The Dev channel has been updated to 94.0.4606.12 for Windows, Linux and 94.0.4606.9 for Mac.
A partial list of changes is available in the log. Interested in switching release channels? Find out how. If you find a new issue, please let us know by filing a bug. The community help forum is also a great place to reach out for help or learn about common issues.
Srinivas Sista
Our physical world is changing faster than ever. Climate change and global socio-economic shifts are threatening our magnificent natural landscapes and disrupting small communities. In keeping with this, there is value to be found in confronting and documenting our at-risk environment. For World Photography Day, we invite you to explore A World of Difference, a new online exhibition on Google Arts & Culture offering a perspective of these diverse stories through the lens of Italian photographer Angelo Chiacchio, in collaboration with Art Works for Change. Follow him on his solo journey around the world to capture some of the most fragile landscapes and cultures.
From the resilient women of Namibia’s Himba Tribe to the other-worldly landscape of Venezuela’s Mount Roraima, discover the stories of over 25 locations and communities who call these endangered places home. Explore Tibetan culture in the Himalayas, how life is changing for Tanzanian communities near Mount Kilimanjaro, and how locals are adapting to winds of change in Brazil’s wet desert. Learn what traditions and crafts teach us and how communities are overcoming new challenges to preserve their way of life.
The lessons learned during Angelo’s journey to document the earth’s fragile heritage are those of respect for the natural world and balance in how we live in it. Although the Miccosukee people of Florida’s Everglades mostly live a modern lifestyle, they still find ways to preserve their heritage. The Uro community of Lake Titicaca, who have lived on floating reed-built islands for thousands of years, have found a way to strike a balance with its growing tourism industry and offer an opportunity for their youth to keep their traditions alive by hosting visitors through homestays and sharing their culture first-hand. Across the territories and cultures of this exhibition, Angelo unearths life philosophies that are universal in their application, and utterly breathtaking in this medium.
Hi, everyone! We've released Chrome Beta 94 (94.0.4606.10) for iOS: it'll become available on App Store in next few days.
You can see a partial list of the changes in the Git log. If you find a new issue, please let us know by filing a bug.
Krishna Govind
Google Chrome
Hi everyone! We've just released Chrome Beta 93 (93.0.4577.51) for Android: it's now available on Google Play.
You can see a partial list of the changes in the Git log. For details on new features, check out the Chromium blog, and for details on web platform updates, check here.
If you find a new issue, please let us know by filing a bug.
Ben Mason
Google Chrome
The Beta channel has been updated to 93.0.4577.51 for Windows, linux and Mac.
Posted by Wesley Chun (@wescpy), Developer Advocate, Google Cloud
Serverless Migration Station is a video mini-series from Serverless Expeditions focused on helping developers modernize their applications running on a serverless compute platform from Google Cloud. Previous episodes demonstrated how to migrate away from the older, legacy App Engine (standard environment) services to newer Google Cloud standalone equivalents like Cloud Datastore. Today's product crossover episode differs slightly from that by migrating away from App Engine altogether, containerizing those apps for Cloud Run.
There's little question the industry has been moving towards containerization as an application deployment mechanism over the past decade. However, Docker and use of containers weren't available to early App Engine developers until its flexible environment became available years later. Fast forward to today where developers have many more options to choose from, from an increasingly open Google Cloud. Google has expressed long-term support for App Engine, and users do not need to containerize their apps, so this is an optional migration. It is primarily for those who have decided to add containerization to their application deployment strategy and want to explicitly migrate to Cloud Run.
If you're thinking about app containerization, the video covers some of the key reasons why you would consider it: you're not subject to traditional serverless restrictions like development language or use of binaries (flexibility); if your code, dependencies, and container build & deploy steps haven't changed, you can recreate the same image with confidence (reproducibility); your application can be deployed elsewhere or be rolled back to a previous working image if necessary (reusable); and you have plenty more options on where to host your app (portability).
Legacy App Engine services are available through a set of proprietary, bundled APIs. As you can surmise, those services are not available on Cloud Run. So if you want to containerize your app for Cloud Run, it must be "ready to go," meaning it has migrated to either Google Cloud standalone equivalents or other third-party alternatives. For example, in a recent episode, we demonstrated how to migrate from App Engine ndb to Cloud NDB for Datastore access.
While we've recently begun to produce videos for such migrations, developers can already access code samples and codelab tutorials leading them through a variety of migrations. In today's video, we have both Python 2 and 3 sample apps that have divested from legacy services, thus ready to containerize for Cloud Run. Python 2 App Engine apps accessing Datastore are most likely to be using Cloud NDB whereas it would be Cloud Datastore for Python 3 users, so this is the starting point for this migration.
Because we're "only" switching execution platforms, there are no changes at all to the application code itself. This entire migration is completely based on changing the apps' configurations from App Engine to Cloud Run. In particular, App Engine artifacts such as app.yaml, appengine_config.py, and the lib folder are not used in Cloud Run and will be removed. A Dockerfile will be implemented to build your container. Apps with more complex configurations in their app.yaml files will likely need an equivalent service.yaml file for Cloud Run — if so, you'll find this app.yaml to service.yaml conversion tool handy. Following best practices means there'll also be a .dockerignore file.
