Google's Android Closer To Reality?

The launch of the iPhone (shortly followed by the iPod Touch) seemed to fuel developer's desires to create mobile-specific web applications despite the device's ability to access the entire internet (without the WAP/WML limitations of most mobile devices). Many mobile web users find the wireless application protocol (WAP) too restrictive and slow, greatly limiting what WAP browsers can access on the internet. On the other hand, all mobile devices (even the iPhone) have small screens and excessive scrolling can be annoying (not to mention EDGE speeds until a 3G version is released). Even still, both the iPhone and iPod touch have spurred movement in the mobile web.



Now, with Google's Android platform even closer to reality, developers could find themselves with a new, open source mobile platform to develop apps for (both native and web-based), if the Open Handset Alliance becomes as revolutionary as many are expecting. The news today is that T-Mobile USA is already preparing for the release of an Android handset to hit stores before the end of this year.



Recently, Joe Sims, VP and general manager of T-Mobile's broadband and new business division, stated that not only has he already seen prototypes of the "impressive" Android-based phone, but that T-Mobile "will have more than one product…(The move to an open platform) will be innovation across the board, not just one device."



As far as manufacturers, the T-Mobile prototype spoken of could be from Motorola, Samsung, HTC or LG, as these are the four handset manufacturers that have joined up with Google. Sprint and Verizon are the other major U.S. carriers who are members of the alliance but neither has yet to announce plans for the release of Android devices. This could work out to T-Mobile advantage, as the Deutsche Telekom-owned company has long lagged behind other services in terms of added features (mobile television, high-speed internet, etc.).



Personally, I see the development of the Android platform as a 'step forward' (even if it's not the perfect solution), because the days of carrier restrictions and outrageous prices for upgraded features should end. Who wants to keep paying by the MB for access to a carrier when free wi-fi is available? And who want to pay $5+ to their phone company for each game they download when their are open source developers around the world itching to create fun games and useful apps for people worldwide… for FREE. All they need is the ability, the platform, and some incentive. That is what Google is trying to accomplish, especially considering that they have $10 million up for grabs for developers.



Though what will come of the impending release of Android and compatible handsets is still unknown, it should defintely help garner some change in the mobile market and help further develop a universal mobile web. My only concerns deal with how the change will affect contract terms, the prices of handsets, and monthly rates for the carriers involved.

Offline access comes to Google Docs

Since Google Gears was initially released the most prime candidate for offline access must have been Google Docs.
To have the freedom to edit documents offline, and the flexibility to access documents from anyhwere online or through a mobile device is wonderful. My Google Docs recently got the Gears upgrade enabled. Synchronising documents is quite fast, although I have not yet given the offline access a good trial, the only major lacking feature is the inability to create new documents whilst offline, though this can be easily overcome by creating a few empty documents before going offline and hottong the road. It would be nice to see my Gmail on Google Apps upgraded to the new version, surely in time. Google's rollout of new features to Apps seems to be sporadic and somewhst chaotic at times.

Everything Google

Cool features Google offers to take advantage



Google Earth

"Explore, Search and Discover" reads the homepage for Google Earth. Now the power to search satellite images, maps, foreign lands and any 3D terrain, building, or structure imaginable is just one click away. Going on a vacation? Type in the location and see a street view of the area surrounding your hotel. The images on Google Earth, say of a neighborhood or public building are 1-3 years old via satellite imaging, and some search listings are limited in international countries. The images displayed in Google Earth are not "real time" images. However, the newest version of Google Earth has a time of day option where one can scroll to see the location at any time of day, noon to midnight. The new version also offers a flight simulator feature. Currently Google Earth is available in the free version, Plus version and Pro version. It is also supported in 13 languages, and working towards being accessible in more languages. Google Earth also has searchable astronomical images available.



