Google Translate now speaks 51 languages

Announced from Official Google Blog: Google Translate now speaks 51 languages, Google Translate now supports 51 languages and 2550 language pairs — including all 23 official EU languages.

Languages available for translation
Afrikaans
Albanian
Arabic
Belarusian
Bulgarian
Catalan
Chinese
Croatian
Czech
Danish
Dutch
English
Estonian
Filipino
Finnish
French
Galician
German
Greek
Hebrew
Hindi
Hungarian
Icelandic
Indonesian
Irish
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Latvian
Lithuanian
Macedonian
Malay
Maltese
Norwegian
Persian
Polish
Portuguese
Romanian
Russian
Serbian
Slovak
Slovenian
Spanish
Swahili
Swedish
Thai
Turkish
Ukrainian
Vietnamese
Welsh
Yiddish

Static Maps API v2

Now, Google have rewritten the API and are launching the new interface as Static Maps API v2. The main new features are:

• Paths can be specified as encoded polylines. (Issue 205)
• Paths can be filled and rendered as polygons. (Issue 792)
• Locations (in center, markers, or path parameters) can now be specified as addresses instead of latitude/longitude coordinates.
• Colors can now be specified as any 24-bit or 32-bit color.

Source: Google Geo Developers Blog: Static Maps API v2: Encoded Paths, Polygons & Geocoding

To play around with everything right now, try the new Static Maps v2 Wizard.

Google Search Logo: 400th Anniversary of Galileo's Telescope

live-android 0.3 released

live-android 0.3 released on on Aug 21, 2009

Want to give Google Android a try, but don't feel like buying a T-Mobile G1/G2/G3? LiveAndroid lets you download a LiveCD disc image of the Google Android operating system. Just burn the image to a disc, stick it in a CD-ROM drive, and reboot your computer and you can check out Android without installing it or affecting any files on your PC.

You can also use the disc image in a virtualization application like VirtualBox, VMWare or Microsoft Virtual PC if you want to try the operating system without even rebooting your computer.

Blogger Play

Blogger Play is a real-time slideshow of photos Blogger users have recently uploaded to their blogs. It's a great snapshot of what people are thinking and posting about, right now! Images on Blogger Play come from blogs that are public and listed on the web, and also from public Blogger profiles.

Google Code Jam 2009

Google Code Jam is a coding competition in which professional and student programmers are asked to solve complex algorithmic challenges in a limited amount of time. The contest is all-inclusive: Google Code Jam lets you program in the coding language and development environment of your choice.

Google Code Jam starts in September, when you will compete in online rounds against contestants from around the world. From the ranks of those contestants will be chosen the 25 best, who will travel to Google headquarters in Mountain View, California. There, on Friday, November 13, they will compete for ACRush's title of Code Jam Champion.

Google Search Logo: Hans Christian Ørsted's Birthday

Introducing social gadgets for iGoogle

Google have added some features to your iGoogle homepage that will make it easier for you to enjoy your favorite web content and to share it with friends. Now you can add social gadgets to post updates, play games with friends, and more. Take a tour.

Social gadgets

Social gadgets let you share information and play games with friends. You can tell if a gadget is social if it has the icon in the top right corner. Click the icon to see the gadget's social settings. The figures in the icon will show up inside a border when social options are enabled. To share social gadgets with your friends, use the drop-down arrow and click 'Share this gadget.' Learn more.

Source: http://www.google.com/intl/en_us/help/ig/social/


We've added some features to your iGoogle homepage that will enable you to post updates and play games with friends: http://www.google.com/igsocial

Caffeine: The next-generation architecture for Google's web search

It's the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits "under the hood" of Google's search engine, which means that most users won't notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we're opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback.

visit the web developer preview of Google's new infrastructure at http://www2.sandbox.google.com/ and try searches there.

Source: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/08/help-test-some-next-generation.html

Today Google Logo: Perseid Meteor Shower

Google Groups

What is a Google Groups?

A Google Group is a user-owned group created using the Google Groups service. Google Groups not only allows you to manage and archive your mailing list, but also provides a method for true communication and collaboration with group members. Unlike other free mailing list services, Google Groups offers generous storage limits, customizable pages, and unique management options. As always, Google Groups displays only relevant text ads (never banners or pop-up ads).