App Engine and Cloud Functions are sourced-based where Google Cloud automatically provides a default HTTP server like gunicorn. Cloud Run is a bit more "DIY" because users have to provide a container image, meaning bundling our own server. In this case, we'll pick gunicorn explicitly, adding it to the top of the existing requirements.txt required packages file(s), as you can see in the screenshot below. Also illustrated is the Dockerfile where gunicorn is started to serve your app as the final step. The only differences for the Python 2 equivalent Dockerfile are: a) require the Cloud NDB package (google-cloud-ndb) instead of Cloud Datastore, and b) start with a Python 2 base image.
The Python 3 requirements.txt and Dockerfile
To walk developers through migrations, we always "START" with a working app then make the necessary updates that culminate in a working "FINISH" app. For this migration, the Python 2 sample app STARTs with the Module 2a code and FINISHes with the Module 4a code. Similarly, the Python 3 app STARTs with the Module 3b code and FINISHes with the Module 4b code. This way, if something goes wrong during your migration, you can always rollback to START, or compare your solution with our FINISH. If you are considering this migration for your own applications, we recommend you try it on a sample app like ours before considering it for yours. A corresponding codelab leading you step-by-step through this exercise is provided in addition to the video which you can use for guidance.
All migration modules, their videos (when published), codelab tutorials, START and FINISH code, etc., can be found in the migration repo. We hope to also one day cover other legacy runtimes like Java 8 so stay tuned. We'll continue with our journey from App Engine to Cloud Run ahead in Module 5 but will do so without explicit knowledge of containers, Docker, or Dockerfiles. Modernizing your development workflow to using containers and best practices like crafting a CI/CD pipeline isn't always straightforward; we hope content like this helps you progress in that direction!
If you're planning to travel this Fall and enjoy some time off with the family, you're also doing everything you can to have fun while still protecting your health. To help make guests feel more comfortable and safe, and have a more engaging experience during their hotel stay, we worked with the hospitality industry and Volara last year to introduce a hands-free, voice-first experience with Google Assistant on Nest Hub smart displays.
Our hotel solutions are already available in thousands of hotel rooms in the U.S. and U.K., and is now available in all guest rooms at both LEGOLAND® Hotel and LEGOLAND® Castle Hotel at LEGOLAND® California Resort, and the new LEGOLAND® Hotel at LEGOLAND® New York Resort.
Here are 10 things visitors will be able to do with Google Assistant on Nest Hub smart displays at LEGOLAND® Hotels:
1. Find help right away from hotel staff by asking “Hey Google, call the front desk” or just say “Hey Google, bring me fresh towels.” You can even check out of the room with just your voice. There’s no more need to handle the phone or stand in long lines at front desk.
2. Stay entertained. Nest Hubs come with nice speakers, so you can ask Google to play music or listen to the news.
3. Get park information by saying “Hey Google, what time does LEGOLAND® open?” or “Hey Google, tell me about the theme park.”
“I want to push the envelope on extending the theme park experience in the room with the Nest Hubs” — James Barton, Group Head of Business Transformation, Hotels, Merlin Entertainment (LEGOLAND®)
4. Speak directly with your favorite LEGOLAND® characters inside your room. Just ask the Jester to set up a LEGO® alarm and get info about the park.
5. Receive recommendations for local restaurants from the hotel’s concierge, or you can ask Google what activities are nearby. Try “Hey Google, can you recommend a place for breakfast?”
6. Take a YouTube tour of the LEGOLAND® theme park before your visit on Nest Hub, so you can make a beeline for your favorite rides — like the Dragon coaster!
7. Wake up on time. No need to mess around with knobs or settings. Just say “Hey Google, set a LEGO® alarm for 8 a.m.,” so you get the day started early.
8. Check the weather again before you head out of the hotel with “Hey Google, what’s the weather today at LEGOLAND® California Resort.”
9. Let Assistant be your interpreter for up to 30 languages, which is a great feature for international guests. Just say, “Hey Google, be my Italian interpreter” to kick off the experience.
10. And remember, we’re also dedicated to protecting privacy. You won’t need to sign into the device, and no activity will be linked to your personal account. There’s no camera on the Nest Hub, and the physical mic switch can be turned off for additional privacy. No audio is ever stored, and any activities will be automatically wiped from the device when it’s reset for the next guest.
Our voice-first, hands-free hotel solution is a big plus for travelers right now and will make your stay at LEGOLAND® Hotels more convenient and fun.
“My blog is my soul,” says Jessica Hylton-Leckie, founder of Jessica in the Kitchen, a blog featuring hundreds of her easy, vegan comfort food recipes. Jessica puts her heart into every recipe she creates, sometimes taking months to get them just right before sharing them with the world. Along with easy-to-follow instructions, she shares snippets of her life and helpful cooking tips, and elevates every recipe with gorgeous, magazine-worthy photos.
