New Line Of iLuv iPhone 4 Cases

Here is iLuv has introduced its new trendy and protective cases for the dainty device which is reportedly the first line of iphone cases to be designed from awesome features. The new regatta, aurora, festival and gilt pieces has a wide range of high-quality and stylish gadgets accessories which can be especially used with iPhone 4. It arrives with innovative fashionable look.

You can be capable to adjust to your iPhone’s. The iCC760 regatta dual layer case provides you full protection against falls with 2 layers, the outer one with a top gloss computer appearance and a comparatively softer inside.

iLuv is one of the most popular manufacturer for making latest gadgets accessories just like its new line of iluv iCC765 aurora glow-in-the-dark case which provides you glow with low light conditions, and Fit for party animals. Overall iluv iPhone 4 series cases is perfect and best for iPhone it is secures the handset with its sturdy body.

Cost: Start from $19.99 (approx Rs. 983) to $34.99 (approx Rs. 1721)

New Bluetooth Headsets: Elite Silver and Elite Flip

new bluetooth headsets
Motorola unveils new elite silver and elite flip Bluetooth headsets, it comes with best sound features. If you are searching for headphones then just take a glance on this new Motorola headsets. These part of audio gadgets are built with NFC technology and deliver high sound quality and richness. It comes with enhance clarity and includes crystal talk dual-microphone noise cancellation technology.

It has an extended 300 feet roaming range which working with My MotoSpeak app. Elite silver and elite flip Bluetooth headsets comes with an attractive design with advance features such as the silver headset offers a 15 hours talk time period. Other modern feature includes a copper-clad aluminum wire voice coil, Neodymium magnet 30mm slim drivers, Supra-Aural look, and soft leatherette ear cushions. These new Motorola headsets will be available online at store.Motorola.com from October 24 so you can select your favorite model.

Cost:
former price – Rs. 6,371
latter cost – Rs. 4,900

source : http://www.techgadgets.info/

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Start the conversation with Google Translate for Android

(Cross posted on the Official Google Blog and Google Translate Blog)

Mobile technology and the web have made it easier for people around the world to access information and communicate with each other. But there’s still a daunting obstacle: the language barrier. We’re trying to knock down that barrier so everyone can communicate and connect more easily.

Earlier this year, we launched an update to Google Translate for Android with an experimental feature called Conversation Mode, which enables you to you translate speech back and forth between languages. We began with just English and Spanish, but today we’re expanding to 14 languages, adding Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Polish, Russian and Turkish.

To use Conversation Mode, speak into your phone’s microphone, and the Translate app will translate what you’ve said and read the translation out loud. The person you’re speaking with can then reply in their language, and Conversation Mode will translate what they said and read it back to you.

This technology is still in alpha, so factors like background noise and regional accents may affect accuracy. But since it depends on examples to learn, the quality will improve as people use it more. We wanted to get this early version out to help start the conversation no matter where you are in the world.

We’ve also added some other features to make it easier to speak and read as you translate. For example, if you wanted to say “Where is the train?” but Google Translate recognizes your speech as “Where is the rain?”, you can now correct the text before you translate it. You can also add unrecognized words to your personal dictionary.

When viewing written translation results, you can tap the magnifying glass icon to view the translated text in full screen mode so you can easily show it to someone nearby, or just pinch to zoom in for a close-up view.

Tap the magnifying glass icon to view translations full screen.

Finally, we’ve also optimized the app for larger screens like your Android tablet.

While we work to expand full Conversation Mode to even more languages, Google Translate for Android still supports text translation among 63 languages, voice input in 17 of those languages, and text-to-speech in 24 of them.

Download the Google Translate app in Android Market — it’s available for tablets and mobile phones running Android 2.2 and up.


Posted by Jeff Chin, Product Manager

App Engine 1.5.5 SDK Release

2011 has seen some exciting releases for App Engine. As the days get shorter, the weather gets colder, and all that Halloween candy starts tempting everyone in the grocery store, we’ve been hard at work on our latest action packed release.

Premier Accounts

When choosing a platform for your most critical business applications, we recognize that uptime guarantees, easy management and paid support are often just as important as product features. So today we’re launching Google App Engine premier accounts.  For $500 per month (not including the cost to provision internet services), you’ll receive:

• Premium support (see the 

Technical Support Services Guidelines for details).

• A 99.95% uptime Service Level Agreement (see the draft agreement, the final agreement will be in the signed offline agreement).


• The ability to create an unlimited number of apps on your premier account domain.


