Author Archives: Google Devs

Chrome Dev Summit 2016: The Mobile Web Moves Forward

Originally posted on Chromium Blog
Posted by Darin Fisher, VP Engineering, Chrome
Last week at the 4th annual Chrome Dev Summit, we were excited to share a glimpse of what’s possible with over 1,000 developers in person, and thousands more on the livestream. Each year this is a time to hear what developers have been building, share our vision for the future of the web platform, and celebrate what we love about the web...


Reach of the web
As we've talked about before, one of the superpowers of the web is its incredible reach. There are now more than two billion active Chrome browsers worldwide, with many more web users across other browsers. The majority of these users are now on mobile devices, bringing new opportunities for us to explore as an industry.

Mobile browsers also lead the way for the internet’s newest users. Exclusively accessing the internet from mobile devices, users in emerging markets struggle with limited computing power, unreliable networks, and expensive data. For these users, native apps can be a poor match due to their large data and storage requirements. And, it’s these constraints that have resulted in the developing markets leading the charge when it comes to innovating on the web.

Progressive

Instead, the web can fill these needs for all users through an experience we've been calling Progressive Web Apps (PWAs). These web apps provide the performance users have come to expect from their device, while also offering critical capabilities such as offlining, add-to-homescreen, and push notifications. We've been encouraged by the strong adoption of these capabilities, with push notifications recently exceeding 18 billion notifications per day across 50,000 domains.


Last year when we spoke about PWAs, things were just getting started. Now we're seeing the movement in full swing, with many large sites across the globe launching great new apps and feeling the success that PWAs can bring.

DAY 1 - THAO LOGOS.png

Alibaba.com, built a PWA and saw a 76% increase in conversion rates across browsers. The investment in the mobile web increased monthly active user rates on iOS by 14 percent. On Android devices where re-engagement capabilities like push notifications and Add to Homescreen were enabled, active user rates increased by 30 percent.


Another great example is The Weather Channel. Since launching a PWA they achieved an 80% reduction in load time and within three months, saw almost 1 million users opt in to receive web push notifications.


During the Summit, we also heard from Lyft, who shared their experience of building a PWA in less than a month, and using less than a quarter of the engineering support needed to build their native app. Learn more about our how partners are using PWA technologies to enhance their mobile web experience.


What can you do?
We also have a variety of tools, libraries, and APIs available to help you bring the benefits of PWAs to your site. For example, Chrome's DevTools provides assistance along every step of the development flow. DevTools has a ton of new features to help you build great mobile apps, such as network simulation, CPU throttling, and a PWA audit tool powered by Lighthouse.


For developers just beginning their web app or looking to rework an existing one, the Polymer App Toolbox provides a set of components and tools for easily building a Progressive Web App using web components. And Polymer 2.0 is right around the corner, making it easy to take advantage of the new Web Components v1 APIs shipping cross-browser and build mobile web apps with minimal overhead.


Finally, checkout can be a complicated process to complete and in the retail sector alone there are 66% fewer conversions on mobile than on desktop. With PaymentRequest, you can now bring a seamless checkout experience to your website with support for both credit cards and Android Pay, increasing odds for conversion.


Catch up
Finally, if you didn’t catch our live stream in real time, you can always check back on our YouTube channel for all the recordings or see the highlights from the event in 57 seconds.


Thanks for coming, thanks for watching, and most of all, thank you for developing for the web!

Making it easier for anyone to start exploring A.I.

Alexander Chen, Creative Lab

With all the exciting A.I. stuff happening, there are lots of people eager to start tinkering with machine learningtechnology. We want to help make it easier for anyone to do that – whether you're an engineer, hobbyist, student, or someone who's just curious. But sometimes, it can feel pretty intimidating when you're just getting started.

That's why we've created a site called A.I. Experiments. The site showcases simple experiments that let anyone play with this technology hands-on, and resources for creating your own experiments.

