Welcome Firebase to the Google Cloud Platform Team

Today we extend a warm welcome to Firebase, who is joining the Google Cloud Platform team. Firebase makes it very easy for developers to build mobile and web apps that store and sync data in realtime.

Mobile is one of the fastest-growing categories of app development, but it’s also still too hard for most developers. With Firebase, developers are able to easily sync data across web and mobile apps without having to manage connections or write complex sync logic. Firebase makes it easy to build applications that work offline and has full-featured libraries for all major web and mobile platforms, including Android and iOS.

By combining Firebase with Google Cloud Platform, we’ll be able to build the best end-to-end platform for mobile application development. If you’re already a Firebase developer, you’ll start seeing improvements right away and if you’re a Google Cloud Platform customer, you’ll find it even easier to create great mobile and web apps. The entire Firebase team is joining Google and, under the leadership of Firebase co-founders James Tamplin and Andrew Lee, will be working hard to bring you great new features. Not only will the products you already love continue to get better, but you’ll also gain access to the full power of Google Cloud Platform.

At Google Cloud Platform Live on November 4, we’ll be demonstrating new Firebase features and integrations with Cloud Platform. You can join us there in person or you can register to stream online for free.

If you are looking for more info check out the Firebase blog. We can’t wait to see what applications you build!

Greg DeMichillie, Director of Product Management

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A special offer on Security Keys for Google Apps customers

Posted by Eran Feigenbaum, Director of Security, Google for Work

Security has always been a top priority for Google. But security innovation is only as good as the number of people who use it. Part of that is making adoption super simple – that’s why we, along with the FIDO Alliance, created the Security Key, so that with a simple tap of the key you can send an encrypted 2-Step Verification signature to ensure your login information cannot be phished. And the other part is getting it into more hands. So today we’re announcing a 50% discount on Security Keys for Google Apps customers purchasing keys from Yubico, a Security Key manufacturer.

New admin controls are also rolling out today, to make it easier for Google Apps Unlimited administrators to deploy, monitor and manage Security Keys for their domains. As a Google Apps admin, once Security Keys have been activated by employees, you can see where and when employees last used their keys through usage tracking and by generating reports. You can easily revoke access to lost Security Keys and provide backup codes, so employees can still sign-in and get work done.

Security is never a done deal, and were continuously working to stay ahead of those with bad intentions. We hope you join us on this continuous journey and take advantage of the Security Key technology, the discount on Yubico keys, and tools to deploy them at scale for your organization.

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Newark Public Schools uses Google Apps for Education as the backbone of digital learning

Posted by Joshua Koen, Special Assistant for Technology, Newark Public Schools

(Cross-posted on the Google for Education Blog.)

Editors note: Today’s guest author is Joshua Koen, Special Assistant for Technology at Newark Public Schools, which serves over 35,000 students across 66 schools. Thanks to his diverse background, Koen focuses on bringing together instruction and technology. Here he shares his reflections from this past school year and his continued focus to ensure IT always serves learning. He’s also sharing the great news that Newark is now using Google Apps for Education district-wide.

Some people worry about giving kids too much access to technology, but I’m worried we might not be providing enough. We know students today can use the Internet pretty much anywhere and anytime. So as educators, it’s our job to model effective use. At the Newark Public Schools, infusing technology in our instruction is helping us reach our goal of preparing all students for the college or career of their choice. When it comes to technology, we try to keep it simple by focusing on three very specific objectives that support our district goals: helping teachers check for understanding for all students in real-time, infusing digital learning experiences into the curriculum and helping students develop digital fluency (which is measured through assessments like PARCC (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers).

When I arrived at Newark a year and a half ago, I was pleased to see that the district had already invested in high-speed wireless access. To further this work, last year I organized a steering committee of students, teachers and administrators to help guide our new learning environment. As part of this work, we developed a digital learning initiative and introduced Google Apps for Education district-wide. Google Apps has since become our educational backbone, facilitating collaboration at the classroom-level, school level and district level.

For example, students at Benjamin Franklin School led by teacher coaches Tracy Blazquez and Amy Panitch implemented a Problem Based Learning unit aligned to our curriculum to explore how the toy industry shapes what careers students enter when they grow up. Students conducted a class and school survey identifying preferences using Forms, analyzed the results in real-time as they were being collected in Sheets, collaborated together to describe their ideas in Docs, and presented their findings via a Hangout on Air.

Students from Franklin Elementary school participate in a Hangout on Air. Watch the video.

