Learn about Google Translate in Coffee with a Googler

Posted by Laurence Moroney, Developer Advocate

Over the past few months, we’ve been bringing you Coffee with a Googler, giving you a peek at people working on cool stuff that you might find inspirational and useful. Starting with this week’s episode, we’re going to accompany each video with a short post for more details, while also helping you make the most of the tech highlighted in the video.

This week we meet with MacDuff Hughes from the Google Translate team. Google Translate uses statistics based translation. By finding very large numbers of examples of translations from one language to another, it uses statistics to see how various phrases are treated, so it can make reasonable estimates at the correct phrases that are natural sounding in the target language. For common phrases, there are many candidate translations, so the engine converts them within the context of the passage that the phrase is in. Images can also be translated. When you point your mobile device at printed text and it will translate to the preferred for you.

Translate is adding languages all the time, and part of its mission is to serve languages that are less frequently used such as Gaelic, Welsh or Maori, in the same manner as the more commonly used ones, such as English, Spanish and French. To this end, Translate supports more than 90 languages. In the quest to constantly improve translation, the technology provides a way for the community to validate translations, and this is particularly used by less commonly used translations, effectively helping them to grow and thrive. It also enhances the machine translation by having people involved too.

You can learn more about Google Translate, and the translate app here.

Developers have a couple of options to use translate:

• The Free Website Translate plugin that you can add to your site and have translations available immediately.
• The Cloud-based Translate API that you can use to build apps or sites that have translation in them.

Watch the episode here:

Read More..

Add Google to your iOS Apps with CocoaPods

Posted by Jonathan Beri, Product Manager

Today, we’re announcing that CocoaPods will be the primary channel to acquire Google SDKs for iOS. CocoaPods is a popular, free dependency manager for iOS that significantly simplifies the process of importing libraries and frameworks into Xcode. And it will help you manage your dependencies between our various libraries.

While there was a small but growing number of official Google Pods, as well as a few Pods written by other iOS developers, it was often difficult for developer to find the right SDK. With today’s announcement, some of our key libraries, like Google Cloud Messaging and the Google Maps SDK for iOS can now be found on the public CocoaPods service. Going forward, new iOS SDKs will be packaged and documented as Pods and published on cocoapods.org. You can find the full list of Google Pods and all supporting documentation at developer.google.com/ios/cocoapods.

If you havent used CocoaPods yet, now is a great time to give it a try. Add GoogleAnalytics to a Podfile to start counting new users. Or pod install your way to adding AdMob ads in your app. And check out pod try, a CocoaPods plugin that allows you to quickly launch our demo projects.

For more iOS developer protips and to learn more about Google’s iOS SDKs, please check out the Route 85 video series from Todd Kerpelman. We look forward to all the great Google-powered iOS apps you will create!

Read More..

HTC One M9 in all flavours! Gallery

If you didnt have a chance yet to see the official, high quality images of the newest HTC flagship - HTC One M9 heres the full gallery. Enjoy!

...and tell us, whats your favourite colour? :)

Do you have any questions or comments? Feel free to share! Also, if you like this article, please use media sharing buttons (Twitter, G+, Facebook) below this post!

For latest news follow Android Revolution HD on popular social platforms:

Read More..

HTC One 4 19 401 11 update in all flavours!

Today the newest 4.19.401.11 OTA for the HTC One has begun rolling out. Due to the official OTA changelog it should fix Wi-Fi problems that some users were having since the Android KitKat update (added support for more routers).

To satisfy all HTC One users, as always Ive prepared both Android Revolution HD based on latest 4.19.401.11 OTA update (link) and also stock system dumps (link). Apart from that under this link you can find original 4.19.401.11 OTA update .zip file for both 4.19.401.8 and 4.19.401.9 software versions.

Once again, here are all the links you need:

Android Revolution HD 53.0 (4.19.409.11) - download

Stock 4.19.401.11 system dumps - download

Original 4.19.401.11 OTA zip package - download

Have fun!

Have any questions or comments? Feel free to share! Also, if you like this article, please use media sharing buttons (Twitter, G+, Facebook) below this post!

For latest news follow Android Revolution HD on popular social platforms:

Read More..

Samsung Chord SDK An Introduction

The Samsung Smart App challenge has motivated me to explore a bit more about the Samsung Chord SDK.

If you want to know more about the SamsungSmart App Challenge, please visit here  or to know more about the Android SDK – Here . There is a growing community for the android developer as well. 

Here is that I understand are the highlights of this SDK:

1.     It is a framework developed by Samsung for networking between devices – making it easy for people without network programming skills.

2.     It is not physical network connection that is created. It is application layer messaging protocol that uses the underlying TCP/IP network. i.e it is different from wi-fi or Bluetooth which work on a physical network protocol.

3.     Samsung also provides an add-in emulator to the standard eclipse development environment to test the networking of your apps.

4.     The Chord SDK allows creating a network of devices allowing for an n:n communication. It supports

a.     Synchronized content sharing

b.     Broadcast of messages to near by devices

c.      Data transfer between devices

d.     Multi-player games

5.     The Security features need improvement as any mobile with the same app on it can join the group or leave the group

6.      Chord supports only Android 4.0 and above

A bit about the architecture of the Chord SDK:

(This diagram is from Samsung SDK documentation.)

The application layer is where our imagination can be used to build innovative apps.

There are a few other basic aspects we need to understand in order to be able to use the Chord SDK.

1.     Channel Manager – This is the part of the software that manages all the mobiles in a network. The various devices are called nodes

2.     Messaging protocol – This is the part of the SDk that helps in exchanging of messages between the nodes

3.     File Transfer Protocol – This is the protocol used for file transfers between the nodes

4.     Discovery protocol -  This is the component that helps in discovering the various devices within range to for the logical group of nodes

5.     ZeroMQ – This is the underlying layer that helps with all the messaging and file transfers

A little bit more about Channels before we get into coding J

Chord has the concept of 2 types of channels for communication:

1.     Public Channel

2.     Private Channel

The Public channel is one one, which any device running the Chord SDk can join.

A private channel is one, which is created by nodes having the same chord SDK based application. 

So, if my mobile has Chord SDK app, I am part of a public channel. If I have an app A and an app B, I can be part of Channel A and Channel B respectively.

In the next article, I will talk about setting up the environment for developing using Chord SDK and later we will develop a simple app using Chord SDK.