The experiments show how machine learning can make sense of all kinds of things – images, drawings, language, sound, and more. They were made by people with all different interests – web developers, musicians, game designers, bird sound enthusiasts, data visualizers – with everyone bringing their own ideas for how to use machine learning.

We also want to make it easier for coders to make their own experiments. Many of the projects we're featuring are built with tools anyone can use, like Cloud Vision API, Tensorflow, and other libraries from the machine learning community. The site has videos by the creators explaining how they work, and links to open-source code to help you get started. To submit something you've made, or just play with things other people are making, visit A.I. Experiments.

And if you're looking for even more inspiration for what's possible using machine learning, check out these new experiments from our friends in Google Arts & Culture.

Chrome Dev Summit. Now Live Streaming

Posted by Paul Kinlan, Chrome Developer Relations

Good morning! Only one minute to go until Darin Fisher, VP of Chrome kick's off this year's keynote at Chrome Dev Summit 2016. Join us as we take a look at the latest web advancements with over 20 sessions presented by Chrome engineers. We're live streaming all sessions and posting videos throughout the next two days.

Introducing the Google Slides API

Originally posted on G Suite Developers Blog

Posted by Wesley Chun, Developer Advocate, G Suite

At Google I/O 2016, we gave developers a preview of the Google Slides API. Since then, the gears have been cranking at full speed, and we've been working with various early-access partners and developers to showcase what you can do with it. Today, we're happy to announce that the Slides API v1 is now generally available and represents the first time that developers have ever been able to programmatically access Slides!

The Slides API breaks new ground, changing the way that presentations are created. No longer do they require manual creation by users on their desktops or mobile devices. Business data on inventory items like retail merchandise, homes/property, hotels/lodging, restaurants/menus, venues/events, and other "cataloged" assets can be instantly turned into presentations based on pre-existing slide templates. Traditionally, the sheer amount of data (and of course time[!]) that went into creating these slide decks made it unwieldy if done by hand. Applications leveraging the API can easily generate presentations like these, customized as desired, and in short order.

Developers use the API by crafting a JSON payload for each request. (We recommend you batch multiple commands together to send to the API.) You can think of these as actions one can perform from the Slides user interface but available programmatically. To give you an idea of how the new API works, here are what some requests look like for several common operations: 

// create new slide (title & body layout)
{
    "createSlide": {
        "slideLayoutReference": {
            "predefinedLayout": "TITLE_AND_BODY"
        }
    }
},
// insert text into textbox
{
    "insertText": {
        "objectId": titleID,
        "text": "Hello World!"
    }
},
// add bullets to text paragraphs
{
    "createParagraphBullets": {
        "objectId": shapeID,
        "textRange": {
            "type": "ALL"
        }
    }
},
// replace text "variables" with image
{
    "replaceAllShapesWithImage": {
        "imageUrl": imageURL,
        "replaceMethod": "CENTER_INSIDE",
        "containsText": {
            "text": "{{COMPANY_LOGO}}"
        }
    }
}

If you're interested in seeing what developers have already built using the API, take a look at our initial set of partner integrations by Conga, Trello, Lucidchart, Zapier and more, as described in detail in our G Suite blog post.


To help you get started, check out the DevByte above from our new series dedicated to G Suite developers. In the video, we demonstrate how to take "variables" or placeholders in a template deck and use the API to generate new decks replacing those proxies with the desired text or image. Want to dive deeper into its code sample? Check out this blogpost. If you're not a Python developer, it'll be your pseudocode as you can use any language supported by the Google APIs Client Libraries. Regardless of your development environment, you can use similar "scaffolding" to generate many presentations with varying content for your users. Stay tuned for more videos that highlight other Slides API features.

The Slides API is available to projects in your Google Developers console today. Developers can find out more in the official documentation which features an API overview plus Quickstarts, sample code in multiple languages and environments, to bootstrap your next project. We look forward to seeing all the amazing slide deck generating applications you build with our first ever API!