• No minimum monthly fees per app. Pay only for the resources you use.


• Monthly billing via invoice.

To sign up for a premier account, please contact our sales team at appengine_premier_requests@google.com.  

Python 2.7

PIL? NumPy? Concurrent requests? Python 2.7 has it all, and today we’re opening up Python 2.7 as an experimental release. We’ve put together a list of all the known differences between the current 2.5 runtime and the new runtime.

Overall Changes

We know that bumping up against hard limits can be frustrating, and we’ve talked all year about our continued push to lift our system limits. With this release we are raising several of these:

• Request Duration: The frontend request deadline has been increased from 30 seconds to 60 seconds. We’ve increased the maximum URLFetch deadline to match from 10 seconds to 60 seconds.


• File limits: We’ve increased the number of files you can upload with your application from 3,000 to 10,000 files, and the file size limit has also been increased from 10MB to 32MB.


• API Limits: Post payloads for URLFetches are now capped at 5MB instead of 1MB.

We’re also announcing several limited preview features and trusted tester programs:

• Cloud SQL Preview: We announced last week that we are offering a preview of SQL support in App Engine. Give it a try and let us know what you think.


• Full-text Search: We are looking for early trusted testers for our long anticipated Full-Text Search API. Please fill out this form if you’re interested in trying it out.


• Conversion API: Ever wanted to convert from text to PDF in your App? Then consider signing up as a trusted tester for the Conversion API.

Datastore

• Cross Group (XG) Transactions: For those who need transactional writes to entities in multiple entity groups (and that's everyone, right?), XG Transactions are just the thing. This feature uses two phase commit to make cross group writes atomic just like single group writes.

Platform Improvements

• Experimental Google Cloud Storage Integration: As Google Cloud Storage, formerly Google Storage for Developers, graduates from labs, we are improving our integration by adding access via the files API.


• Prediction API: Another of our friends graduating from labs is the Prediction API. Check out some of the App Engine examples in their getting started guide.

Of course, these are just the high level changes. This release is packed full of features and bug fixes, and as always, we welcome your feedback in the group.

Posted by The App Engine Team

Google Cloud SQL: Your database in the cloud

Cross-posted from the Google Code Blog



One of App Engine’s most requested features has been a simple way to develop traditional database-driven applications. In response to your feedback, we’re happy to announce the limited preview of Google Cloud SQL.

You can now choose to power your App Engine applications with a familiar relational database in a fully-managed cloud environment. This allows you to focus on developing your applications and services, free from the chores of managing, maintaining and administering relational databases.

Google Cloud SQL brings many benefits to the App Engine community:

• No maintenance or administration - we manage the database for you.


• High reliability and availability - your data is replicated synchronously to multiple data centers. Machine, rack and data center failures are handled automatically to minimize end-user impact.


• Familiar MySQL database environment with JDBC support (for Java-based App Engine applications) and DB-API support (for Python-based App Engine applications).


• Comprehensive user interface for administering databases.


• Simple and powerful integration with Google App Engine.

The service includes database import and export functionality, so you can move your existing MySQL databases to the cloud and use them with App Engine.

Cloud SQL is available free of charge for now, and we will publish pricing at least 30 days before charging for it. The service will continue to evolve as we work out the kinks during the preview, but let us know if you’d like to take it for a spin.



Posted by Navneet Joneja, Product Manager for Google Cloud SQL

An enhanced Google Docs experience on Android tablets

(Cross-posted from the Google Docs blog)

Earlier this year, we introduced the Google Docs app for Android. Since then, many users have downloaded the app and enjoyed the benefits of being able to access, edit and share docs on the go.

Today’s update to the app makes Google Docs work better than ever on your tablet. With an entirely new design, we’ve customized the look to make the most of the larger screen space on tablets. The layout includes a three-panel view, which allows you to navigate through filters and collections, view your document list, and see document details, all at once.

Looking at the details panel on the right side, you can see a thumbnail to preview a document and its details before opening it. From the panel, you can see who can view or edit any doc.

New 3-panel view for improved browsing

Autocomplete makes sharing with others on the go even easier

These features are now available in 46 languages on tablet devices with Android 3.0+ (Honeycomb) and above.

You can download the app from the Android Market and let us know what you think in the comments or by posting on the forum. Learn more by visiting the help center.

