Posted by Wesley Chun, Developer Advocate, Google Apps

Happy Monday! Have you ever been asked by your boss to do something simple (good) but long and tedious (bad)? Take for example, the simple task of counting up all of the YouTube views for your corporate videos and your competitors’. It doesn’t even have to be your boss. What if you and your gamer friends are competing to see whose gameplay clips are garnering the most attention? It’s easy to manually track ten videos, but how about 100 or even 1,000? While simple -- you can visit the YouTube to grab the view count for each video -- you know the real problem with a task like this is that you don’t scale with the amount of content, so it’s better to automate with a simple app instead. This is the exact scenario that my colleagues and I set out to address in the latest episode of the Launchpad Online, introducing users to a pair of Google developer tools that can help solve this particular problem:

The first developer tool covered is the YouTube Data API. You can access it like most modern Google APIs from your preferred programming environment using one of the Google APIs Client Libraries. However, this type of data generally lives in a spreadsheet, and if you’re using Google Sheets, you can instead write the app with Google Apps Script, a JavaScript environment running in Google’s cloud that, if authorized, can write that video information to the cells in your Sheet. YouTube is just one of the many supported services available to Apps Script developers.

As with all my Launchpad Online episodes, I walk you through a short code snippet (only eight lines this time) that will get you started building your own custom solution. If you’re new to the developer series, we share technical content aimed at novice Google developers… current tools with a little bit of code to help you launch your next app. Please give us your feedback below and tell us what topics you would like to see in future episodes!

Posted by Brandon Wuest, Software Engineer & Stereoscopic Sightseer

Google Cardboard is bringing virtual reality worldwide. Starting today, the Google Cardboard app is available in 39 languages and over 100 countries on both Android and iOS devices. Additionally, the Cardboard developer docs are now published in 10 languages to help developers build great VR experiences. With more than 15 million installs of Cardboard apps from Google Play, we're excited to bring VR to even more people around the world.

More Works with Google Cardboard viewers

Anyone can make their own Cardboard viewer with the open designs ready for download. If you'd rather not DIY, choose from the growing family of certified viewers, including the Mattel View-Master and Zeiss VR One GX, on sale now.

Better tools for building

The Cardboard SDKs for Android and Unity have been updated to address your top two requests: drift correction and Unity performance. This update includes a major overhaul of the sensor fusion algorithms that integrate the signals from the gyroscope and accelerometer. These improvements substantially decrease drift, especially on phones with lower-quality sensors. The Cardboard SDK for Unity now supports a fully Unity-native distortion pass. This improves performance by avoiding all major plugin overhead, and enables Cardboard apps to work with Metal rendering on iOS and multi-threaded rendering on Android. All of this adds up to better VR experiences for your users.

More places

Finally, to help bring you to more places, you can now explore Google Street View in Cardboard. So, download the updated Google Street View app for Android or iOS, and grab your Cardboard to immerse yourself in destinations around the world.

With Cardboard available in more places, we're hoping to bring the world just a little bit closer to everyone. Happy exploring!

Posted by, Laurence Moroney, Developer Advocate

Vulkan is the new generation, open standard API for efficient access to graphics and compute on modern GPUs. In this episode of Coffee with a Googler, Laurence meets with Shannon Woods, a Technical Program Manager in Google’s rendering teams to talk about plumbing code from your app down to the GPU!

Historically mobile apps have used Open GL ES to communicate with the GPU, but the hardware and API have evolved separately, impacting efficiency. Vulkan has been designed to organize the graphics space in much the same way as the underlying GPU, so it can be more efficient.

Android will support both Open GL ES and Vulkan, so developers can choose which API is right for them — and with Vulkan, precise control over the commands executed by the GPU allows for great optimization, as well as parallelization of code.

We also learn about the famous Utah Teapot, a standard reference object for 3D modellers, and how it is found in popular culture -- such as showing up in most animated movies. Have you spotted it?

Watch this episode for some great guidance from Shannon on what you need to do as a developer to prepare for Vulkan, and how using could be of benefit to your apps!

Posted by Taylor Savage, Product Manager, Polymer

Yesterday in Amsterdam we kicked off the first ever Polymer Summit, joined live by 800 developers. We focused on three key themes: Develop, Design and Deploy, giving concrete advice on how you can build your web app from start to finish. You can watch a replay of the keynote here.

It has been amazing to see how much the community has grown and how far the project has come: what started as an experiment in a new way of developing on the web platform has steadily grown into the range of tools, product lines, and community contributions we saw presented throughout the Summit. Since Polymer 1.0 launched in May we’ve seen more than 150,000 public facing pages created with Polymer.

In case you missed any of the sessions, we’ve consolidated all of the recordings below:

Develop

• Thinking in Polymer
• End to End with Polymer
• Using ES6 with Polymer
• Testing Polymer Web Components
• Platinum Elements
• There’s an element for that - but what if there isn’t
• A11y with Polymer
• Upgrading to 1.0 with polyup
• Polymer's Gesture System

Design

• Adaptive UI with Material Design and Paper Elements
• Polymers Styling System
• Polymers Animation System

Deploy

• Polymer Power Tools
• Polymer Performance Patterns
• Doing a Perf Audit of your Polymer App

Be sure to visit our YouTube channel for the session recordings. For the latest news and upcoming Polymer events, subscribe to the Polymer blog and follow us on Twitter @Polymer.

Posted by Wesley Chun, Developer Advocate, Google Apps

Have you ever booked a dining reservation, plane ticket, hotel room, concert ticket, or seats to the game from your favorite app, only to have to exit that booking app to enter the details into your calendar? It doesn’t make for a friendly user experience. Why can’t today’s apps do that for you automatically?