Celebrating TensorFlow’s First Year

Originally posted on Google Research Blog
Posted by Zak Stone, Product Manager for TensorFlow, on behalf of the TensorFlow team
It has been an eventful year since the Google Brain Team open-sourced TensorFlow to accelerate machine learning research and make technology work better for everyone. There has been an amazing amount of activity around the project: more than 480 people have contributed directly to TensorFlow, including Googlers, external researchers, independent programmers, students, and senior developers at other large companies. TensorFlow is now the most popular machine learning project on GitHub.
With more than 10,000 commits in just twelve months, we’ve made numerous performance improvements, added support for distributed training, brought TensorFlow to iOS and Raspberry Pi, and integrated TensorFlow with widely-used big data infrastructure. We’ve also made TensorFlow accessible from Go, Rust and Haskell, released state-of-the-art image classification models, and answered thousands of questions on GitHub, StackOverflow and the TensorFlow mailing list along the way.

At Google, TensorFlow supports everything from large-scale product features to exploratory research. We recently launched major improvements to Google Translate using TensorFlow (and Tensor Processing Units, which are special hardware accelerators for TensorFlow). Project Magenta is working on new reinforcement learning-based models that can produce melodies, and a visiting PhD student recently worked with the Google Brain team to build a TensorFlow model that can automatically interpolate between artistic styles. DeepMind has also decided to use TensorFlow to power all of their research – for example, they recently produced fascinating generative models of speech and music based on raw audio.

We’re especially excited to see how people all over the world are using TensorFlow. For example:
  • Australian marine biologists are using TensorFlow to find sea cows in tens of thousands of hi-res photos to better understand their populations, which are under threat of extinction.
  • An enterprising Japanese cucumber farmer trained a model with TensorFlow to sort cucumbers by size, shape, and other characteristics.
  • Radiologists have adapted TensorFlow to identify signs of Parkinson’s disease in medical scans.
  • Data scientists in the Bay Area have rigged up TensorFlow and the Raspberry Pi to keep track of the Caltrain.

We’re committed to making sure TensorFlow scales all the way from research to production and from the tiniest Raspberry Pi all the way up to server farms filled with GPUs or TPUs. But TensorFlow is more than a single open-source project – we’re doing our best to foster an open-source ecosystem of related software and machine learning models around it:
  • The TensorFlow Serving project simplifies the process of serving TensorFlow models in production.
  • TensorFlow “Wide and Deep” models combine the strengths of traditional linear models and modern deep neural networks.
  • For those who are interested in working with TensorFlow in the cloud, Google Cloud Platform recently launched Cloud Machine Learning, which offers TensorFlow as a managed service.

Furthermore, TensorFlow’s repository of models continues to grow with contributions from the community, with more than 3000 TensorFlow-related repositories listed on GitHub alone! To participate in the TensorFlow community, you can follow our new Twitter account (@tensorflow), find us on GitHub, ask and answer questions on StackOverflow, and join the community discussion list.

Thanks very much to all of you who have already adopted TensorFlow in your cutting-edge products, your ambitious research, your fast-growing startups, and your school projects; special thanks to everyone who has contributed directly to the codebase. In collaboration with the global machine learning community, we look forward to making TensorFlow even better in the years to come!

Get Ready for the Chrome Dev Summit 2016

Posted by Paul Kinlan, Chrome Developer Relations

Chrome Dev Summit is almost here! We'll kick off live from San Francisco at the SFJAZZ Center, at 10:00 AM PT this coming Thursday, Nov 10th. This year's summit will focus on key themes that matter to you: Progressive, to build high quality web apps; Performance, to increase user engagement; and What's Next, a look at how the Chrome team is thinking about the future of the web.

While we're putting the finishing touches on the keynote, sessions, and code labs, we wanted to provide you with some tips to get ready to experience Chrome Dev Summit, either in-person or via the livestream.