Posted by David Loxton, Product Manager

OnTheFly™ 1.2 for Android just made it easier to plan your trip

(Cross-posted on the ITA Software by Google blog)

We just released the latest version of OnTheFly™, our airfare shopping mobile app, for Android. One of the new features in v1.2 is flexible date search, which enables you to browse 35 days of potential departure dates on a calendar combined with an interactive “temperature” graph.

You can also save and access search history now, including particular itineraries of interest. We’ll even check price changes for those itineraries so you can know the best time to plan that dream trip.

If you haven’t already tried OnTheFly, you can download it for free from Android Market or the App Store. OnTheFly for use with BlackBerry (OS 4.6+) can be accessed at http://bbmatrix.itasoftware.com.

Posted by Stefan Frank, Product Manager

Project WOW

Today's post is contributed by Edward Hartwell Goose of PA Consulting, who is working on an App for the UK’s Met Office to report everyone's favorite bit of small talk, the weather. We hope you find the discussion of his team's experience using App Engine illuminating.

The UK’s Met Office is one of the world’s leading organisations in weather forecasting, providing reports throughout the day for the UK and the rest of the world. The weather information they provide is consumed by a variety of industries from shipping to aircraft, and powers some of the UK’s leading media organisations, such as the BBC.

Although the Met Office is the biggest provider of weather data, they aren’t the only ones collecting information. Thousands of enthusiasts worldwide collect their own weather data, from a wide variety of weather stations - either simple temperature sensors or highly sophisticated stations that rival the Met Office’s own equipment. The question of course is: how do you harness the power of this crowd?

Enter the Weather Observations Website

The Met Office and our team from PA Consulting worked together to answer this question late last year. The end result was The Weather Observations Website, or “WOW” for short. In the 3 months since launch on the 1st June 2011, WOW has recorded 5.5 million weather reports from countries throughout the world. Furthermore, we can retrieve current reports in sub second times, providing a real time map of worldwide weather. We haven’t got the whole globe covered just yet and the UK carries the most sites, but most countries in Western Europe are reporting. We also have reports from a medley of countries throughout the world, from Mauritius, Brazil and as far away as New Zealand. We even have one site reporting at regular intervals in Oman (it’s hot!).

Better yet, as a development team of 2, since launch, we’ve spent almost no time at all doing anything but casual monitoring of WOW. No one carries a pager, and the one time we did have problems (we underestimated demand, and our quota ran out), I was able to upgrade the quota in a minute or so. And I did it from my sofa. On my phone.

How good is that?

WOW - Showing Live Temperature Data Across Europe

Lessons Learnt Building for App Engine

We learnt a lot building WOW. A huge amount in fact. And we’d love to share our insights with you. We’d also love to tell you what we love about App Engine - and why you should use it too. And so you know we’re honest - we’ll tell you what we don’t like too!

Firstly - the good stuff. We think App Engine is a fantastic tool for prototyping and any team working in an agile environment. We’re big fans of SCRUM at PA Consulting, and App Engine was a dream to work with. Compared to some of our colleagues working with difficult build procedures and environments, our full release procedure never took more than 5 minutes. Better yet, App Engine’s deployment tools all hook up with ANT and CruiseControl (our continuous build system), allowing us to run unit tests and deploy new code on every check-in to our code repository. This allowed us as developers to get on with what we do best: develop!

The APIs are great too. The documentation is fantastic and is regularly updated. We use all but the Channel API at the moment (sadly, it uses Google Talk Infrastructure behind the scenes and this gets blocked by some corporate environments). If I could offer any advice to a budding App Engine developer it would be to thoroughly read the documentation, and place the following three questions and their solutions at the forefront of everything you do:

        1. Can I do it in the background? - Task Queue API

        2. Can I use the low-level API? - Datastore API

        3. Can I cache the result? - Memcache API

These three principles have given WOW the performance it has, and will allow it to scale effectively over the coming years. We’ve got some big changes coming over the next couple of months too that should provide even higher performance as well as exciting new features.

Future Developments

So, how about improvements App Engine could make? There are definitely a few, although how important they are will depend on the problems you’re trying to solve.

To begin with, improvements to some of the non technical elements are needed before App Engine becomes truly mainstream. Needing a credit card to pay is a showstopper for some organisations. Backup and restore is also missing, unless you implement it yourself. This is perfectly possible, but can add significant man days to your development effort if your data structure is complex and fast changing.