In case you missed it the episode 97 of #GoogleDev100 the other week, I aim to inspire how app developers can streamline that process with the help of the Google Calendar API. A short Python script, anchored by the following snippet, is illustrated to show developers how easy it is to programmatically add calendar events:

CALENDAR = apiclient.discovery.build('calendar', 'v3', http=creds.authorize(Http()))
GMT_OFF = '-07:00' # PDT/MST/GMT-7
EVENT = {
    'summary': 'Dinner with friends',
    'start': {'dateTime': '2015-09-18T19:00:00%s' % GMT_OFF},
    'end':   {'dateTime': '2015-09-18T22:00:00%s' % GMT_OFF},
    'attendees': [
        {'email': '[email protected]'},
        {'email': '[email protected]'},
    ],
}
CALENDAR.events().insert(calendarId='primary', body=EVENT).execute()

For deeper dive into the script, check out the corresponding blogpost. With code like that, your app can automatically insert your relevant events into your users’ calendars, saving them the effort of manually doing it themselves. One of the surprising aspects is that a limited set of actions, such as RSVPing, is even available to non-Google Calendar users. By the way, inserting events is just the beginning. Developers can also delete or update events instantly in case that upcoming dinner gets pushed back a few weeks. Events can even be repeated with a recurrence rule. Attachments are also supported so you can provide your users a PDF of the concert tickets they just booked. Those are just some of the things the API is capable of.

Ready to get started? Much more information, including code samples in Java, PHP, .NET, Android, iOS, and more, can be found in the Google Calendar API documentation. If you’re new to the Launchpad Online developer series, we share technical content aimed at novice Google developers… the latest tools and features with a little bit of code to help you launch that app. Please give us your feedback below and tell us what topics you would like to see in future episodes!

Posted by Laurence Moroney, Developer Advocate.

App Indexing helps you get your mobile app found in Google Search. Once your app is indexed, mobile users who search for content related to your app can be guided directly to your app, helping you to increase your install base and improve user engagement.

In this episode of Coffee with a Googler, Laurence meets with Jennifer Lin from the App Indexing team, who demonstrates the possibilities!

Jennifer shares that Google has indexed over 50 billion deep links into apps, with searches returning these links to users, taking them directly into your app. She shares how the Daily Mail newspaper in the UK saw a 22% boost in search impressions, and app users spent around 20% more time reading and sharing articles when they came in via a deep link from Search. Additionally, Tabelog, a premier restaurant review app and site in Japan, saw an increase of 9.6% in page views within their app, and a 63% increase in Search impressions after adding their app to the index.

When searching with Google Search on your phone, if the app is already installed, and has content that matches what you’re looking for -- you can be directed straight into the app to get a very rich experience. Alternatively, if the app isn’t yet installed, but has matching content, you can be guided through an install experience for the app, without losing context, so that when the app launches, you’ll go straight to the content you were looking for! Jennifer demos both scenarios using real apps, showing how straightforward the user experience is.

You can learn more about App Indexing, including how to get started on the Google Developers App Indexing site. For more information about other Google Search for Developers APIs, check out g.co/DeveloperSearch.

Posted by Taylor Savage, Product Manager, Polymer

The Polymer Summit is almost here! We’ll officially kick off live from Amsterdam at 9:00AM GMT+2 this coming Tuesday, September 15th. To get the most out of the event, make sure to check out the speaker list and talk schedule on our site.

Can’t join us in person? Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered! You can tune into the summit live on www.polymer-project.org/summit. We will stream the keynote and all sessions over the course of the event. If you want us to send you a reminder to tune into the livestream, sign up here. We’ll also be publishing all of the talks as videos on the Chrome Developers YouTube Channel.

We’re looking forward to seeing you in person or remotely on Tuesday. Don’t forget to join the social conversations at #PolymerSummit!

Posted by Reto Meier, Team Lead, Scalable Developer Advocacy

For the past 100 days, Google Developers has delivered a series of daily videos to keep you informed about everything you need to develop, engage and earn.

We’ve covered everything from the Android Marshmallow launch:

...to how you can get started developing with beacons:

Thank you for following along and learning with us about all the ways you can use Google tools to make your apps awesome. Let us know what your favourite video was using #GoogleDev100. In the meantime, check out this short sizzle reel looking back at our most memorable moments -- we hope you’ve enjoyed watching them as much as we’ve enjoyed making them:

Posted by Laurence Moroney, Developer Advocate

Google Voice Actions let your users quickly complete tasks in your app using voice commands. It’s a great way to drive usage of your app, and now users’ voice action requests can lead directly from Search to your Android app. In this episode of Coffee With a Googler, Laurence meets with Sunil Vemuri, product manager of Google Voice Actions.

Sunil tells us about how the speech field has progressed, and how the quality of algorithms for detecting speech have drastically improved in a short space of time. In 2013, the average error rate for speech detection was 23 percent -- almost a quarter of all words weren’t recognized. By 2015, at Google I/O, we announced that the rate was down to 8 percent, and it continues to get better.

The episode will also share how developers can get started with building for voice actions using System Actions, where the voice action can be routed from Google Search directly to your app by declaring an intent to capture that action. If you need voice actions that aren’t in the system, you can also set Custom Actions. A developer can tell Google the phrases that they’d like to have triggered (e.g. ‘Ok Google, Turn on the Lights on MyApp’) and the Google app can then fire off the Intent that you specify. In addition, you can build Voice Interactions where your app can ask the user follow-up questions before performing an action. For example, when the user asks to play some music, the app could ask for the genre.

You can learn more about Voice Actions, how they work, and how to get started at the Google Developers site for Voice Actions.

If you have any questions for Laurence or Sunil, please leave them in the comments below.

If there are any guests, technologies, or anything Google that you’d like us to chat about over Coffee, please also drop us a line!