Navigate the summit with notifications

To get the most out of Chrome Dev Summit, make sure to check out the schedule and set up notificationsfor the sessions you don't want to miss. These will help you plan your schedule whether you're in person or tuning in via the livestream.

Can't join us in person?

Don't worry, we've got you covered! Here are some ways you can connect with Chrome Dev Summit in real-time:

  • Tune in to the livestream at any time throughout the 2 day summit on developer.chrome.com/devsummit. 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.
  • Subscribeto the Chrome Developers YouTube Channel to stay up to date as we'll be publishing all of the talks from the event.
  • Join the conversation and send us your web questions on Twitter that include the #ChromeDevSummit hashtag or join our Slack by signing up here and a team of onsite Googlers will do their best to track down an answer in real time for you.

We're looking forward to having you with us you for 2 days of web fun, soon!

Don't forget to join the social conversation at #ChromeDevSummit.

Live from the Firebase Dev Summit in Berlin: Firebase, six months after I/O

Posted by Francis Ma, Firebase Product Manager

Originally posted to the Firebase blog

Our goal with Firebase is to help developers build better apps and grow them into successful businesses. Six months ago at Google I/O, we took our well-loved backend-as-a-service (BaaS) and expanded it to 15 features to make it Google’s unified app development platform, available across iOS, Android, and the web.

We launched many new features at Google I/O, but our work didn’t stop there. Since then, we’ve learned a lot from you (750,000+ projects created on Firebase to date!) about how you’re using our platform and how we can improve it. Thanks to your feedback, today we’re launching a number of enhancements to Crash Reporting, Analytics, support for game developers and more. For more information on our announcements, tune in to the livestream video from Firebase Dev Summit in Berlin. They’re also listed here:

Improve App Quality to Deliver Better User Experiences

Firebase Crash Reporting comes out of Beta and adds a new feature that helps you diagnose and reproduce app crashes.

Often the hardest part about fixing an issue is reproducing it, so we’ve added rich context to each crash to make the process simple. Firebase Crash Reporting now shows Firebase Analytics event data in the logs for each crash. This gives you clarity into the state of your app leading up to an error. Things like which screens of your app were visited are automatically logged with no instrumentation code required. Crash logs will also display any custom events and parameters you explicitly log using Firebase Analytics. Firebase Crash Reporting works for both iOS and Android apps.

Glide, a popular live video messaging app, relies on Firebase Crash Reporting to ensure user quality and release agility. “No matter how much effort you put into testing, it will never be as thorough as millions of active users in different locations, experiencing a variety of network conditions and real life situations. Firebase allows us to rapidly gain trust in our new version during phased release, as well as accelerate the process of identifying core issues and providing quick solutions.” - Roi Ginat, Founder, Glide.

Firebase Test Lab for Android supports more devices and introduces a free tier.

We want to help you deliver high-quality experiences, so testing your app before it goes into the wild is incredibly important. Firebase Test Lab allows you to easily test your app on many physical and virtual devices in the cloud, without writing a single line of test code. Beginning today, developers on the Spark service tier (which is free!) can run five tests per day on physical devices and ten tests per day on virtual devices—with no credit card setup required. We’ve also heard that you want more device options, so we’ve added 11 new popular Android device models to Test Lab, available today.

Illustration of Firebase Crash Reporting

Make Faster Data Driven Decisions with Firebase Analytics

Firebase Analytics now offers live reporting, a new integration with Google “Data Studio”, and real-time exporting to BigQuery.

We know that your data is most actionable when you can see and process it as quickly as possible. Therefore, we’re announcing a number of features to help you maximize the potential of your analytics events:

  1. Real-time uploading of conversion events
  2. Real-time exporting to BigQuery
  3. DebugView for validation of your analytics instrumentation
  4. StreamView, which will offer a live, dynamic view of your analytics data as we receive it

To further enhance your targeting options, we’ve improved the connection between Firebase Analytics and other Firebase features, such as Dynamic Links and Remote Config. For example, you can now use Dynamic Links on your Facebook business page, and we can identify Facebook as a source in Firebase Analytics reporting. As well, you can now target Remote Config changes by User Properties, in addition to Audiences.