We also struggled with how to estimate quota to begin with too. One of the brilliant features of App Engine is how easy it is to spool up (and down) new instances to deal with demand. Unfortunately, this also means it can be quite easy to accidentally spool up too many instances and burn quota quickly. Although this has never affected the actual data, it can cause an unpleasant spike in the amount of dollars spent. We also had a similar problem with a MapReduce job getting stuck overnight that caused a scare the next morning. Hopefully the new monitoring API should provide a bit more visibility of these issues as well as automatic email notifications to help catch these issues.

Aside from that, other features will probably depend on the application you’re trying to build. Built in support for geo-queries would be invaluable for WOW. Currently we use an external library, but this adds some extra overhead on our development. Another common feature request is full text search which is essential for projects dealing with large text corpa. Both of these features would allow us to provide better search facilities for our users - for example search by site name or geographic location. These queries can be implemented in App Engine as it is now, but achieving optimal performance and optimal cost are difficult problems that we struggle to complete ourselves.

Final Thoughts

Overall, we’re really impressed by App Engine. The App Engine team regularly releases new versions, and although it does have limitations it has allowed us to concentrate on what really matters to us - the weather. We know WOW will scale without any problems, and we don’t have to worry about any of the hardware configuration or system administration that can easily consume time. Our small team of developers spends all of their time understanding the business problems and improving WOW.

We’re really looking forward to taking WOW forward in the future, we hope you can join us: http://wow.metoffice.gov.uk.

Edward Hartwell Goose (@edhgoose)

Developer

PA Consulting

Fall 2011 App Engine events

Buenos días desde Buenos Aires!! Wow, we are just blazing through the summer! We had an exciting Google I/O in May where we saw the launch of the Go runtime, introduction of the Backends feature, and confirmed Google's commitment to the platform with our plans to leave preview mode, not to mention the five releases since that time. We then hit the road this summer with team members appearing around the globe, including mega events like the Cloud Computing Expo, EuroPython, and OSCON.



At Google I/O, many App Engine team members gave in-depth technical sessions. Alfred Fuller, an App Engine Datastore engineer, revealed how the High Replication datastore gives greater reliability and availability for users. Michael Handler, one of App Engine’s talented Site Reliability Engineers, discussed how App Engine works in production. At OSCON, the largest open source event in the world, yours truly gave a three-hour App Engine overview and workshop to help new users get up to speed, and earlier in the year at PyCon, described how Python users can avoid “vendor lock-in” via the Django-nonrel project by porting their applications from webapp to Django, allowing them to move on to or off of App Engine as they please with only minor configuration changes. We participate in events like these because we like to communicate with users to find out what they like & don’t like about the platform, and we often take their suggestions to heart!



This fall we have a full schedule, appearing at many developer events worldwide, including Google Developer Days and Google DevFests. At the Google events, we'll recap App Engine and those announcements we made at I/O, and you’ll learn how to build exciting applications using App Engine and other Google cloud technologies as well as how to build games in the cloud. Here are the dates, events, and locations that we will be visiting:



Fall 2011

Sep 19-20 - Google Developer Day Argentina - Buenos Aires - Wesley Chun, Chris Schalk

Sep 19-23 - Strata - New York - Chris Schalk

Sep 23-24 - PyCon Argentina - Junín - Wesley Chun

Sep 26-30 - Congresso Brasileiro de Software - São Paulo - Wesley Chun

Sep 29-Oct 1 - Python Brasil[7] - São Paulo - Wesley Chun

Oct 8-9 - Silicon Valley CodeCamp - Los Altos Hills - Wesley Chun

Oct 10 - Google Developer Day Russia - Moscow - Iein Valdez, Fred Sauer

Oct 18 - Google Developer Day Czech Republic - Prague - Iein Valdez, Fred Sauer

Oct 20 - Google DevFest France - Paris - Iein Valdez, Johan “Proppy“ Euphrosine

Nov 1 - Google Developer Day Japan - Tokyo - Takashi Matsuo, Johan “Proppy“ Euphrosine

Nov 8 - Google Developer Day Australia - Sydney - Chris Schalk, Johan “Proppy“ Euphrosine

Nov 8 - Google DevFest Spain - Barcelona - Iein Valdez, Michael Manoochehri

Nov 12 - Google DevFest Singapore - Singapore - Chris Schalk

Nov 13 - Google Developer Day Israel - Tel-Aviv - Michael Manoochehri

Nov 14 - Devoxx - Antwerp - Iein Valdez

Nov 16 - Google DevFest Indonesia - Jakarta - Chris Schalk

Nov 19 - Google Developer Day Germany - Berlin - Michael Manoochehri



If these aren't close enough to you, keep an eye out on this list as we'll add new events and locations as they are scheduled. A calendar with all of Google's developer events is also available. We look forward to meeting you soon!



