Every week, the Google Apps gang here in New York organizes a movie night. It’s always a lot of fun, but organizing it is chaotic! Naturally, we use a spreadsheet to keep a list of movies we’d like to see (that’s the easy part!), and then on Tuesday evening there’s a storm of email as we try to pick a winner.
Always fans of logic and the democratic process, the team wrote a script — to first collate a list of movie showtimes, then invite everyone to vote. The script automates the process, eliminating the drudgery and leaving us more time to canvas and cajole support for our favorite films.
Google Apps Script has been available to businesses, schools and other organizations using Google Apps since January, and today we’re excited to bring it to all Google spreadsheets, along with a new Apps Script Gallery that let’s everyone — not just those who are JavaScript-savvy — reap the benefits of Apps Script. You can see just how easy it is to make use of a script in the video below:
To kick things off in the gallery, we put together some wacky demos showing what’s possible with a script: you’ll find games of hangman and sudoku, some fractal art and a very practical unit conversion script. You can find these scripts, and more, in the Apps Script gallery by going to Insert and then selecting Script... in any Google spreadsheet.
For more details on the Movie Night script, and to get started writing your own scripts, be sure to check out today’s Google Apps Script announcement on the Google Apps Developer Blog.
Posted by: Evin Levey, Product Manager, Google Apps
Every week, the Google Apps gang here in New York organizes a movie night. It’s always a lot of fun, but organizing it is chaotic! Naturally, we use a spreadsheet to keep a list of movies we’d like to see (that’s the easy part!), and then on Tuesday evening there’s a storm of email as we try to pick a winner.
Always fans of logic and the democratic process, the team wrote a script — to first collate a list of movie showtimes, then invite everyone to vote. The script automates the process, eliminating the drudgery and leaving us more time to canvas and cajole support for our favorite films.
Google Apps Script has been available to businesses, schools and other organizations using Google Apps since January, and today we’re excited to bring it to all Google spreadsheets, along with a new Apps Script Gallery that let’s everyone — not just those who are JavaScript-savvy — reap the benefits of Apps Script. You can see just how easy it is to make use of a script in the video below:
To kick things off in the gallery, we put together some wacky demos showing what’s possible with a script: you’ll find games of hangman and sudoku, some fractal art and a very practical unit conversion script. You can find these scripts, and more, in the Apps Script gallery by going to Insert and then selecting Script... in any Google spreadsheet.
For more details on the Movie Night script, and to get started writing your own scripts, be sure to check out today’s Google Apps Script announcement on the Google Apps Developer Blog.
Posted by: Evin Levey, Product Manager, Google Apps
Over on the Official Google Blog, you can read a very, very exciting announcement: Google Maps now offers biking directions! As my teammate Shannon mentions in that post, we've been constantly asked when this feature will be made available. But as an engineer working on the directions team, I'd often get questions about why Google Maps didn't already have biking directions. After all, we've had driving, walking, and public transit directions for some time, so what is it about biking directions in particular that presents an engineering challenge?
Well now that the good news is out, I can lift the curtain and explain the many factors and variables that we've had to take into account to put this whole feature together:
Bike trails: Our maps contain over twelve thousand of miles of biking trails. First, we had to figure out where trails are, so we worked with the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy to get much of our trail data. Once we had trails mapped out, the next task was to incorporate them into our routing algorithm. The algorithm is weighted to strongly prefer routing on these trails rather than roads open to automobile traffic, so your directions will try to put you onto a trail as long as it won't take you totally out of your way. On our bicycling layer (found under the 'More' button), these trails show up in dark green.
Bike lanes: For more than 150 cities in the US, we know which streets have dedicated bicycle lanes. These are also prioritized when coming up with a routing suggestion. On the bicycling layer, you’ll see these roads indicated in bright green.
Recommended routes: For many cities we also provide information on streets that have been designated as good for cyclists, so we them into account in our algorithm. These roads are indicated with dashed green lines on our bicycling layer.
Uphill slopes: l don't know anyone who enjoys biking up a hill, especially when you're trying to get somewhere you need to be. Going uphill is worse than simply being much slower; it's also exhausting and can take a toll on the rest of your ride. Our biking directions are based on a physical model of the amount of power your body has to exert given the slope of the road you’re biking on. Assuming typical values for mass and for wind resistance, we compute the effort you’ll require and the speed you’ll achieve while going uphill. We take this speed into account when determining the time estimate for your journey, and we also try hard to avoid routes that will require an unreasonable degree of exertion. Sometimes the model will determine that it's far more efficient to make you ride several extra blocks than to have to deal with a massive hill. My teammates in San Francisco were relieved to see that this does indeed work!
Downhill slopes: Many cyclists will tell you that going downhill is annoying for a different reason: you may have to ride your brakes all the way down. All else equal, we try to avoid routes that require a lot of braking. Of course, in some cities, including my hometown of Seattle, this isn’t always possible! And if you feel like you need a big workout and want to climb some hills, or if you just love that wind-in-your-hair feeling of a long downhill (you better be wearing a helmet and staying safe!), you can always turn on the terrain layer to check out the hilliness of an area for yourself.
Busy roads: Cyclists often tend to prefer to stay off of fast roads, and not even cross them unless it's necessary. This is roughly the inverse of driving directions, where you want to stay on arterials and freeways, so we had to rework a lot of those fundamental calculations when coming up with our biking directions algorithm.
Busy intersections: We try to avoid making you cross busy streets with a lot of car traffic and long wait times.
Even having figured out how to account for all these variables and cost-estimates in our algorithm, the biking direction feature would not have been possible without our new base map data which allowed us the flexibility to easily incorporate bike trail data, a fundamental part of this feature. It also allowed us to readily incorporate feedback directly from our users, and we welcome all your feedback and suggestions via the "Report a problem" tool -- after all, biking directions are still in beta and we're continuing to work on adding more data about bike trails, bike lanes, and preferred roads. Both of these updates were made in October, at which time we promised that that biking directions were in the works, and now five months later: here they are!
Posted by John Leen, Software Engineer, Google Seattle
Interested in learning more about open source software development and methodologies? Looking for a way to get that experience while getting paid? Look no further!
Through the Google Summer of Code™ program, we match college and university students with mentors from academia and industry to work on a three month coding project. You're welcome to propose a project that suits your specialized interests or to apply to work on a project proposed by one of our mentoring organizations. Successful student participants receive a $5000 stipend, an awesome t-shirt and valuable exposure to real world software development scenarios. You won't even need to leave home to work with this global community, with our members hailing from more than 100 countries. Best of all, no previous experience with open source development is required, and there will be projects available across a wide variety of technical areas and skill levels.
We're currently accepting applications from open source projects who wish to act as mentoring organizations. We'll publish the list of accepted open source projects, along with their suggested project ideas, on Thursday, March 18th. You'll have a few days to get to know your would-be mentors before student applications open on Monday, March 29th. However, there's no reason to wait to get involved with the Google Summer of Code community; check out the webpages from past instances of the program, review what other students have done and decide what open source projects look interesting to you. While there are no guarantees, if an organization has participated in the past, chances are they'll return again this year provided they choose to apply.
Whether you're catching up on your favorite Arabic gameshow, getting up to speed on the latest Korean mobile gadgetry, or researching the local perspective for a dream trip to Machu Picchu, we're all constantly reminded that the internet is an amazingly multilingual place. The Google Chrome team is excited to introduce a new beta feature to help our users navigate the multilingual web: instant machine translation of webpages, without the need for any browser extensions or plug-ins.
How does it work? When the language of the webpage you're viewing is different from your preferred language setting, Chrome will display a prompt asking if you'd like the page to be translated for you using Google Translate.
Here's a demo of the translation feature by Jay Civelli, one of the engineers who developed it:
For more on how automatic translation in Chrome works, read on in our Help Center article. We hope that the development of online translation tools like this one will help make all the world's information universally accessible in an easy, frictionless way – imagine reading a diversity of foreign language news sources in your mother tongue, or easily conducting online commerce across borders and languages.
With today's beta release, we're also excited to introduce new features that will give you even greater choice and control over your privacy as you browse the web. We realize that many users have questions about privacy in browsers, so we've produced a short video to help users better understand privacy in the browser:
In addition to Chrome's existing incognito mode – a handy way to browse the web without leaving traces of website visits on your computer or downloads in your browser history – you can now manage your privacy settings in the new "Privacy" section of Chrome's Options dialog. From these settings, you can control how browser cookies, images, JavaScript, plug-ins, and pop-ups are handled on a site-by-site basis. For example, you can set up cookie rules to allow cookies specifically only for sites that you trust, and block cookies from untrusted sites. You can read more about these features, or watch videos explaining how your privacy is handled in Chrome's various features including search and suggestions, browser cookies, Safe Browsing technology, and automatic security updates.