Google Desktop

The new download from Google makes organizing and searching your computer even easier. Now searching your desktop is as quick as searching the Internet, and the application also allows users to organize their desktop with useful gadgets like personalized searches, e-mail previews, weather, news updates and a handy sidebar that keeps all the gadgets organized. Very similar to Mac's dashboard application, Google Desktop also features smart indexing that organizes web browsing history, and multiple file types.



Google Talk

Google Talk is free. It hosts instant messaging, PC to PC voice calls, gmail notifications and fast file transfers. There is no download needed to use Google Talk and it is accessible on any computer. It can be added to iGoogle, a web-page, and is automatically accessible through any gmail account. Google Talk also allows media previews of videos, URL's and slideshows from multiple media-based sites.



Google Books and My Library

Google Books offers readers access to thousands of titles, and virtually all genres imaginable. This feature allows readers to scroll through and read limited previews of all books, or as much as the copyright holder of each title has released to be seen, by making the books available through PDFs. The Google Book search works by simply typing in a keyword, the title, or author, and a preview of the book covers search results appears. By clicking on a book cover, another page opens that has images of the book front and back, reviews, author info, popular pages, subjects in the book, and links to Amazon.com to buy the book if a reader wishes to have access to the entire book. Users can also create their own personalized library where they can rate, label, review, and organize their own library of favorite book previews.



Google Groups

Now anyone can create a discussion group on any topic fast and hassle free. Google Groups users can discuss topics through e-mail, webpages, and customized discussion boards. Google Group members can share files, and easily share access to a wide variety of info. The newest version of Google Groups is now available with new and improved features: collaborative webpage creation, customization, file sharing and personalized member profiles to learn more about other users in shared groups.



Google Scholar

Although Google Scholar may not be as exhaustive as other scholarly databases, especially those with emphasis in specific subject areas, it offers users "a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature" spanning a wide variety of disciplines. Google lists the sources for GS: "peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations." GS provides links to the full text of much of the searchable scholarly literature. Where the free full text cannot be provided, GS



Google Video

Like Youtube, Google Video allows users to upload and share video content. What makes Google Video special is its search engine, which incorporates results from Google Video itself, youtube, and other third-party websites. According to Google, The Google Video index is "the most comprehensive on the web," making it the most powerful video searching tool currently available.



Google Docs

Free to Google users-Google Docs is a basic and easy to use online word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation application. Google Docs gives users the ability to create new documents or upload existing documents, users can store and share documents online with ease. The most innovative and useful feature in Google docs is real time collaboration. Users can invite people to collaborate on a document, which allows multiple users to edit a single document at the same time. A chat-window keeps track of revisions made and displays which user made specific changes. Google Docs are stored securely online where they are far removed from the risk of computer crashes and accessible from any computer with an Internet connection. Frequent auto-saving mitigates data loss in the event of a browser crashing or disruptions in Internet connections. Docs requiring more advanced features can be exported in popular formats like .doc, .xls, .pdf, and .rtf and used popular document production programs.



Gmail

Back in the invite-only days of Google's e-mail service, having a Gmail account was a status symbol of sorts around the web. Since then, the fervor has died down, but users remain faithful. Using Ajax and JavaScript, Gmail implements a user-friendly interface that was one of the first to boast the feature of archiving. Archiving means that instead of users deleting their mail permanently, "read mail" is saved-a feature that can come in handy in the clutch.



GOOG-411 (1-800-466-4411)

Think directory assistance done right-and free. GOOG-411 uses speech-recognition technology to allow users to search and connect to businesses in the U.S. and Canada. GOOG-411 also allows users to have the telephone number and address of a given business text-messaged to any text-accepting cellular phone. The best feature of GOOG-411 is that it is free of charge.



Google Reader

Google Reader utilizes Atom and RSS feeds to aggregate a personalized news feed. Google Reader serves as an "inbox for your news," bringing in stories and posts from the user's choice websites and blogs into a slick interface that makes staying up to date simple. Google Reader is also available on mobile phones that support XHTML or WAP 2.0 and the Wii web browser.