Build Better Games using Firebase

Firebase now has a Unity plugin!

Game developers are building great apps, and we want Firebase to work for you, too. We’ve built an entirely new plugin for Unity that supports Analytics, the Realtime Database, Authentication, Dynamic Links, Remote Config, Notifications and more. We've also expanded our C++ SDK with Realtime Database support.

Integrate Firebase Even Easier with Open-Sourced UI Library

FirebaseUI is updated to v1.0.

FirebaseUI is a library that provides common UI elements when building apps, and it’s a quick way to integrate with Firebase. FirebaseUI 1.0 includes a drop-in UI flow for Firebase Authentication, with common identity providers such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter. FirebaseUI 1.0 also added features such as client-side joins and intersections for the Realtime Database, plus integrations with Glide and SDWebImage that make downloading and displaying images from Firebase Storage a cinch. Follow our progress or contribute to our Android, iOS, and Web components on Github.

Learn More via Udacity and Join the Firebase Community

We want to provide the best tool for developers, but it’s also important that we give resources and training to help you get more out of the platform. As such, we’ve created a new Udacity course: Firebase in a Weekend! It’s an instructor-led video course to help all developers get up and running with Firebase on iOS and Android, in two days.

Finally, to help wrap your head around all our announcements, we’ve created a new demo app. This is an easy way to see how Analytics, Crash Reporting, Test Lab, Notifications, and Remote Config work in a live environment, without having to write a line of code.

Helping developers build better apps and successful businesses is at the core of Firebase. We work hard on it every day. We love hearing your feedback and ideas for new features and improvements—and we hope you can see from the length of this post that we take them to heart! Follow us on Twitter, join our Slack channel, participate in our Google Group, and let us know what you think. We’re excited to see what you’ll build next!

Here’s to more HTTPS on the web!

Originally posted on Google Security Blog

Posted by Adrienne Porter Felt and Emily Schechter, Chrome Security Team

Security has always been critical to the web, but challenges involved in site migration have inhibited HTTPS adoption for several years. In the interest of a safer web for all, at Google we've worked alongside many others across the online ecosystem to better understand and address these challenges, resulting in real change. A web with ubiquitous HTTPS is not the distant future. It's happening now, with secure browsing becoming standard for users of Chrome.

Today, we're adding a new section to the HTTPS Report Card in our Transparency Report that includes data on how HTTPS usage has been increasing over time. More than half of pages loaded and two-thirds of total time spent by Chrome desktop users occur via HTTPS, and we expect these metrics to continue their strong upward trajectory.

Percentage pages loaded over HTTPS in Chrome

As the remainder of the web transitions to HTTPS, we'll continue working to ensure that migrating to HTTPS is a no-brainer, providing business benefit beyond increased security. HTTPS currently enables the best performancethe web offers and powerful features that benefit site conversions, including both new features such as service workers for offline support and web push notifications, and existing features such as credit card autofill and the HTML5 geolocation API that are too powerful to be used over non-secure HTTP.

As with all major site migrations, there are certain steps webmasters should take to ensure that search ranking transitions are smooth when moving to HTTPS. To help with this, we've posted two FAQs to help sites transition correctly, and will continue to improve our web fundamentals guidance.

We've seen many sites successfully transition with negligible effect on their search ranking and traffic. Brian Wood, Director of Marketing SEO at Wayfair, a large retail site, commented "we were able to migrate Wayfair.com to HTTPS with no meaningful impact to Google rankings or Google organic search traffic. We are very pleased to say that all Wayfair sites are now fully HTTPS." CNET, a large tech news site, had a similar experience. "We successfully completed our move of CNET.com to HTTPS last month," said John Sherwood, Vice President of Engineering & Technology at CNET. "Since then, there has been no change in our Google rankings or Google organic search traffic."

