Christian Heilmann

Posts Tagged ‘Google’

TTMMHTM: Google delivers, Guardian delivers and some more developer goodies

Friday, May 21st, 2010

Damn, life is good as a developer right now.

** We finally have an open video format with WebM which is a container based on Matroska with VP8 as the video and Vorbis for audio. It is backed by Opera, Mozilla and Google amongst other huge players. IE9 says it will support it with a plugin and Safari seems to be supporting it via a Quicktime plugin.

** Google released a library to make it easier to embed web fonts and also host quite a bunch of fonts for easy embedding – preliminary reports by friends of mine state that they look amazing on Mac but very bac on PC - can you verify this?

** Google Latitude now has an API but it also shows some problems

** Google also released BigQuery which is a REST API to analyse data in Google Storage. One of the uses they showed is the Prediction API which does natural language analysis and could become a contender for Open Calais.

** AppEngine got some good updates including a Comet API

** Android got a major update – it now runs the superfast V8 engine, you will have access to accelerometer and camera with a JavaScript API and you can send applications to the phone from computers via the cloud. Makes me want to kill the guy who dropped my Nexus One and hope HTC will be quick in repairing it.

My Google Nexus One died – or the perils of very early adoption

Wednesday, May 19th, 2010

When I went to California last I was lucky enough to meet some friends from Google for lunch at their office and as a surprise on the way out I got a Nexus One as a present:

Nexus One - thanks Google! by  you.

I loved it immediately. It is a very slick phone with a real “developer touch”. This means:

  • To get data on or off it I connect it to a USB port and copy the stuff – no need to fire up some “Media Explorer” or iTunes.
  • The handling was wonderful – even though I never had a touch phone before I had no issues with it at all (except when I tried to type German SMS with the English dictionary on)
  • The geolocation stuff, Google Goggles, Google Maps, Point by Point navigation and all the other stuff that only runs on this platform beat the pants off the iPhone (at least for me)
  • The camera is amazing and the display is crisp as can be

That is until yesterday night. When I gave the phone to someone at the Future of Web Design after party to have a look at it he dropped it. I didn’t check and just pocketed it and this morning I found the display to look like this:

Broken Nexus One by  you.

It has a bit of a Eastman Colour vibe to it but makes it impossible to use. Funnily enough the touch stuff still works perfectly but outside of artificial light you cannot see anything on it any longer.

Now I am busted:

  • Where can I get a free Nexus One repaired in the UK? This is a no contract phone.
  • What can I do about my Jewels and Layar addiction?

It is a great example how being a very, very early adopter can bite you in the bum if something as simple as gravity messes with you :(.

TTMMHTM: Public data explorer, good weather, dogs with taches, and automated Twitter to delicious bookmarking

Monday, March 8th, 2010

Things that made me happy this morning:

I just arrived in Atlanta for Georgia Tech University hack day and the weather is awesome. I spent the day in the sun in cafes writing my slides for the Mix10 conference next week and now I am going through my feeds. So time for another TTMMHTM:

Google Chrome getting navigator.geolocation

Thursday, March 4th, 2010

Just when I was writing an article about geolocation and bemoaned the fact that only Firefox on the Desktop supports the W3C geolocation API (Safari only as the mobile version) there is a new beta out that stepped up and filled that hole.

Following the link on ReadWriteWeb to the Chrome Developer Blog I downloaded the beta for Mac and tried it out.

The result, using the GeoPlanet Explorer shows that navigator.geolocation works:

chrome with geolocation

In order to enable geolocation on Chrome you need to start it from the Terminal – for example in OSX:

/Applications/Google Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google Chrome—enable-geolocation

Good times ahead. Now ship it, Google!

TTMMHTM – BBC Web animals, two very cool APIs and there’s something about the LG logo

Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010

Things that made me happy this morning: