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..

Google Vault now covers Hangouts for work chat

Posted by Deborah Hsieh, Product Manager, Google for Work

As an IT admin you want your organization to be free to focus on getting stuff done. But part of your role is also to make sure you stay on top of legal compliance. Today we’re making it a little bit easier to do both with two new Hangouts features.

Over the next few days, we’ll roll out an admin option that lets you manage Hangouts chat history in your organization, so that you can make certain that it’s either on or off. People in your organization can have the freedom to chat with whomever they want — whether that person is part of your organization or not — and you can be sure that new employee conversations stay personal and private, because they’ll disappear shortly after taking place.

We’re also adding Google Apps Vault support for Hangouts chat. With Vault support for chat, organizations of all sizes can quickly find and preserve chat messages. This is a great way to safeguard business-critical information for continuity, compliance and regulatory purposes.

Find out how to tailor Hangouts to best suit your organizations compliance needs.

Read More..

HTC One vs Apple iPhone 5s comparison part 2

The HTC One has received high praise in recent weeks, including the honors of smartphone of the year. For many, the One defines what a smartphone should be. It has a beautiful 4.7 inch 1080p display, elegant aluminum zero-gap build, loud and clear dual front facing boomsound speakers and user friendly Sense 5. The handset has dealt with stiff competition in recent months, with the iPhone 5s garnering a ton of hype.

Regardless, the One has stood on its own, as we delve into both handsets in part two of our two part comparison between the two handsets.

Check out more no nonsense tech at Technibility.com!

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!

Read More..

Ho Ho Ho! Googles Santa Tracker is now open source

Posted by Ankur Kotwal, Software Engineer

The holiday spirit is about giving and though we’re early into April, we’re still in that spirit. Today, we’re announcing that Googles Santa Tracker is now open source on GitHub at google/santa-tracker-web and google/santa-tracker-android. Now you can see how we’ve used many of our developer products to build a fun and engaging experience that runs across the web and Android.

Santa Tracker isn’t just about watching Santa’s progress as he delivers presents on December 24. Visitors can also have fun with the winter-inspired games and an interactive North Pole village while Santa prepares for his big journey throughout the holidays.

Below is a summary of what we’ve released as open source.

Android app

• The Santa Tracker Android app is a single APK, supporting all devices running Ice Cream Sandwich (4.0) and up. The source code for the app can be found here.

• Santa’s village is a canvas-based graphical launcher for videos, games and the tracker. In order to span 10,000 pixels in width, the village uses the Android resource hierarchy in a unique way to scale graphics without needing assets for multiple density buckets, thereby reducing the APK size.
• Games on Santa Tracker Android are built using a combination of technologies such as JBox2D (gumball game), Android view hierarchy (memory match game) and OpenGL with a purpose-built rendering engine (jetpack game).
• To help with user engagement, the app uses the App Indexing API to enable autocomplete support for Santa Tracker games from Google Search. This is done using deep linking.

Android Wear

• The custom watch faces on Android Wear provide a personalized touch. Having Santa or one of his friendly elves tell the time brings a smile to all. Building custom watch faces is a lot of fun but providing a performant, battery friendly watch face requires certain considerations. The watch face source code can be found here.
• Santa Tracker uses notifications to let users know when Santa has started his journey. The notifications are further enhanced to provide a great experience on wearables using custom backgrounds and actions that deep link into the app.

On the web

• Santa Tracker on the web was built using Polymer, a powerful new library from the Chrome team based on Web Components. Santa Tracker’s use of Polymer demonstrates how easy it is to package code into reusable components. Every scene in Santas village (games, videos, and interactive pages) is a custom element, only loaded when needed, minimizing the startup cost of Santa Tracker.
• Santa Tracker’s interactive and fun experience is built using the Web Animations API, a standardized JavaScript API for unifying animated content - this is a huge leap up from using CSS animations. Web Animations can be written imperatively, are supported in all modern browsers via polyfills and Polymer uses them internally to create its amazing material design effects. Examples of these animations can be found using this GitHub search.

• Santa believes in mobile first; this years experience was built to be optimized for the mobile web, including a fully responsive design, touch gesture support using Polymer, and new features like meta-theme color and the application manifest for add to homescreen.
• To provide exceptional localization support, a new i18n-msg component was built, a first for Web Components. Modeled after the Chrome extension i18n system, it enables live page-refresh for development but has a build step for optimization.

Now that the source code is also available, developers can see many of the parts that come together to make Santa Tracker. We hope that developers are inspired to make their own magical experiences.

Read More..

Android 4 3 for HTC One now available for everyone

As previously promised here, the new Android Revolution HD based on Android 4.3 and HTC Sense 5.0 is ready for everyone to download.

HTC hasnt released yet the international (WWE) update for HTC One, so users with international version of HTC One (M7_UL) are still waiting for Android 4.3 to come. As a workaround, Android Revolution HD is based on recently released Android 4.3 OTA for HTC One "Developer Edition". By checking byte to byte its quite easy to notice that the software from international edition (401) and developer edition (1540) are almost the same. So instead of waiting for WWE OTA, Android Revolution HD 22.0 has been "WWE-ed", which means it works identically to WWE software. All WWE languages are included.

So, if you dont want to wait for WWE OTA update for your HTC One, please visit this thread and get the latest Android Revolution HD 22.0 with Android 4.3 and HTC Sense 5.0.

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!

Read More..