Sarah Clark, Program Manager, Google Developer Training
Front-end web developers face challenges when using common “asynchronous” requests. These requests, such as fetching a URL or reading a file, often lead to complicated code, especially when performing multiple actions in a row. How can we make this easier for developers?
Javascript Promises are a new tool that simplifies asynchronous code, converting a tangle of callbacks and event handlers into simple, straightforward code such as: fetch(url).then(decodeJSON).then(addToPage)...
Promises are used by many new web standards, including Service Worker, the Fetch API, Quota Management, Font Load Events,Web MIDI, and Streams.
We’ve just opened up a online course on Promises, built in collaboration with Udacity. This brief course, which you can finish in about a day, walks you through building an “Exoplanet Explorer” app that reads and displays live data using Promises. You’ll also learn to use the Fetch API and finally kiss XMLHttpRequest goodbye!
This short course is a prerequisite for most of the Senior Web Developer Nanodegree. Whether you are in the paid Nanodegree program or taking the course for free, won’t you come learn to make your code simpler and more reliable today?
Posted by Vishay Nihalani, Product Manager, Lyft (Cross-posted on the Google Geo Developers Blog.)
Editor’s note: Today’s guest blogger is Vishay Nihalani, Product Manager at the ride-sharing service Lyft. Read how Lyft uses Google Maps APIs to help riders save money and get to their destinations faster. Lyft is one of many customers sharing their story as part of our cross-country road trip, Code the Road.
We know a lot about road trips—people have taken tens of millions of rides with us from the steep hills of San Francisco to the city streets of Chicago. Ride-sharing today is an intensely competitive business. If you’re going to succeed, you’ve got to connect riders and drivers simply and conveniently and make the experience delightful from beginning to end. That’s why we chose Google Maps and the Google Maps APIs. We started using them with our internal operations tools, and when we saw how valuable and scalable they were, we worked with Google to launch their services in our customer-facing apps.
The Google Maps Android API creates our Android app’s main interface—it’s the map you see when users log in. Our users can drop pins on a map or enter their location manually to indicate pick-up and drop-off locations. Through reverse geocoding, the app will recognize locations and determine an address automatically based on where the pin is dropped. We also help people find their locations by using the Google Places Search API. People often think about the places they want to go by name—for example, they’ll enter “Cliff House” rather than the restaurant’s street address. The Google Places Search API allows a passenger to enter the name of a destination.
When customers use our app, they expect there’ll be a car waiting for them and they’ll get to their destination as quickly as possible. They need to know when they’ll be picked up and when they’ll get where they want to go. We make it easy for our riders to quickly see this information right in the app.
Lyft now has more than 100,000 drivers and delivers more than two million rides per month in 65 cities. We’ve seen more than 500% growth in rides and revenue since last year, thanks in large part to Google Maps. And we’re exploring ways to make Lyft even better by using maps to improve the ride options we offer—for example, by expanding our new Lyft Line option for riders going in the same direction.
Google has been a great partner and has really contributed to our success, so we’re pleased to participate in Code the Road as Google celebrates mapping innovation and fun on its trip across America. Kyle Madsen, Android Developer at Lyft, presented at the Chicago developer meetup on June 9th. It was a great crowd and an exciting event. We hope to see you on the road!
There is no higher form of user validation than having customers support your product with their wallets. However, the path to a profitable business is not necessarily an easy one. There are many strategies to pick from and a lot of little things that impact the bottom line. If you are starting a new business (or thinking how to improve the financial situation of your current startup), we recommend this course weve been working on with Udacity!
This course blends instruction with real-life examples to help you effectively develop, implement, and measure your monetization strategy. By the end of this course you will be able to:
Choose & implement a monetization strategy relevant to your service or product.
Set performance metrics & monitor the success of a strategy.
Know when it might be time to change methods.
Go try it at: udacity.com/course/app-monetization–ud518
Lately Ive been using one of the best phone accessory Ive ever had. And the funny part is, I didnt suspect it to be that great. But lets start from the beginning!
Full name of that red & black little thing is "HTC External Battery Bank for all Micro USB Handsets".
What is so great about it? In simple words - its small and can save your butt in many situations. The capacity of 6000 mAh is enough for full two charges. What is more - due to dual charging port - USB port and micro USB port - its compatible with most new smartphones.
