Following the US elections on your phone

Elections in the US are coming, and the race is heating up. With Joe Biden just announced as the Democratic VP nominee, speculation is increasing about the Republican choice. To help you stay up to date on the latest election updates, we've set up a new one stop shop for your mobile electoral needs. Just go to m.google.com/elections on your mobile phone, and you can find these resources:

• Mobile Search - Link to search results for Obama and McCain, so you don't have to type in their names on your phone each time you want information.
• Mobile News - Read the latest! A handy link returns only elections-relevant news.
• Mobile Reader - Are you subscribed to the Google Power Readers in Politics? If you're already following the reading lists of the presidential candidates or prominent political journalists on Google Reader, you can keep it up while you're on the go. Not yet subscribed? Manage your account and subscriptions on your desktop computer.
• Mobile YouTube - Both presidential candidates have their own YouTube channels. Watch their latest clips of speeches and press conferences from your phone.
• Mobile Maps - Are you going to the Democratic National Convention in Denver, or the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis? Make sure you've got Google Maps for mobile on your phone to help you get around town. (And if you're going, stop by and say hello! We'll be at both conventions.)

Posted by Effie Seiberg, Mobile Special Projects

A couple datastore updates

We've updated other parts of the system before, so it's time for the datastore to ante up with its own improvements. There may not be any big surprises, but we still hope you'll enjoy the new features we've included!

First up is batch writes. You can now include entities in different entity groups in a single db.put() or db.delete() call. Entity modifications are only atomic within each entity group, but a single call that spans entity groups will be more efficient than a call for each group, which was required before.

Also, in our next upcoming release, indexes with a single repeated property will be supported. For example:

Kind: Post
 properties:
 - name: tag
 - name: tag

These indexes can be useful in a few different cases; see Queries and Indexes for more discussion.

As usual, be sure to update your SDK and check the release notes for a full list of changes. If you have feedback or questions, feel free to mention them on the group!

Posted by Ryan Barrett, App Engine Team