Official Google Australia Blog

Welcome Gotye to Google+!

Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Joining the likes of Snoop Dogg, Madonna and Blink 182’s Mark Hoppus, Australia’s very own Gotye can now be added to the growing list of music artists using Google+.

To kick off his time on Google+, last week Gotye hosted a Hangout along with Triple J’s Lindsay McDougall. He was able to video chat with five fans about everything from creating the ultimate mixtape to developing song concepts while taking out the compost. Ever wondered what kind of instruments Australia’s chart-topping, creative genius used in the making of his gold-selling album Making Mirrors, or what kind of books he keeps on his bookshelf? You can catch highlights on the video Sydney Opera House has just posted to their channel.

With Google+, you now have a new way to share and discover creative stuff online. You can form artistic communities, promote your own work, and find inspiration through other artists. Here are just a few, to start. You can even use Google+ photos to showcase your own work, and create personalised recommendations for the things you care about.

And Hangouts are a great way to relax and stay connected virtually with friends when you’re online. Musicians like Gotye use them to connect with fans. And there are budding communities that are jumping on hangouts to share similar interests, like photography.

To keep up to date on the latest with Gotye, be sure to add him to your circles.

Posted by Sophie Hirst, YouTube Music

The evolution of enterprise software

Monday, September 5, 2011

This is a cross-post from the Google Enterprise Blog.
Last week our chairman Eric Schmidt took the stage at Dreamforce with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff to discuss the evolution of computing. In a wide-ranging conversation, they covered everything from the network computer to the consumerisation of IT to the emerging primacy of mobile, social and local. You can watch the keynote here:

Eric pointed out that it’s the cloud that is allowing us to upend the old software model. High cost. Complex. Quickly out-of-date. Difficult to replace. We’ve exhausted what can be done with client-server.

Consumer technology is now shaping enterprise software, and it’s transforming the way we live and work. Ubiquitous. Easy to use. Flexible. Constantly innovating. Built for teams. We’ve embraced a user-first, 100% web approach with Google Apps, and it’s a big reason why more than 40 million people now use Apps. We also announced that 4 million businesses run on Apps and another 5,000 join the movement every day.

But of all the ideas Eric and Marc discussed, one resonated with me most: “Life is short, you should spend it working with people you enjoy.”
Posted by Amit Singh, Vice President, Google Enterprise

Happy third birthday, Chrome!

Thursday, September 1, 2011

This is a cross-post from the Official Google blog.

It’s that time of the year again for the Chrome team, when we pause on our anniversary to reflect on the amazing life and times of the web. It’s hard to believe that it’s already been three years since we launched our open source web browser, Chrome.

In that time, the web community has continued to inspire us, bringing the power of the web into all kinds of apps and experiences, with all modern browsers making great strides in speed, simplicity and security. To pay homage to the goodness of the web, we’ve put together an interactive infographic, built in HTML5, which details the evolution of major web technologies and browsers:

(With thanks to our friends at Hyperakt, Vizzuality, mgmt design, and GOOD)

In our third year, we’ve also brought Chrome's principles of speed, simplicity and security to a new model of computing: the Chromebook. The Chromebook is pure Chrome—a computer built for everything you ever need to do on the web while doing away with all the usual annoyances of an old, slow PC.

Here’s a quick fly-by through the some of the highlights of the past 12 months on the Chrome platform:

Faster and faster

Simpler and more accessible

Chrome supports many popular screen readers such as JAWS, NVDA and VoiceOver to help visually impaired people better experience the web.
Print Preview, a popular feature request, uses Chrome’s built-in PDF viewer to display the preview, and enables you to save any webpage as a convenient PDF file using the “Print to PDF” option.
Chrome’s icon takes on a simpler look to embody the Chrome spirit, since Chrome is all about making your web experience quicker, lighter and easier for all.

An even more secure platform

Our integrated and sandboxed PDF viewer enables you to view PDF files on the web without installing additional software. Furthermore, we built an additional layer of security around the PDF viewer called a “sandbox” to help protect you from security attacks that are targeted at PDF files.
Adobe Flash Player is sandboxed on Windows, further protecting you from security attacks and malware targeted at Flash content on the web.
Chrome warns you before downloading some types of malicious files with enhanced Safe Browsing technology. In order to protect privacy, malicious content is detected without Chrome or Google ever having to know about the URLs that you visit or the files you download.
To provide greater transparency and control over the data that websites store on your computers, Chrome lets you delete Local Shared Objects created by Adobe Flash Player using the browser’s built-in setting dialogs.