Posted by Wesley Chun (@wescpy), Google cloud Developer Relations team

Google+: 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107...

We started the Google+ project to help make online sharing more like real-world sharing. Of course, in life we increasingly share on the go, so over the past ~90 days we’ve developed Google+ apps for Android, iOS and the mobile web.

During this time we've made lots of improvements to the project, and in fact, the team just announced its 100th new feature overall (open signups). But our work is far from done, and today we're bringing seven additional Google+ features to your mobile device.

Hangouts on your mobile (a.k.a. feature #92) 

Seeing someone face-to-face is one of the most important ways you can connect with them. Unfortunately we're often too busy, too far away, or too unpredictable to make meetups a regular occurrence. That's why we're making Hangouts available on phones with Android 2.3+ and front-facing cameras (iOS support coming soon). Just find an active hangout in the Stream, and you can join your friends face-to-face-to-face:

Hangouts on your phone: Stream View (left), Green Room (center), Portrait View (right) 

101, 102, 103. You asked for it 

We take your feedback very seriously, and we do our best to deliver your most-requested features as quickly as possible. So today we're launching three more things you've been asking for in Google+ mobile:

• Improved SMS support. Users in the US and India can now post to Google+, receive notifications, and respond to group messages via SMS (with more countries on the way). To start texting, just verify your phone number in Google+ settings. 
• Improved +mentions support. To add someone in your circles to a conversation (or simply get their attention), you can now +[their name] inside a post or comment. 
• +1’ing comments. When you read a great comment in the Stream, you can now +1 it directly from your iOS device (with Android coming soon). 

SMS (left), +mentions (center), +1’ing comments (right)

104, 105, 106. Giving you more choices 

The most important part of Google+ is you, so we want to make sure you have meaningful ways to personalize your experience -- from selecting just the right people to share with, to switching between the app, the web, and SMS as you see fit. Today we're excited to bring three new options to mobile users:

• Edit your profile photo. You can now put your best face forward, from where you happen to be. Just visit your profile, click edit, and you can choose or take a new picture. 
• Customize your notifications. Some notifications may be more important than others, especially when you’re on the go. Now you can decide which ones you see (or not) on your phone. 
• Make some room. If you’re taking lots of photos, or installing lots of apps, then internal storage can sometimes shrink. That’s why you can now move the Google+ app to SD storage on Android devices. 

 Edit your profile photo (left), Notification settings (center), Move to USB (right) 

107. So long Huddle, hello Messenger (and hi there, photos) 

As we move from limited field trial to open beta, we’re renaming Huddle to Messenger. More importantly, we’re adding new functionality to Messenger that makes group communication even more fun: photo sharing. So now when you’re sitting down for a meal, or kicking back on vacation, you can show your circles what’s happening, right this second:

Messenger: Homescreen (left), Choosing a Photo (center), Posting a Photo (right)  

We hope you enjoy today’s round of Google+ mobile features. There’s plenty left for us to do, so we’ll keep listening, and working to make your mobile experience that much better. In the meantime, you can try the new app (on Android and the mobile web today, and on iOS soon), and let us know what you think.

 Posted by Punit Soni, Google+ Mobile PM

Launching Google Wallet on Sprint and Working with Visa, American Express and Discover

(cross-posted on Official Google Blog and Google Commerce Blog)

In May we announced Google Wallet—an app that makes your phone your wallet—with Citi, MasterCard, Sprint and First Data. With Google Wallet, you can tap, pay and save using your phone and near field communication (NFC).

We’ve been testing it extensively, and today we’re releasing the first version of the app to Sprint. That means we’re beginning to roll out Google Wallet to all Sprint Nexus S 4G phones through an over-the-air update—just look for the “Wallet” app. Here’s a demo of Google Wallet in action:



Google Wallet enables you to pay with your Citi MasterCard credit card and the Google Prepaid Card, which can be funded with any of your existing plastic credit cards. As a thanks to early adopters, we’re adding a $10 free bonus to the Google Prepaid Card if you set it up in Google Wallet before the end of the year.

When we announced Google Wallet, we pledged a commitment to an open commerce ecosystem. We appreciate Citi and MasterCard for being our launch partners. And today, Visa, Discover and American Express have made available their NFC specifications that could enable their cards to be added to future versions of Google Wallet.

Our goal is to make it possible for you to add all of your payment cards to Google Wallet, so you can say goodbye to even the biggest traditional wallets. In fact, we’ve got a video of our first customer, someone who is ready to replace his famously over-stuffed wallet. We hope Google Wallet gives him “serenity now.”

This is still just the beginning and while we’re excited about this first step, we look forward to bringing Google Wallet to more phones in the future. You can learn more about Google Wallet at google.com/wallet.

Posted by Osama Bedier, Vice President of Payments

Pictarine: pictures in the cloud

Pictarine is a photo management web application, launched in 2010, that allows people to easily manage and share all of their photos from Flickr, Picasa, Facebook, Twitter and other sites. Pictarine developers Guillaume Martin and Maxime Rafalimanana have contributed the following post discussing their experiences using Google App Engine and Google Web Toolkit.



From the start, we used Google technologies in developing Pictarine and we wanted to share our experience with them so far. In this post, we will shed some light on the weaknesses and strengths we found in Google Web Toolkit (GWT) and Google App Engine. We will also discuss how we leveraged GWT to build a new technology that allows Pictarine to seamlessly display photos from the computer directly into the browser. The following diagram is an overview of how our application works.

Building a mashup in the cloud with Google App Engine



The Pictarine team is made of a web designer and two developers who previously worked mainly with Java based enterprise technologies and had a little experience with web technologies. When we started the project in early 2009, we were quite open on learning new languages like Python or Ruby, but when App Engine announced that Java would be supported, we were really excited to give Google App Engine a try.



The first few months, learning about the App Engine environment was quite easy and dare I say fun. Testing our code on Google’s servers from Eclipse IDE was only one click away. So we built our first prototype fast and we quickly decided to adopt App Engine. Then we started to build the core of our application: the engine that uses the API from Flickr, Picasa, Facebook to fetch the users’ photos. This is where we hit the first limitations of App Engine. Most users have a lot of photos on these services and retrieving them can take some time. But App Engine has strict limits on how long a request should last: an outgoing HTTP request cannot last more than 10 seconds and cannot process a request for more than 30 seconds. So while building our architecture we found ourselves writing approximately one third of our code dealing with these limitations: paginating our requests, creating background tasks to store data in small batches, etc.



In early 2010, when we launched our alpha version, everything went smoothly. We had some good press coverage and App Engine met our expectations in handling our first users. During 2010, we worked on implementing new features requested by our users, and during this period of time we were really impressed by the way App Engine evolved. Many of the limitations were lifted and great new features were added. We are now able to use Task Queues for requests that last up to 10 minutes, which we fully use to sync our users’ photos and albums. One of the features we like the most is the Channel API, a push notification system that allows us to instantly show a photo in every connected browser as soon as it is uploaded.
App Engine is still not perfect but has greatly improved and when we see its roadmap, we are quite confident it will continue to improve.



Building a fresh photo experience with Google Web Toolkit 



When we started Pictarine, we wanted a fast, distraction free interface that would allow our users to focus on their photos. We wanted the interface to adapt to the screen resolution, displaying a lot of photos on large screens and fewer on small ones. We wanted it to be automatically updated when new comments or new photos are added. We wanted a web application. As we eliminated Flash quite quickly (based on our user experience...) we started to look at tools to build HTML/CSS/Javascript applications. We settled quickly on GWT: while coding in Java, with all the tools we are used to (even the debugger), we could produce optimized Javacript that would run in every browser! When we started with GWT, it was already 3 years old, so we had few complaints about it. The main issue was that we had to always keep in mind that the Java code we produced was ultimately translated to Javascript. So some Java methods, such as the Reflection API, are not allowed. Another thing that was not obvious to us when we started with GWT was that a java developer needs an intimate knowledge of HTML/CSS if he/she wants to go beyond the basic user interface provided by the GWT widgets.



What we really like about GWT in our architecture is the ability to share code between client and server: we can use the same Photo or Album class on the client and the server and the GWT RPC system allows us to automatically share the same Java object on both side. We can also have the same data validation code on both sides: we can alert the user immediately on errors and still validate the data on the server just in case.



Another great feature we like about GWT is its handling of internationalisation. From the beginning we wanted to build a website available for all Internet users, so supporting English as well as our native language (French) was almost obligatory. Fortunately, GWT makes it really easy to generate centralized localization files so that we just have to translate.



Finally, to illustrate how great Javascript generation is, when IE9 came out, we waited a few weeks for GWT to support it and our application was compatible after a recompile! Of course, the IE9 team also did a good job with their HTML5/CSS3 engine.