Its quite small (9,7 x 4,2 x 2,2) so you can take with you everywhere. Not really useful when you are in the car (better to use car charger) but quite handy in the train, bus, boring lecture or long day trip outside the city.
At the top youll find a button. Once pressed, the lights in front of the battery bank will indicate how much power left inside. Very nice!
As I wrote before, the size is great, but as most of you probably think - things can always get smaller! I dont know if its possible to make such battery bank smaller (at least now) but the current size should not be an issue. If you have enough space to carry 4-inch screen device or bigger, then you surely will find extra space for this external battery bank.
When battery bank is discharged, simply plug it to any device with USB port (can be notebook) or regular charger. It will take few hours to full charge, but afterwards its ready to be your lifelong companion!
Described battery bank comes with a micro USB cable with a length of 15cm. What I really miss here is some kind of holder for that cable integrated with the battery bank. Some simple plastic holdfast would be really great and wont take much space. HTC, maybe something worth to consider?
Reviewed subject was delivered by HTC.
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Posted by Vijay Subramani, Technical Program Manager, Google Cloud Platform
Back in 2011, we announced the deprecation of the following APIs: Google Patent Search API, Google News Search API, Google Blog Search API, Google Video Search API, Google Image Search API. We supported these APIs for a three year period (and beyond), but as all things come to an end, so has the deprecation window for these APIs.
We are now announcing the turndown of the above APIs. These APIs will cease operations on February 15, 2016.
You may wish to look at our Custom Search API as an alternative for these APIs.
Posted by: Scott Johnston, Director of Product Management, Google Drive
Since we launched Drive for Work 9 months ago, weve watched as more and more businesses moved to the cloud — and seen that they prioritize data security as much as we do. Security ranks at the top of the list of concerns that companies have about moving to the cloud, which is why we’ve put security front and center in our products from the beginning. And to keep your company’s data even more secure in Drive, we’re launching new sharing controls, alerts and audit events to Google Drive for Work and Google for Education over the next several weeks.
For Google Drive for Work customers:
Set sharing settings by department Sometimes different file settings make sense. You might, for example, have a research department that needs to keep information confidential and a sales team that needs to share presentations with their clients. To help manage these different sharing needs, now when you make selections in Drive settings from the Admin console, you can turn off sharing outside the domain for one organizational unit, while still allowing others to work and share files with anyone they need to.
Create custom Drive alerts and track more events with Drive audit
To keep track of when specific actions are taken in Drive, you can set up custom Drive alerts. So if you want to know when a file containing the word “confidential” in the title is shared outside the company, now you’ll know. And there are more events coming to Drive audit, including download, print and preview.
For all Google Apps for Work customers:
Set up custom admin alerts to find out when things change
There are lots of moving parts to running a company, and now it’s easier for IT to find out about the things they care about with custom alerts — like when a new app is installed or a shared calendar is deleted — and get those right in their inbox.
Let people reset their own passwords Recovering passwords isn’t the most pleasant thing we do in our lives. But now IT can let employees securely reset their own passwords, so they don’t lose valuable time being locked out of their account. If this doesn’t make sense for your organization, admins can simply turn this ability off.
Available for all to use:
Disable downloading, printing and copying of any file with IRM With Information Rights Management (“IRM”) you can disable downloading, printing and copying from the advanced sharing menu – perfect for when the file you’re sharing is only meant for a few select people. This new option is available for any file stored in Google Drive, including documents, spreadsheets and presentations created in Google Docs.
Share quickly with anyone outside your organization When it comes to sharing, like giving final inventory lists to your caterer or last minute logos to your design agency, you want to make sure people can see it right away — whether they use Drive or not. Now, you can share with any email address and they’ll be able to view the files you share —without having to sign-in to a Google account. Admins can disable this feature for certain departments that want to require sign-in before , while enabling it for others.
All the above are rolling out over the next month.
Stay tuned for more We’re also working on the ability to establish trusted domains, so businesses and schools that have multiple Google Apps domains or want to work with trusted partners or customers, can select multiple Google Apps domains that are OK to share with from Drive and Classroom. And on expiring access, because occasionally you only want to share files for a temporary amount of time. With expiring access you can set a future date when access will be removed. Stay tuned, theres more to come from Drive and Drive for Work.