Wowzah, the modern web!

The Chrome Web Store is an open marketplace where you can search for and discover web applications, both free and paid, along with ratings and reviews. Developers can add in-app payments to their apps for a flat 5 percent transaction fee.
Chrome supports WebGL, which brings hardware-accelerated 3D graphics to the browser with no additional software needed. For a taste of what WebGL can do, check out “3 Dreams of Black,” a 3D music experience for the web browser.
Chrome’s support for the HTML speech input API enables developers to give web apps the ability to transcribe your voice into text. Try it out on www.google.com by clicking on the microphone icon in the search box.
Hardware-accelerated 3D CSS enables snazzier experiences in webpages and apps which use 3D effects.

Delivering a new, simpler model for computing

There’s more to come. Keep an eye on the Chrome blog to hear about new features and performance improvements as we continue to ship stable channel updates every six weeks. As always, on both Chrome and Chromebooks you’ll be automatically updated to the new versions as soon as they’re released.

Posted by Ben Goodger and Darin Fisher, Software Engineers

Using Gmail, Calendar and Docs without an Internet connection

Thursday, September 1, 2011

This is a cross-post from the Gmail blog

The great thing about web apps is that you can access all of your information on the go, and we’ve introduced ways to use Google Apps on a variety of devices like mobile phones and tablets. But it’s inevitable that you’ll occasionally find yourself in situations when you don’t have an Internet connection, like planes, trains and carpools. When we announced Chromebooks at Google I/O 2011, we talked about bringing offline access to our web apps, and now we’re taking our first steps in that direction. Gmail offline will be available today, and offline for Google Calendar and Google Docs will be rolling out over the next week, starting today.

Gmail Offline is a Chrome Web Store app that’s intended for situations when you need to read, respond to, organise and archive email without an internet connection. This HTML5-powered app is based on the Gmail web app for tablets, which was built to function with or without web access. After you install the Gmail Offline app from the Chrome Web Store, you can continue using Gmail when you lose your connection by clicking the Gmail Offline icon on Chrome’s “new tab” page.

Google Calendar and Google Docs let you seamlessly transition between on- and offline modes. When you’re offline in Google Calendar, you can view events from your calendars and RSVP to appointments. With Google Docs you can view documents and spreadsheets when you don’t have a connection. Offline editing isn’t ready yet, but we know it’s important to many of you, and we’re working hard to make it a reality. To get started using Google Calendar or Google Docs offline, just click the gear icon at the top right corner of the web app and select the option for offline access.

IT administrators can deploy Chrome Web Store apps to users en masse by setting up organisational policies for Chrome.

Today’s world doesn’t slow down when you’re offline and it’s a great feeling to be productive from anywhere, on any device, at any time. We’re pushing the boundaries of modern browsers to make this possible, and while we hope that many users will already find today’s offline functionality useful, this is only the beginning. Support for offline document editing and customising the amount of email to be synchronised will be coming in the future. We also look forward to making offline access more widely available when other browsers support advanced functionality (like background pages).

Posted by Benoît de Boursetty, Product Manager

Viocorp broadcasts clear signal for growth with Google Apps

Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Editor’s note: Today’s guest blogger is Ian Gardiner, CEO of Viocorp, a leading provider of digital broadcast video solutions in Asia Pacific. See what other organisations that have gone Google have to say.

Viocorp has provided digital broadcast video solutions to local and global corporations, governments, and media companies since 2002. The video webcasts we host, such as the Rolex Sydney Hobart Yacht Race or World Youth Day, often attract millions of viewers worldwide. We manage the back-end infrastructure to encode and deliver video of these events online, giving businesses an easy way to publish these digital media webcasts. Our customers don’t have to install anything on their end. They just buy a username and password and we deliver our services through the web browser.

Prior to Google Apps, we used a legacy on-premise solution to support our communication needs. Exchange had several shortcomings which became especially obvious as our business started to expand. Employees working from home and on the road had frequent problems with mobile email access and with synchronisation of email across multiple devices. Our IT staff spent hundreds of hours each year managing and maintaining our email server when they could have been improving our video software solutions.

As a company that provides its services entirely online, we saw Google Apps for Business as a natural fit. Deployment was very easy and there were no major issues since Google Apps supports user choice, enabling us to have a gradual transition. Initially most of our users chose to maintain Microsoft Outlook as their email client, but today, given the option between Gmail or Microsoft Outlook, 90 percent of our employees choose Gmail.

We’ve also adopted Google Calendar to set up meetings and reserve shared resources such as conference rooms. Google Talk and Google Docs let us create, share, and collaborate faster than ever, moving projects forward as teams connected by real time information. Most importantly, Google Apps lets our employees work from anywhere with any smartphone or web-enabled tablet. When I’m in transit to client meetings, I can use my phone to email, chat, or even review my presentation in Google Docs. And every month we get new features that support innovation and efficiency within the company—at no extra cost.

Compared with our previous solution, managing Google Apps is incredibly easy. We think moving to Google Apps saves Viocorp well over 200 hours (approx. 5 weeks) of IT work annually, with no drawbacks in service or uptime. Although we definitely saved money by switching to Google Apps, the real value for us goes far beyond reduced costs. The question was, will Google Apps allow us to work more effectively? And when we ask our employees, the answer is “yes, without a doubt”.

Posted by Ian Gardiner, CEO of Viocorp

Celebrating developers: Developer Day registration open

Tuesday, August 23, 2011

Calling all developers! We've opened registration for developers to attend Google Developer Day 2011 in Sydney on November 8th, 2011. It should be a great line up with explorations of the latest developments in Android, Chrome, HTML5, Cloud and more. It will take place at the Sydney Convention and Exhibition Centre.

While we’re talking all-things developer, we wanted to send congratulations to Peter Finch, Brian McKenna, and Marko Vuksanovic, the Australian winners of the Open Call for Developers HTML5 challenge.

Screenshots of their beautiful creations are featured below: each participant of the challenge was asked to design and implement an original HTML5 doodle of the Google Developer day Dymaxion map, adding their own local twist. Doodles had to be built using open web technologies (HTML5, WebGL, etc.) and feature a local theme.

Creator: Peter Finch
How did you do it? The doodle is created using a HTML5 2D canvas element. The Dymaxion map is programmatically generated by subdividing the triangles in the original map into smaller sub-triangles and then drawing all of them in different colours based on a colour map representing the image to be drawn. The colour maps were generated using a Java program that mapped the relative location of the triangle onto a target image and then back onto the page colour map. The waves then merge the images, one on top of another, to create the transition effect.

Creator: Brian McKenna
How did you do it? I imported the Dymaxion map to Blender and then animated it to transform into the Opera House using "shape keys". The Dymaxion map, Opera House, Southern Cross and stars all rendered using Three.js. Everything else rendered with normal HTML5/CSS3.

Creator: Marko Vuksanovic
How did you do it? Doodle is a manipulation of the Dymaxion map using HTML canvas element. Interactivity is achieved using native drag and drop events and transitions. Animations are used to transition between the iconic landmarks of Sydney.

Congratulations to Brian, Marko and Peter - and hope to see you all at Google Developer Day in November.

Posted by Alan Noble, Director of Engineering Google Australia.

Owliver!

Thursday, August 11, 2011

Last Tuesday we were lucky enough to have a special visitor to the window ledge of our office.

As it was my birthday, I secretly hoped this little guy was bringing me an invitation to Hogwarts but it seemed he just wanted to see what we were up to at Google. I snapped a couple of pictures and this one was my favourite.

The Sydney Morning Herald called him Barney, but there have been a bunch of names thrown around our office, including Owliver, Ow-lan Noble (in homage to our Director of Engineering) and Colonowl Whobert von Owlivander.

Our friends at WIRES helped Owliver out after he was injured flying, and released him back into Pyrmont at dusk last night.

We hope you enjoy looking at him as much as we did.

Posted by Carson Page, Learning and Development, Google Australia.

Australia Blog

Welcome Gotye to Google+!

The evolution of enterprise software

Happy third birthday, Chrome!

Using Gmail, Calendar and Docs without an Internet connection

Viocorp broadcasts clear signal for growth with Google Apps

Celebrating developers: Developer Day registration open

Owliver!

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