Google Finance

Google Finance features Business News headlines as well as in-depth stock information. Adobe Flash powers the stock charts and feature real-time quotes during trading hours.



iGoogle

Similar to Netvibes and My Yahoo! iGoogle is a personalized start page that offers users a variety of helpful ways to begin their web-browsing experience. iGoogle works in a three-column layout with web-based widgets that focus on a variety of different topics. Some of the most popular widgets include "Google Reader," "Quotes of the Day," and "Youtube: Top Rated."



Google Page Creator

Like the name suggests, Google Page Editor will allow users easily compose, edit, and publish web pages. Frequent auto-saving fast publishing, and a user-friendly interface could make this yet another popular ingredient in the Google mix.



Google Mars

The same concept as Google Earth, this Google feature still in development is the result of a collaboration with NASA researchers at ASU and according to Google, provide "some of the most detailed scientific maps of Mars ever made."



Google Ride Finder

Based in Google Maps, Google Ride Finder offers real time tracking of participating taxi and limousine services using GPS technology. So far, Ride Finder only gives users up-to-the-minute locations of vehicles in the following cities: Atlanta, Austin, Baltimore, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, New York, Phoenix, San Francisco, and Washington D.C.

Google Docs Offline Access For Apps Users

Wondering when Google is FINALLY going to bless your Google Apps account with offline access to your Google Docs, Spreadsheets and Presentations? Like most Google Apps for Your Domain users, I have been waiting (not so patiently) for the ability to download my documents to Google Gears to work offline in airplanes, subterranean offices, or other internet-challenged locations.

Unfortunately for Google Apps users, the rollout of offline access will occur after the rollout to regular non-Apps users:

We’ve sometimes delayed the launch of features like group chat and colored labels to Google Apps domains because we want to ensure that all the features we bring to the Google Apps suite are useful and stable before providing them to our business, education and organizational users.

However, as an administrator it is possible to opt-in to new services and features within Google Apps by configuring your domain settings like this:

1. Log in to the control panel at https://www.google.com/a/your_domain.com. Be sure to replace ‘your_domain.com’ with your actual domain name.


2. Click Domain settings.



3. Under the General tab, and in the New services and features section, check the box next to Turn on new features.


4. Click Save changes.

It may take up to 24 hours for the features to be added to your domain, but it beats waiting for the rest of the Apps world to catch up.

A few of the offline features and benefits are explained in this video from the Google Apps team:

Spanning Sync to add Address Book synchronization (updated)

If you’re like me you probably have a Gmail account. Some people use Gmail as their full-time email, others just for large attachments or times when your ISP’s email is fubar. Either way, there’s no denying the convenience of a good webmail account and I find Gmail to be the best of the lot.

As a Mac user I’m totally wrapped up in Address Book and iCal. The latter mostly because it’s invaluable to sync and subscribe to multiple calendars – iCal’s practically a requirement for any modern family, especially one that uses iPhones.

There are times, however, when it’s necessary to share calendars with people who aren’t Mac users and that’s where Google apps come in. They’re super-convenient, free and, well, they work with that other platform too. But who wants to maintain a Google Calendar and iCal? Not me.

Spanning Sync provides an easy way to sync iCal with your Google Calendars and vice versa.

With Spanning Sync, your iCal calendars are kept in sync with Google Calendar, which means you can use the best features of both to manage your schedule.

Today comes news that version 2 will add contact syncing from Address Book to Google contacts. A demo screencast is posted on the Spanning Sync blog. The best news comes at the very end of the screencast – Spanning Sync 2 will be a free upgrade. No word on when the 2.0 update will be available though.

Spanning Sync is free for 15 days, after which you can sign up for either a US$25 one-year subscription or a US$65 one-time purchase.

Update: Charlie Wood from Spanning Sync told me to expect to see a public beta of Spanning Sync v2.0 “soon.” He didn’t want to commit to anything, thinks it’s reasonable to expect it within the next couple of weeks.

Also, since they sell Spanning Sync on a subscription basis, all upgrades – both major and minor – are always free for paid subscribers. This hasn’t gotten much attention but is worth noting. I hate being surprised by upgrade charges.

Google developers play in the sandbox

Google has released new sandbox tools for its iGoogle web service, allowing developers to create larger and more complex iGoogle Gadget apps.

A sandbox is an isolated environment in which developers can test and preview code without running it live.

Among the features in the new sandbox will be better support for Google's OpenSocial APIs and new view modes.

Developers will use the sandbox to piece together the Gadgets from a mixture of XML and JavaScript code.

A new 'Canvas' view lets developers run applications in much larger windows on the user's iGoogle page, allowing a gadget to run in a full window rather than a pre-determined box on the page.

The new tools will also allow developers to add Gadgets to a new navigation box which will appear on the left-hand side of the screen.

"Developers are an important part of Google's innovation ecosystem and we are always striving to provide tools to help them innovate in new directions that will ultimately make the web richer for all users," Google said in a statement.

"By building more powerful and interactive Gadgets for iGoogle, developers will have an opportunity to share their Gadgets with tens of millions of iGoogle users."

Google released iGoogle in April 2007 as a remake of the traditional launch pages. Users customise the pages with the Gadget applets that add various features.

The service is accompanied by the OpenSocial API, which allows other sites and services to create their own Gadgets for use with iGoogle.

Google Summer of Code 2008

The various Google Summer of Code slots have been awarded to the participating projects. As most of you will know, the Summer of Code is all about enticing programmers to contribute to open source projects. Students submit their ideas to mentor organisations (these mentors are approved by Google first), and after selecting the ideas the mentors like the most, the programmers work to complete their task. If they succeed, Google will grant them a stipend. Google selected 174 mentor organisations for this year's Summer of Code. Read on for a selection of interesting applications that have been approved.

* DragonFlyBSD: LiveCD with a DragonFly-specific X desktop, integrated into nrelease build, by Lousia Luciani. "In this project I will integrate more functionality into the nrelease build system. The build will generate a persistent liveCD with Dragonfly specific features. It will be customized for recovery, demonstration and testing and include a good default installation of packages."

* Enlightenment: Improvement of Enlightenment 0.17 file manager, by Fedor Gusev. "As Enlightenment is standing to be a desktop shell, it has to have a nice file manager. Since E developers understand that, they already have started the work. But there is still a lot to do - a fifth of Enlightenment TODO is related to the file manager. It is necessary to finish it."

* Enlightenment: Enlightenment win32 port, by Dzmitry Mazouka. "Currently, the Enlightenment project is ported to a large number of platforms, but support of win32 is still not completed. This hinders Enlightenment from being used by a large amount of Windows users. The aim of the porting project is to make Ewl and Etk Enlightenment toolkits work on win32 platform."

* ES operating system: A Pure Component Kernel Design and Development, by Santosh G. Vattam. "I wish to take up the design and development of the pure component kernel for ES Operating System as a project for the Google Summer of Code initiative for the year 2008. The aims of the project are as follows: Improving the quality of the existing kernel code and bring it to production level; providing x64 support to the OS along with x86 support, using the Newlib which already has 64-bit support; adding a new virtual memory management system for x64."

* Haiku: Application for Implementing paging (swap file) support, by Zhao Shuai. "Implement a module that writes dirty pages back to its backing store. Support more than 1 swap files. Do necessary changes in other modules to interact with the new features."

* The X.Org Foundation: GUI tool for assisted editing of the XKB configuration database, by Symeon Xenitellis. "One of the missing free and open-source applications is a GUI tool that helps create keyboard layouts. Currently, a user has to edit the layout file by hand using a text editor, which is both cumbersome and error-prone. The GUI tool will be able to create a new or import existing keyboard layouts and export a formatted new version. The user will be presented with a keyboard and auxiliary windows covering Unicode blocks, and will be able to drag and drop characters on individual keys."

This is just a selection of projects that I personally find noteworthy. The list is endless, however, so there's bound to be something in there that tickles your fancy.