Webmasters that include ads on their sites also carefully monitor ad performance and revenue during large site migrations. The portion of Google ad traffic served over HTTPS has increased dramaticallyover the past 3 years. All ads that come from any Google source always support HTTPS, including AdWords, AdSense or DoubleClick Ad Exchange; ads sold directly, such as those through DoubleClick for Publishers, still need to be designed to be HTTPS-friendly. This means there will be no change to the Google-sourced ads that appear on a site after migrating to HTTPS. Many publishing partners have seen this in practice after a successful HTTPS transition. Jason Tollestrup, Director of Programmatic Advertising for the Washington Post, "saw no material impact to AdX revenue with the transition to SSL."

As migrating to HTTPS becomes even easier, we'll continue working towards a web that's secure by default. Don't hesitate to start planning your HTTPS migration today!

Google Open Source Report Card

Originally posted on Google Open Source Blog
Posted by Josh Simmons, Open Source Programs Office

Open source software enables Google to build things quickly and efficiently without reinventing the wheel, allowing us to focus on solving new problems. We stand on the shoulders of giants and we know it. This is why we support open source and make it easy for Googlers to release the projects they’re working on internally as open source.

Today we’re sharing our first Open Source Report Card, highlighting our most popular projects, sharing a few statistics and detailing some of the projects we’ve released in 2016.

We’ve open sourced over 20 million lines of code to date and you can find a listing of some of our best known project releases on our website. Here are some of our most popular projects:
  • Android - a software stack for mobile devices that includes an operating system, middleware and key applications.
  • Chromium - a project encompassing Chromium, the software behind Google Chrome, and Chromium OS, the software behind Google Chrome OS devices.
  • Angular - a web application framework for JavaScript and Dart focused on developer productivity, speed and testability.
  • TensorFlow - a library for numerical computation using data flow graphics with support for scalable machine learning across platforms from data centers to embedded devices.
  • Go - a statically typed and compiled programming language that is expressive, concise, clean and efficient.
  • Kubernetes - a system for automating deployment, operations and scaling of containerized applications.
  • Polymer - a lightweight library built on top of Web Components APIs for building encapsulated re-usable elements in web applications.
  • Protobuf - an extensible, language-neutral and platform-neutral mechanism for serializing structured data.
  • Guava - a set of Java core libraries that includes new collection types (such as multimap and multiset), immutable collections, a graph library, functional types, an in-memory cache, and APIs/utilities for concurrency, I/O, hashing, primitives, reflection, string processing and much more.
  • Yeoman - a robust and opinionated set of scaffolding tools including libraries and a workflow that can help developers quickly build beautiful and compelling web applications.
While it’s difficult to measure the full scope of open source at Google, we can use the subset of projects that are on GitHub to gather some interesting data. Today our GitHub footprint includes over 84 organizations and 3,499 repositories, 773 of which were created this year.

Googlers use countless languages from Assembly to XSLT, but what are their favorites? GitHub flags the most heavily used language in a repository and we can use that to find out. A survey of GitHub repositories shows us these are some of the languages Googlers use most often:
  • JavaScript
  • Java
  • C/C++
  • Go
  • Python
  • TypeScript
  • Dart
  • PHP
  • Objective-C
  • C#
Many things can be gleaned using the open source GitHub dataset on BigQuery, like usage of tabs versus spaces and the most popular Go packages. What about how many times Googlers have committed to open source projects on GitHub? We can search for Google.com email addresses to get a baseline number of Googler commits. Here’s our query:

SELECT count(*) as n
FROM [bigquery-public-data:github_repos.commits]
WHERE committer.date > '2016-01-01 00:00'
AND REGEXP_EXTRACT(author.email, r'.*@(.*)') = 'google.com'


With this, we learn that Googlers have made 142,527 commits to open source projects on GitHub since the start of the year. This dataset goes back to 2011 and we can tweak this query to find out that Googlers have made 719,012 commits since then. Again, this is just a baseline number as it doesn’t count commits made with other email addresses.