Building an universal uploader 



After the launch of our alpha in 2010, our users were able to see and share their photos from Flickr, Picasa, Facebook. But they still had to put their photos on these websites first before coming to Pictarine. This limitation quickly became the first request on our feedback system. We needed to let our users do everything from Pictarine, including uploading photos. Uploading many photos from a website is still not a trivial process. Most websites choose Flash to allow users to upload multiple files at once, but our experience with it was that it often crashed after a while. Some use Java applets, but they are never well integrated and always look odd. At Pictarine we decided to tackle this problem by using Java Applet for their stability across all platforms but without using it to render photos or folders.



We have built a technology that uses the GWT RPC mechanism to talk to a Java Applet: photos, upload progression are rendered in HTML/CSS and the applet takes care of photos resizing and uploading. Sharing a photo from a camera is now a one-step process. This technology also allows users to browse their local files directly in their browser and it is fully integrated in our design.



We believe that this new use of Java applets can help blur the line between the Desktop and the Cloud by seamlessly integrating desktop files in any web application.

In conclusion, we can say that we are really happy with the choices we made with App Engine and GWT. App Engine is a great service that perfectly handled the spike in traffic we saw right after articles on Mashable and Lifehacker were published. So we recommend it to every lean startup out there who loves developing in Java, Python or Go.

Posted by The App Engine Team

Introducing Voice Actions for Android in the UK, France, Italy, Germany and Spain

Last year in the US, we introduced Voice Actions, a series of spoken commands that let you control your Android phone or tablet with your voice. You can call businesses and contacts, send texts, browse the web and complete other common tasks, all just by speaking into your phone.

Today, we’re pleased to announce that users in the UK, France, Italy, Germany and Spain can now use Voice Actions in British English, French, Italian, German and Spanish.

To use Voice Actions, tap the microphone button on the Google search box on your home screen, open the Voice Search app, or press down for a few seconds on the physical search button on your phone to activate the “Speak Now” screen. You can see how it works in this video.

Speak any of these commands to perform a Voice Action on your phone:

• send text to [contact] [message]
• call [business]
• call [contact]
• go to [website]
• navigate to [location/business name]
• directions to [location/business name]
• map of [location]

And of course, you can still conduct a Google search using your voice.

Use Voice Actions to get directions, or send a text using just your voice

Voice Actions is available on phones and tablets running Android 2.2 and higher. If you don't have Voice Search on your phone yet, you can download it from Android Market - if you do have Voice Search, you can just start using Voice Actions.

We think Voice Actions helps you get things done on your phone faster and easier. Give it a try, and let us know what you think!

Posted by Bertrand Damiba, Product Manager

Your smartphone camera is now smarter with Goggles 1.6

Today, we launched a new version of Google Goggles that enhances the camera on your Android-powered phone. With this new opt-in feature in Goggles, you can simply photograph an image using your phone’s camera, and Goggles will work in the background to analyze your image. If your photo contains items that Goggles can recognize, the app will notify you.

Let’s say that I’m going on vacation, and I decide to use my Android-powered phone as my primary camera. Goggles would identify landmarks, paintings and other interesting objects in my photos. I can share these facts about my vacation with my friends right from my Goggles search history.

  

(l-r) Goggles has found a search result for this popular landmark; Find out more about this item in your photo within Google Goggles

Photos you take with your phone’s camera will only be seen by Goggles if you enable the Search from Camera feature. Here’s how:

• launch Google Goggles
• tap Menu > Settings > Search from Camera

Manage your opt-in status from the settings menu

Google Goggles 1.6 is available for Android 2.1 and newer devices. Download by clicking here or by scanning the QR code below:

Posted by Pavel Vodenski, Software Engineer

App Engine 1.5.4 SDK Release

It’s been a busy four weeks for us (you may have heard), but we are still on track with our new monthly release schedule. Today we have new SDKs for you, with some new features as well as some bug fixes.

Overall Changes

• Blobstore API - We’ve introduced an option to specify a limit on your blob upload size. This feature will allow you to expose blob uploads to your users, while still being able to ensure that their uploads won't exceed your preferred limits.


• Datastore Query Improvements - We’re also continuing our theme from the past few releases to tune our Datastore query planner to give users more flexibility. Starting with 1.5.4, queries with equality filters on multiple properties will now continue scanning up to the 30 second Datastore query deadline. Many of these queries that used to generate an error due to inefficient indexes will now succeed.