Try out all these new features for yourself in today's beta release. For those of you already on the beta channel, you'll soon be updated automatically. And for those of you on the stable channel, we'll be making Chrome's new translation and privacy features available to you in the coming weeks. Till our next update, auf Wiedersehen!
Posted by Wieland Holfelder, Engineering Director, Google Munich
Last year, I planned an OSCARS® viewing party with my friends. To add some friendly competition and figure out who was coming, I collected people's predictions for the winners and their RSVP information with a Google form ahead of time. I found the process really easy, so this year I created a Google form for the 2010 OSCARS® and made it a template that anyone can use to plan their own viewing parties:
If you're getting together with friends for OSCAR NIGHT® tomorrow, check out this template in the Google Docs Template Gallery. Happy viewing!
Posted by: Natalie Schwartz, Google Creative Lab
“OSCAR®,” “OSCARS®,” “ACADEMY AWARD®,” “ACADEMY AWARDS®,” “OSCAR NIGHT®,” “A.M.P.A.S.®” and the “Oscar” design mark are trademarks of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science.
Google Voice is about giving you more control over your communications, through dozens of features — ranging from call screening to voicemail transcription to the ability to send and receive SMS by email.
While we've heard from users that they love our growing list of features, we're conscious of the fact that Google Voice can seem overwhelming to people trying it for the first time.
So we've created a short video that gives an overview of what Google Voice can do:
In addition, we've created a set of short videos that dive into more detail about ten features of Google Voice:
The videos show why you might want to use each feature and basic instructions for getting started. And each video focuses on just one topic so you can learn about the features that matter to you.
Finally, we just launched our own YouTube channel at youtube.com/googlevoice. You can view all of the videos mentioned above in a custom video gadget we built for this channel, which will help you keep track of which videos you've already watched.
We hope these videos help you get the most out of Google Voice.
Posted by Jason Toff, Associate Product Marketing Manager
Back in 2008, we started opening Google Maps up to user edits. With the launch of Place Pages in September, we decided it'd be a lot easier if editing had its own page too. Today, we're pleased to announce a new, easier way to edit places on Google Maps.
If you find something incorrect or missing on the Place Page for a business -- maybe they have a new website or moved to a bigger location down the block -- just click "Edit this place":
You'll then access a single, dedicated page where you can edit the business listing details about that place.
If you happen to stumble across a problem that you don't know how to fix, no worries. You can always report a problem directly to Google instead of attempting to edit it yourself. Just look for the Report a problem link in the "more" menu and tell us what's wrong, then we'll take on the job of tracking down the right information. Also, if you're the owner of the business, you can click the "Business owner?" link to supply additional information and see your dashboard.
We realize that you know your own neighborhood best, so we hope this makes it simpler and more streamlined for you to pass that local knowledge along to all your fellow Google Maps searchers.
Posted by Steve Kirkham, Associate Product Manager
Posted by Eric Sachs, Senior Product Manager, Google Security
Last November, we discussed the progress that account login systems operating via standards-based identity technologies like OpenID have achieved across the web. As more websites seek to interact with one another to provide a richer experience for users, we're seeing even more interest in finding a secure way to enable that kind of information sharing while avoiding the hassle for users of creating new accounts and passwords.
Excitement for technology like OpenID is not limited to the private sector. President Obama's open government memorandum last year spurred the creation of a pilot initiative in September to enable U.S. citizens to more easily sign in to government-run websites. Google joined a number of other companies to explore ways to answer that call.
Now, several months later, some interesting things are taking shape. The Open Identity Exchange (OIX), a new organization and certification body focused on online identity management, today named Google among the first identity providers to be approved by the U.S. Government as meeting federal standards for identity assurance. This means that Google's identity, security, and privacy specifications have been certified so that a user can register and log in at U.S. government websites using their Google account login credentials. The National Institute of Health (NIH) is the first government website ready to accept such credentials, and we look forward to seeing other websites open up to certified identity providers so that users will have an easier and more secure time interacting with these resources.
Our hope is that the work of the OIX and other groups will continue to grow and help facilitate more open government participation, as well as improve security on the Internet by reducing password use across websites.