In another school, Speedway Academies, a 5th grade class donned their press badges, put on their adventure gear and became journalists chronicling natural disasters across the world. Their teacher, Audra Chisolm (who had never used Google Apps before) and coach Damion Frye, used Google Classroom to facilitate students researching, editing and writing editorials and newspaper articles in Docs. They created an online student newspaper with their final product using Google Sites. During the entire eight-week unit, the students only used one piece of paper and practiced PARCC readiness by cutting and pasting, highlighting and editing each others work.

Students collaborate on a problem based learning unit.

As a district team weve taken many steps to enable more digital learning. First and foremost, we focus on learning rather than IT. As IT teams, we need to be knowledgeable about the curriculum and needs of teachers if were going to be able to help them. We also model the use of new tools. For example, at a recent principals’ leadership institute, we shared the agenda and activities through a Google Site with our attendees who could contribute to brainstorms using Google Docs. To help teachers infuse technology into daily practice we utilize the technological, pedagogical and content knowledge (TPACK) framework to guide us in this. We find this to be a helpful framework. Finally, we’ve also introduced tech instructional leads in each school for on-the-job support.

In the next year, we plan to roll out more devices to give students even more access to learning. How will I know were having success with digital learning? I’ll know when we spend less time talking about IT and gadgets and more time talking about learning.

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iPhone Like Tab bar in Android

In a previous post we saw how to use the TabHost to create tabs in Android applications. Also we noticed that the Tabs in Android appear at the top of the activity.
but what if we want to give the tabs the look of the iPhone Tab Bar ?

this is possible by wrapping the TabWidget and the FrameLayout in a RelativeLayout container and adding android:layout_alignParentBottom="true" attribute to the TabWidget just like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>


 <TabHost android_layout_width="fill_parent"
 android_layout_height="fill_parent"
 android_id="@android:id/tabhost"
 
 >
 <RelativeLayout
 android_layout_width="fill_parent"
 android_layout_height="fill_parent"
 >
 <TabWidget
 android_layout_width="fill_parent"
 android_layout_height="wrap_content"
 android_id="@android:id/tabs"
 android_layout_alignParentBottom="true"
 />
 <FrameLayout
 android_layout_width="fill_parent"
 android_layout_height="fill_parent"
 android_id="@android:id/tabcontent"
 >
 
 </FrameLayout>
 </RelativeLayout>
 </TabHost>

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S O S Application for Android from Red Cross

A god news for you, American Red Cross has launched an Android version of S.O.S, which is loaded with step-by-step first aid guide and also quick help diagnosing a medical emergency. This app can be used as a hand guide while you wait for an ambulance to arrive. Quoting from Android market:

"The S.O.S. app provides step-by-step video narration by Dr. Oz and follow along demonstrations allowing people to quickly and confidently respond to common emergency situations with the goal of saving lives."

Emergency care protocols for over 30 of the most common emergency care situations were developed and reviewed by prestigious medical and educational panels from both the American Red Cross and the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP). These protocols were then adapted for an Android app surroundings and are accompanied by dynamic videos that walk through clear and concise emergency action steps that are appropriate for any audience. Dr. Oz is the instructional voice of each video, reassuringly guiding users on how to provide emergency care. 3-D animations are included for the more complex techniques, specifically Unconscious Choking and CPR which also include an audio and visual counter for actual time CPR compressions.

Definitely this app is going to be a hit among Android users, as its a great companion especially while travelling. This is going to be a good refresher if you have ever taken a CPR/first aid course.

Cons: Voice enabled commands are not integrated, in case of emergencies users may find it difficult to browse through the app.

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Project Tango I O Apps now released in Google Play

Posted by Larry Yang, Lead Product Manager, Project Tango

At Google I/O, we showed the world many of the cool things you can do with Project Tango. Now you can experience it yourself by downloading these apps on Google Play onto your Project Tango Tablet Development Kit.

A few examples of creative experiences include:

MeasureIt is a sample application that shows how easy it is to measure general distances. Just point a Project Tango device at two or more points. No tape measures and step ladders required.

Constructor is a sample 3D content creation tool where you can scan a room and save the scan for further use.

Tangosaurs lets you walk around and dig up hidden fossils that unlock a portal into a virtual dinosaur world.

Tango Village and Multiplayer VR are simple apps that demonstrate how Project Tango’s motion tracking enables you to walk around VR worlds without requiring an input device.

Tango Blaster lets you blast swarms of robots in a virtual world, and can even work with the Tango device mounted on a toy gun.

We also showed a few partner apps that are also now available in Google Play. Break A Leg is a fun VR experience where you’re a magician performing tricks on stage.

SideKick’s Castle Defender uses Project Tango’s depth perception capability to place a virtual world onto a physical playing surface.

Defective Studio’s VRMT is a world-building sandbox designed to let anyone create, collaborate on, and share their own virtual worlds and experiences. VRMT gives you libraries of props and intuitive tools, to make the virtual creation process as streamlined as possible.

We hope these applications inspire you to use Project Tango’s motion tracking, area learning and depth perception technologies to create 3D experiences. We encourage you to explore the physical space around the user, including precise navigation without GPS, windows into virtual 3D worlds, measurement of spaces, and games that know where they are in the room and what’s around them.

As we mentioned in our previous post, Project Tango Tablet Development Kits will go on sale in the Google Store in Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom starting August 26.

We have a lot more to share over the coming months! Sign-up for our monthly newsletter to keep up with the latest news. Connect with the 5,000 other developers in our Google+ community. Get help from other developers by using the Project Tango tag in Stack Overflow. See what others are creating on our YouTube channel. And share your story on Twitter with #ProjectTango.

Join us on our journey.

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The Case of Xamarin – For Cross Platform Mobile development

The Case of Xamarin – For cross-platform Mobile development

As an enterprise mobile developer, at some point, you would be faced with the decision to choose a cross platform development tool. Remain native and manage its challenges (which are elaborated a bit later) or go hybrid with tools like PhoneGap(Based on open-source Apache Cordova) or go with HTML5 and its related libraries?

As you might have guessed, there is certainly no right or wrong answer. The answer depends on what is the problem you are facing or trying to solve when you started looking at a cross-platform development tool.

Most-often, HTML5 based development or hybrid development tools seem to be advocated as the panacea for all problems faced by native development. So, what are the typical problems that continue to haunt if we were to take the native development route for Enterprise Apps? I specifically say “Enterprise” apps and not gaming apps (since gaming apps most often need not have custom UI per platform)

The problems could be of:

·      Managing a large number of code bases – for Android, iOS, Windows, for smartphones, tablets, mini tablets, TVs, including some variations if you are targeting different countries.

·      Adding new features to the many code bases that exist

·      Fixing bugs in each and every code base

·      Testing all the code bases for each feature enhancement or bug fix

·      Ensuring features are in parity in the large number of code bases

·      Giving a standard experience on each of them

In short, the problems are all related to the growing number of code bases each time we target a new device form-factor or platform or country.

HTML5 or hybrid apps could bring down the number of code bases. Infact, they have matured over the years to be able to give most of the features that native apps support.  They are positioned as “write-once-run-anywhere” solutions.

However, one fundamental question you have to ask yourself is whether you are looking for an app with the exact same User-Interface (UI) on Android, iOS, Windows etc.? If you are looking for platform-specific UI paradigms, you will have to do a lot of branching in the code – which very soon can become a nightmare. Your entire view layer code would be filled with branches on platform specific UI!! That certainly was not the intention when you chose a cross-platform tool!!

This may not be too different for the hybrid route too. You also have to deal with the lowest common denominator of the UI features supported by the cross platform tools.  So, if you intend to give native UI feel and features without being stuck with the least common denominator of features for your app and without having to do platform specific coding through “if…else” branches in your code, you must take a look at Xamarin.

Xamarin is the cross-platform tool that has addressed this very problem in a very elegant way!! It makes an assumption or advocates that you develop all the backend pieces of common, non-UI code in a separate layer and you write your platform specific UI in a separate layer.  Considering such a design, Xamarin  gives a complete set of platform specific features to you through the platform specific SDKs. You have the Xamarin.Android and Xamarin.iOS, which give you a 100% support to every feature on their specific platforms. But you also have Xamarin itself with out platform dependencies that can be used to build all the non-UI logic and reuse it across platforms – giving you the advantages of cross platform development but also giving you’re the advantage of native development of UI !! Howzat?!! And since this is developed using C#, you are almost ready to deploy the same code with UI development specific to Windows on Windows mobile as well!! 

Based on my experience in mobile app development, typically about 60% to 705 of the code is non-UI in enterprise apps and that is what lends itself to reuse.

Sure, it is now giving a “write-once-run-anywhere” assurance. It requires you to develop UI specific to platforms. Infact, what can be touted as its biggest limitation – having to develop UI separately for each platform is what I term as THE biggest advantage in enterprise apps that want platform-specific UI but cross-platform development!

Sure, any solution is suitable only considering the problem you are trying to solve. So, take an informed decision J

Check it out at Xamarin.com.

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