• Datastore Write Ops in the SDK - In response to the feedback from our recent Side By Side Bills release, we are now displaying the number of write ops needed to store an entity in the SDK dataviewer. Write ops include both the entity write as well as the index writes that are executed when an entity is added. You can always reduce the number of write ops by turning your indexed properties into unindexed properties, just make sure you don’t reference those properties in any of your queries! (Java, Python).

Java

• Prospective Search API - We’ve released the experimental Java version of our Prospective Search API. Prospective Search lets you detect and take action on datastore entities that match certain criteria when they are written.

Python

• Memcache - You can now make calls asynchronously with the Memcache API. With Asynchronous Memcache, your application does not need to block on calls to the Memcache API and can continue processing a request instead of waiting for a response from Memcache. Fear not Java friends, we’ll have matching functionality for you in an upcoming release.

Full release notes can be found in the usual location (Java, Python), and we’re always listening for your feedback in the groups. Happy coding!

Posted by The App Engine Team

A few adjustments to App Engine’s upcoming pricing changes

Last week we rolled out side-by-side billing to give you a more detailed preview of how you’ll be affected by the price changes that we announced in May. We received a variety of feedback and have made a few important changes based on it. Our intent is to be as open and transparent about the changes as possible and to give you enough time to prepare. In that spirit, our Engineering Director has also shared some of his personal thoughts.



We understand that the new rates surprised some of you. We’ve been listening closely to your feedback, and we wanted to share an update on the changes we’re making to help ensure you have an accurate picture of how the new pricing will affect your app. Although prices will increase, we’re confident that you’ll find App Engine still provides great value.



Based on your feedback we’re taking the following steps:

• Extended review period: We’re now giving you almost eight weeks before introducing the new pricing. You now have until November 1 to configure and tune your application to manage your costs. 


• Increased free Instance Hours: We are increasing the number of free Instance Hours from 24 to 28. This means that people who are using a free app to try out App Engine can run a single instance all day with a few spikes and still remain below our free quota.  This will be reflected in the comparison bills soon.


• Extended discount: We’ll continue to offer the 50% discount on instance prices until December 1st, at which time Python 2.7 should be available. Python 2.7 will include support for concurrent requests, which could further lower your costs. 


• Faster Usage Reports: We appreciate the importance of quickly being able to see the effect your tuning has on your bill and starting today we’ll provide your Usage Report (and the included comparison bills) within one day instead of the previous three. 


• Better analysis tools: We are working on better ways for you to model the cost of your apps. We will add the “billing” line into the instances graph on the Admin Console. We’re adding datastore billing information into the dev console to making it easier for you to track how the changes you make affect your bill, which should also help lower the cost. 


• Premier accounts: we know a lot of our customers are eagerly awaiting Premier accounts to get operational support, offline billing, unlimited accounts, and the SLA. So we will not wait until November 1st for this, but rather launch Premier accounts as soon as possible.  If you are interested in a Premier account, please contact us at appengine_premier_requests@google.com.

We also wanted to share some of the main ways for you to lower your bill and get a better sense of the true cost of App Engine:

• Set Max Idle instances: Setting Max Idle Instances to a lower level will help lower your costs as we will only charge for idle instances up to the maximum you set. This could impact your performance so it’s worth reading up on the ramifications. 


• Always-On reflected in bills: Currently the side-by-side bills still include the cost of always-on even though it will be retired when the new pricing launches (to be replaced by min idle instances). We’re working on a fix for this. Until then you can comfortably subtract 48 instance hours per day from the estimate. 


• Reserved instance hours: The simplest way to lower the charge for instance hours is to consider using reserved instance hours. They are 37.5% cheaper than on-demand, but you do need to commit to a certain number of them over the course of a week. 


• Managing resources: Check out this article, which provides more helpful advice on how to efficiently manage your resources and lower costs. 

We launched App Engine in preview three years ago to make it easier for you to build, maintain and scale web applications. Since then, we’ve added many features like Java and Go language support, created a High Replication Datastore, and added many other APIs. And there’s a lot more cool stuff to come. It’s heartening to us that so many developers- 150,000 and counting- have chosen to use App Engine to run their apps. While we can’t continue to offer App Engine at our original prices, we can commit to listening to your feedback, acting on it, and working hard to give you a great platform for your apps at the most competitive price possible. If you find that’s not the case, or have any questions about this at all, please feel free to contact us at appengine_updated_pricing@google.com.



The App Engine Team