Looking back at the projects we’ve open-sourced in 2016 there’s a lot to be excited about. We have released open source software, hardware and datasets. Let’s take a look at some of this year’s releases.

Seesaw
Seesaw is a Linux Virtual Server (LVS) based load balancing platform developed in Go by our Site Reliability Engineers. Seesaw, like many projects, was built to scratch our own itch.

From our blog post announcing its release: “We needed the ability to handle traffic for unicast and anycast VIPs, perform load balancing with NAT and DSR (also known as DR), and perform adequate health checks against the backends. Above all we wanted a platform that allowed for ease of management, including automated deployment of configuration changes.”

Vendor Security Assessment Questionnaire (VSAQ)
We assess the security of hundreds of vendors every year and have developed a process to automate much of the initial information gathering with VSAQ. Many vendors found our questionnaires intuitive and flexible, so we decided to shared them. The VSAQ Framework includes four extensible questionnaire templates covering web applications, privacy programs, infrastructure as well as physical and data center security. You can learn more about it in our announcement blog post.

OpenThread
OpenThread, released by Nest, is a complete implementation of the Thread protocol for connected devices in the home. This is especially important because of the fragmentation we’re seeing in this space. Development of OpenThread is supported by ARM, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments and other major vendors.

Magenta
Can we use machine learning to create compelling art and music? That’s the question that animates Magenta, a project from the Google Brain team based on TensorFlow. The aim is to advance the state of the art in machine intelligence for music and art generation and build a collaborative community of artists, coders and machine learning researchers. Read the release announcement for more information.

Omnitone
Virtual reality (VR) isn’t nearly as immersive without spatial audio and much of VR development is taking place on proprietary platforms. Omnitone is an open library built by members of the Chrome Team that brings spatial audio to the browser. Omnitone builds on standard Web Audio APIs to deliver an immersive experience and can be used alongside projects like WebVR. Find out more in our blog post announcing the project’s release.

Science Journal
Today’s smartphones are packed with sensors that can tell us interesting things about the world around us. We launched Science Journal to help educators, students and citizen scientists tap into those sensors. You can learn more about the project in our announcement blog post.

Cartographer
Cartographer is a library for real-time simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) in 2D and 3D with Robot Operating System (ROS) support. Combining data from a variety of sensors, this library computes positioning and maps surroundings. This is a key element of self-driving cars, UAVs and robotics as well as efforts to map the insides of famous buildings. More information on Cartographer can be found in our blog post announcing its release.

This is just a small sampling of what we’ve released this year. Follow the Google Open Source Blog to stay apprised of Google’s open source software, hardware and data releases.

[New eBook] Download The No-Nonsense Guide to Native Ads

Posted by Vishal Kumar, Senior Product Manager, AdMob

Originally posted to the Inside AdMob blog

Recently we launched a new eBook called "The No-Nonsense Guide to Native Ads", the latest in our No-Nonsense series. This guide is designed to provide a comprehensive overview of native ads and share practical tips and best practices for implementing native ads in your app.

Over the last several years, app users have raised their expectations for a high quality app UX. To meet these expectations, ad formats have evolved accordingly. The most fitting new format that meets these higher expectations is native ads – ads that match the look and feel of the surrounding app content. And as spending on native ads is expected to grow to $21 billion in 2018, this presents a huge opportunity for publishers to enhance their user experience and tap into new revenues.

In the eBook, you’ll learn:

  • Guiding design principles that will help you better implement native ads 
  • Practical tips and best practices for implementing native ads with lots of examples 
  • Tips on how to set up a proper A/B test to begin testing native ads 
  • How AdMob can help you implement native ads

Download your copy here: