administrator controls. We needed to make it safe and easy to use and we needed big-time scalability. That's why we built these new applications on App Engine -- it provided us with a container that combined scalability and rapid development with our experience building powerful applications that Google users love.
Here at Google, we're very serious about keeping user data safe. We designed safety mechanisms to enforce the separation of namespaces in the datastore so that data remains secure and private on each domain. We also added integration with the Google Apps control panel for customer-level administrative controls.
Today's launch is just the beginning, and we're going to introduce more useful apps into the Labs for Google Apps over time. We also intend to eventually open up this platform to all App Engine developers, so that new and existing software vendors can build easy-to-consume software for the million-plus businesses using Google Apps today.
Want to be a part of it? Check out the Solutions Marketplace and you can pick and choose which Labs for Google Apps features you want for your domain. We've put feedback links in too so you can let us know what's good and what's not--the good stuff may make it into Google Apps one day.
Happy experimenting!
(cross posted with the Google LatLong Blog)
*note: i know the below picture is essentially the exact same picture as above, but i wanted to document us running across the busy street to the Central Market... it was just memorable. so there. it's my blog, i can post two almost identical pictures if i want to. :) 
Many of you have expressed interest in learning about what's coming next for Google App Engine, and although we've often talked about features we plan on supporting, we've decided to publish this roadmap along with our documentation. Without further ado, here's what we've got coming up in the next 2 quarters:
At Google we've historically avoided giving release dates for our products because we know that software development is incredibly hard to predict. Thus, it should be noted that while we're working hard on these features, development schedules do slip at times, and the dates below may change. We'll do our best to update this roadmap as our engineers continue development.
For reference, since our release in April, we've already added:
Remember, you can always let us know what you think on our Google Group!
I use the Gmail client on my mobile phone all the time. Because of this, I'm always looking for ways to make it faster, more robust and easier to use. Today, we're thrilled to introduce Gmail for mobile version 2.0 for J2ME-supported and BlackBerry phones. Our focus for this version was to make the experience faster and more reliable. We rearchitected the entire client to push all the processing to the background, greatly improve the client-side caching scheme and optimize every bottleneck piece of code we came across.
We'll start with Saturday. Mom and I both got our hair done, and then we went to lunch at California Pizza Kitchen before driving to our friend Azalea's antique store. I have been trying to find these pumpkins with scripture on them, but had no luck. I did, however, find a Christmas present for my mother-in-law, so that was productive! Mom got a fun hat for a costume party, and I can't wait to borrow it! (See her blog for a cute picture of her in her outfit!) After hanging out with mom for a little bit, I went home and got ready for my next outing....Kristin & Alan's family & friend's barbeque night! Everyone was there, and I got to meet some of Ryan's coworkers so it was a super fun evening of hamburgers and yummy cake.
There were some prank jellybeans at the party, and they definitely kept us entertained for a while! The flavors looked like coconut, peach, etc, but they were actually vomit, earwax, baby wipes, boogers, etc. SO GROSS! Aaron was a trooper and tried them out for us.
the happy couple!!!
That evening, we met up with our Foundations class at the Arbors Nature Preserve (which is where we had our Fall portraits last year!) The turn-out was a little less than we expected, but of course we still had fun with Matt & Courtney, and we had some great conversation with our teachers, too. The fall leaves were finally changing, so that was super exciting!!
Later that evening, we went to Kristin & Alan's reception at Javier's in downtown. We had drinks and appetizers out on the patio and then went inside for an amazing dinner. There was a cute slideshow of them throughout the night, and they were so cute! We had an awesome time.
On Monday night, we had the Stewarts and the Johnsons over for dinner and to carve pumpkins. We had a BLAST!! I just love those guys :) The Lord has truly blessed us with amazing young married friends that support and love us and walk through the same stuff we're going through. It's amazing! We ate some fajitas (I made enough for an army), and then started carving our pumpkins. We took a break in the middle of all the fun to sit and pray for our class and for our marriages. It was awesome.
(below: fake smiles after a little accident)
I love this picture... You can just hear Julie telling David that's not a good idea... :)
This might be my favorite picture of the night...David looks like a jack-o-lantern.
David looks like a demon, Matt looks goofy & Ryan looks perturbed.
The Johnson's "J"
The Johnson/McCrady/Stewart Pumpkin Carving Picture of 2008!
...and lastly... a friend's not a friend unless he can pop your back.