Jessica has always been an entrepreneur. In 2010, while an undergraduate law student, she started a baking business and blog called Jessiker Bakes. At the time, the food blogging world wasn’t the crowded market it is now, but a smaller, tighter-knit community, especially in Jamaica, where Jessica was born and continues to call home today.
As times changed, Jessica changed with them. She stopped her baking business to concentrate on law school, but she kept her blog. When she transitioned to a plant-based diet in 2014, she evolved her site to share more savory, veg-friendly recipes, and renamed it Jessica in the Kitchen to better reflect its new focus. After getting her degree and becoming a practicing lawyer, she had a bout of debilitating, stress-induced health issues that forced her to face that blogging, not law, was her true calling.
“It was months of stress. Really bad, bed-ridden stress,” Jessica says. “It was my dad who was like, hey, I’ve seen that you love [blogging], I think you should try to give it a shot.” And so she quit her corporate law career in 2016 and took up Jessica in the Kitchen full-time.
After becoming vegetarian, Jessica rebranded her baking blog into a vegan recipe blog called Jessica in the Kitchen.
While her parent’s blessing was a supportive push to transition careers, Jessica credits her experience in studying law — specifically staying organized and focused — that helped her to make the daunting leap to become a full-time creator. “I still use law everyday. In contracts, talking, negotiation, how I approach organization even to this day,” she says. “Law school is why I’m here; it’s given me that self-confidence to know ‘you can do this.’”
Jessica explains she’s found success as a food blogger through thorough planning, finding a great support network, putting in the research and work, and being her biggest advocate. (And for another inspiring example of someone who made the corporate jump, don’t miss blogger Andi Eaton’s Creator Insight video on the Google Web Creators YouTube channel.)
One of the first things Jessica did when she was still deciding whether she could actually make a living as a blogger was to make a business plan. “I literally just typed in ‘creative business plan’ in Google and used what was the first one,” Jessica admits. That plan pushed her to get serious and map out concrete steps. “I had to answer questions I never thought about,” she said. With the plan, she created a mission statement, identified her target audience and came up with ideas to reach them, and drew up a budget, among other first steps.
Jessica in the Kitchen offers simple, plant-based comfort food recipes, like this lentil soup.
Almost everyone in Jessica’s family is a lawyer, so she had plenty of trusted and knowledgeable people to test the mettle of her plan. But she recommends creators tap into the brain power of just about anyone with experience running a business. “If you know someone who owns a business that is successful, they usually want to help,” she says. When you do reach out, be sure to recognize and appreciate your mentor’s time and expertise. Offer to take them to lunch in exchange for answering your questions, and make sure to come prepared with what you want to discuss before the meeting.
In addition to business-minded folks, Jessica recommends turning to people who “want the best for you, that show you positivity, love and support” in everything you do. Even when it’s just friends and family members who leave comments on your blog or share what you’re doing on social media, it has an impact. “That makes such a big difference, that the people in your life love and support you.”
You wouldn’t know it by looking at her blog now, but Jessica says when she first started blogging, her photos looked terrible. So Jessica put in the work to improve her skills by reading guides made by fellow bloggers, including RecipeTin Eats, and subscribing to several YouTube channels focused on food photography, such as The Bite Shot.
Aside from upping her photography game, Jessica also took the time to hone her journaling, recipe formatting and SEO writing. She found a lot of this information online, but she also took courses through online services like Skillshare and Fizzle. And because she knew she wanted to offer an e-book on her site, she bought a bunch of e-books from other recipe bloggers to learn the format and figure out how to put her own stamp on hers. Jessica’s e-book, “It’s That Easy,” features more than 70 recipes, as well as several guides to teach people how to transition to a plant-based lifestyle.
Jessica sells copies of her Ebook on her blog.
Traffic to Jessica in the Kitchen spiked last year, partly because more people were searching for simple recipes to make at home during the pandemic, but also thanks to a growing interest in Black creators sparked by the Black Lives Matter movement. Jessica says the growth has been overwhelming at times, but she’s continuing to maintain the upward momentum.
Keeping engaged with her work and community takes a lot of time and energy, and it can be tempting to just keep hustling, but Jessica has found that building in moments to rest and rejuvenate are key to the creative process. “I’ve had to force myself not to work on the weekend and take time off,” she explains. “I realize that I always want to do more, but it’s never going to all be done.” Jessica recognizes when she needs to take an evening off from working on her blog, or even a few days off social media, “to balance out and burn out less.”
It’s not always easy to take time off, especially when you’re working for yourself, which is why Jessica recommends that creators who go full-time have at least six months of savings set aside. Having that extra money banked will allow you to take a break when you need it, but also make it so you “don’t feel pressure to do desperate work” (a.k.a., stuff that doesn’t align with your goals or your ethos).
Jessica explains, “If you want to do something creative especially, it’s important to be able to put your whole heart into it, not to feel limited or scared,” and having that financial buffer could be a great relief while you’re just getting started.