Google Latitude

Google Latitude

With Google Latitude, you can:

• See where your friends are and what they are up to
• Quickly contact them with SMS, IM, or a phone call
• Control your location and who gets to see it

Or type this URL into your phone's browser: google.com/latitude

Google Maps for mobile

Download Google Maps for mobile to your phone, and never carry a paper map again.

• Determine your current location with or without GPS
• Get driving and transit directions
• Get phone numbers and addresses for local businesses

Or type this URL into your phone's browser: m.google.com/maps

Current supported platforms:

• Android
• BlackBerry
• Java
• Windows Mobile
• Symbian S60 3rd Edition (most new Nokia smartphones)
• Palm OS
• iPhone (pre-installed)

Google Chrome Blog: Recreating the Google Chrome icon: videos from around the world

Google Chrome Blog: Recreating the Google Chrome icon: videos from around the world

Google App Engine Python SDK version 1.2.4 released

Version 1.2.4 - August 6, 2009

• Added support for kindless queries, ie. transaction descendant queries.
• http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=913
• Composite indexes no longer required for certain types of key queries.
• Improved exception reporting in the bulkloader.
• Datastore transaction RPC sent at beginning of transaction rather than upon first Datastore request.
• PolyModel supports keys_only query.
• http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=1630
• Remote API supports more API's (Images, Memcache and URLFetch).
• http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=1596
• Remote API shell.
• Support for multiple inheritance for Model and PolyModel.
• Enhancement to SearchableModel allowing multiple properties to be indexed.
• Various code quality improvements.

Google App Engine's Home

Google Chrome: a new Beta released, shows over 30% improvement.

at Wednesday, August 5, 2009 | 8:00 AM

There's a brand new beta for you to try out today. As always, we continue to focus on speed, and this beta release shows over 30% improvement on both the V8 and SunSpider benchmarks over our current stable channel release. We've also improved two of the most loved and most used features of Google Chrome: the New Tab page and the Omnibox. Plus, we decided to add a little bit of style by allowing you to deck out your browser with colors, patterns, and images.

~ Google Chrome Blog: A New Beta: Why slow down when you can speed up?

Download the New Beta

Google CEO Resigns from Apple

Google CEO Eric Schmidt stepped down from Apple's board of directors, marking the end of their buddy-buddy relationship. What does this mean for the two companies?
http://www.newsy.com

Simple version 0.1.1

Update: A couple more problems was fixed with the Windows binary distribution. The download file has been updated. Version 0.1.1 also contains a new component for a location sensor.

Project Home of Simple>>

Simple is a BASIC dialect for developing Android applications. It is particularly well suited for non-professional programmers (but not limited to). Simple allows programmers to quickly write Android applications by using the components supplied by its runtime system.

The Google Maps API V3

What is the Google Maps API?

The Google Maps API lets you embed Google Maps in your own web pages with JavaScript. The API provides a number of utilities for manipulating maps (just like on the http://maps.google.com web page) and adding content to the map through a variety of services, allowing you to create robust maps applications on your website.

This Google Maps API V3 will look similar to the existing version 2 of the Google Maps API. However, much has changed under the hood: Version 3 has been designed to load fast, especially on mobile browsers such as Android-based devices and the iPhone™. The initial launch has a smaller feature set than that available in the V2 API. Additional features from V2 will be migrated while working to keep the size of the JavaScript code small and maintain our optimized loading speeds.

Chromium

Chromium is an open-source browser project that aims to build a safer, faster, and more stable way for all Internet users to experience the web. The site contains design documents, architecture overviews, testing information, and more to help you learn to build and work with the Chromium source code.

Chromium is the open-source project behind Google Chrome. Google is releasing a first look at Chromium and invite you to join in to:

• Help build a safer, faster, and more stable way for all Internet users to experience the web
• Create a powerful platform for developing a new generation of web applications

Google I/O 2009 - Building Applications with Google APIs

Google I/O 2009 - Building Applications with Google APIs

Ray Cromwell

Google offers a wide variety of APIs in many domains that together form a complete platform, from authentication and authorization, cloud computing, and social networking, to visualization, mobile computing, and Google Web Toolkit. In this talk, we will walk though a complex application that integrates many APIs together, how each can solve a different need in your application, how you can share code between GWT, Android, and App Engine, and how you can monetize your application with Google Checkout.

For presentation slides and all I/O sessions, please go to: code.google.com/events/io/sessions.html