Tag Archives: Udacity

Updated Udacity Android course prepares students for the Associate Android Developer Certification

Originally posted on Android Developers Blog

Posted by Jocelyn Becker, Senior Program Manager, Android Training

As one of our most popular Udacity courses, the Developing Android Appscourse was recently updated to ensure developers have the resources to build high quality apps. This course, which has already helped more than half a million developers learn to build Android apps, has been through the car wash and come out sparkling clean and updated.

Google and Udacity have worked together to update the course to include the very latest changes in Android and Android Studio, including how to use the new Constraint Layout editor, and how to use Firebase Job Dispatcher. Learn best practices for building Android apps using Android 7.0 (Nougat) while keeping your apps backwards compatible in older versions, learning at your own pace in your own time.

You sent us feedback that some of the lessons were a little difficult to get through, so we've restructured the lessons and added smaller apps for you to build as you progress through the course. So not only will you build the Sunshine weather app as a complete, integrated application that spans the entire course, but you'll also create an app in each lesson to help you learn individual concepts.

Build a To Do app and add new tasks as you learn how to build a ContentProvider.

This course brings back Android experts Dan Galpin and Reto Meier from Google, and Lyla Fujiwara from Udacity, and introduces new faces from Google and Udacity.

Start learning now at https://www.udacity.com/course/ud851.

Combined package for Developing Android Apps course and Associate Android Developer Certification

This updated course teaches the skills that are tested by the Associate Android Developer certification exam. Udacity is offering a package that combines the updated Developing Android Apps course with a voucher for the Associate Android Developer certification exam. If you pass this exam, you will earn the Associate Android Developer Certification and show that you are competent and skilled in tasks that an entry-level Android developer typically performs. Enroll in Udacity's Fast Track to get prepared and take the Associate Android developer exam at: https://www.udacity.com/course/nd818.

Updated Udacity Android course prepares students for the Associate Android Developer Certification

Posted by Jocelyn Becker, Senior Program Manager, Android Training

As one of our most popular Udacity courses, the Developing Android Apps course was recently updated to ensure developers have the resources to build high quality apps. This course, which has already helped more than half a million developers learn to build Android apps, has been through the car wash and come out sparkling clean and updated.

Google and Udacity have worked together to update the course to include the very latest changes in Android and Android Studio, including how to use the new Constraint Layout editor, and how to use Firebase Job Dispatcher. Learn best practices for building Android apps using Android 7.0 (Nougat) while keeping your apps backwards compatible in older versions, learning at your own pace in your own time.

You sent us feedback that some of the lessons were a little difficult to get through, so we've restructured the lessons and added smaller apps for you to build as you progress through the course. So not only will you build the Sunshine weather app as a complete, integrated application that spans the entire course, but you'll also create an app in each lesson to help you learn individual concepts.

Build a To Do app and add new tasks as you learn how to build a ContentProvider.

This course brings back Android experts Dan Galpin and Reto Meier from Google, and Lyla Fujiwara from Udacity, and introduces new faces from Google and Udacity.

Start learning now at https://www.udacity.com/course/ud851.

Combined package for Developing Android Apps course and Associate Android Developer Certification

This updated course teaches the skills that are tested by the Associate Android Developer certification exam. Udacity is offering a package that combines the updated Developing Android Apps course with a voucher for the Associate Android Developer certification exam. If you pass this exam, you will earn the Associate Android Developer Certification and show that you are competent and skilled in tasks that an entry-level Android developer typically performs. Enroll in Udacity's Fast Track to get prepared and take the Associate Android developer exam at: https://www.udacity.com/course/nd818.

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!

Introducing the Android Basics Nanodegree

Posted by Shanea King-Roberson, Lead Program Manager Twitter: @shaneakr Instagram: @theshanea

Do you have an idea for an app but you don’t know where to start? There are over 1 billion Android devices worldwide, providing a way for you to deliver your ideas to the right people at the right time. Google, in partnership with Udacity, is making Android development accessible and understandable to everyone, so that regardless of your background, you can learn to build apps that improve the lives of people around you.

Enroll in the new Android Basics Nanodegree. This series of courses and services teaches you how to build simple Android apps--even if you have little or no programming experience. Take a look at some of the apps built by our students:

The app "ROP Tutorial" built by student Arpy Vanyan raises awareness of a potentially blinding eye disorder called Retinopathy of Prematurity that can affect newborn babies.

And user Charles Tommo created an app called “Dr Malaria” that teaches people ways to prevent malaria.

With courses designed by Google, you can learn skills that are applicable to building apps that solve real world problems. You can learn at your own pace to use Android Studio(Google’s official tool for Android app development) to design app user interfaces and implement user interactions using the Java programming language.

The courses walk you through step-by-step on how to build an order form for a coffee shop, an app to track pets in a shelter, an app that teaches vocabulary words from the Native American Miwok tribe, and an app on recent earthquakes in the world. At the end of the course, you will have an entire portfolio of apps to share with your friends and family.

Upon completing the Android Basics Nanodegree, you also have the opportunity to continue your learning with the Career-track Android Nanodegree (for intermediate developers). The first 50 participants to finish the Android Basics Nanodegree have a chance to win a scholarship for the Career-track Android Nanodegree. Please visit udacity.com/legal/scholarshipfor additional details and eligibility requirements. You now have a complete learning path to help you become a technology entrepreneur or most importantly, build very cool Android apps, for yourself, your communities, and even the world.

All of the individual courses that make up this Nanodegree are available online for no charge at udacity.com/google. In addition, Udacity provides paid services, including access to coaches, guidance on your project, help staying on track, career counseling, and a certificate upon completion for a fee.

You will be exposed to introductory computer science concepts in the Java programming language, as you learn the following skills.

  • Build app user interfaces
  • Implement user interactions
  • Store information in a database
  • Pull data from the internet into your app
  • Identify and fix unexpected behavior in the app
  • Localize your app to support other languages

To enroll in the Android Basics Nanodegree program, click here.

See you in class!

Become a Highly Productive Web Developer with Udacity

Posted by Paul Bakaus, Web Developer Advocate at Google

There’s a lot to learn when you start to become a web developer. What’s often forgotten though is that the best web developers don’t just know the right JavaScript APIs and frameworks and the mysteries of CSS, but have access to a myriad of tools that dramatically increase their every-day productivity.

In the recently launched Web Tooling & Automation course at Udacity, we’re giving you access to information that most other developers have been learning gradually on the side, so you can kickstart your developer life.

Regardless of whether you’re just beginning your career or whether you want to refresh your picture of the productivity tools landscape, head over to Udacity to learn about setting up your editor, creating powerful build scripts, live editing, linting and all other sorts of awesome optimizations.

Teach Yourself Deep Learning with TensorFlow and Udacity

Originally posted on Google Research Blog

 Posted by Vincent Vanhoucke, Principal Research Scientist

Deep learning has become one of the hottest topics in machine learning in recent years. With TensorFlow, the deep learning platform that we recently released as an open-source project, our goal was to bring the capabilities of deep learning to everyone. So far, we are extremely excited by the uptake: more than 4000 users have forked it on GitHub in just a few weeks, and the project has been starred more than 16000 times by enthusiasts around the globe.

To help make deep learning even more accessible to engineers and data scientists at large, we are launching a new Deep Learning Course developed in collaboration with Udacity. This short, intensive course provides you with all the basic tools and vocabulary to get started with deep learning, and walks you through how to use it to address some of the most common machine learning problems. It is also accompanied by interactive TensorFlow notebooks that directly mirror and implement the concepts introduced in the lectures.
The course consists of four lectures which provide a tour of the main building blocks that are used to solve problems ranging from image recognition to text analysis. The first lecture focuses on the basics that will be familiar to those already versed in machine learning: setting up your data and experimental protocol, and training simple classification models. The second lecture builds on these fundamentals to explore how these simple models can be made deeper, and more powerful, and explores all the scalability problems that come with that, in particular regularization and hyperparameter tuning. The third lecture is all about convolutional networks and image recognition. The fourth and final lecture explore models for text and sequences in general, with embeddings and recurrent neural networks. By the end of the course, you will have implemented and trained this variety of models on your own machine and will be ready to transfer that knowledge to solve your own problems!

Our overall goal in designing this course was to provide the machine learning enthusiast a rapid and direct path to solving real and interesting problems with deep learning techniques, and we're now very excited to share what we've built! It has been a lot of fun putting together with the fantastic team of experts in online course design and production at Udacity. For more details, see the Udacity blog post, and register for the course. We hope you enjoy it!

Helping 1 million students build better apps

Posted by Peter Lubbers, Senior Program Manager, Google Developer Training

Almost three years ago we shipped our very first Udacity course about HTML5 Game Development. Today marks a milestone that we proudly want to share with the world. The 1 millionth person has enrolled in our Google Developer Training courses. Was it you?

This milestone is more than just a number. Thanks to our partnership with Udacity, this training gives developers access to skills that empower families, communities, and the future.

One million developers around the world have made a commitment to learn a new language, expand their craft, start a new business, completely shift careers and more. So, here's to the next million people who are excited about using technology to solve the world’s most pressing challenges.

Keep learning!

Get ready for Javascript “Promises” with Google and Udacity

Sarah Clark, Program Manager, Google Developer Training

Front-end web developers face challenges when using common “asynchronous” requests. These requests, such as fetching a URL or reading a file, often lead to complicated code, especially when performing multiple actions in a row. How can we make this easier for developers?

Javascript Promises are a new tool that simplifies asynchronous code, converting a tangle of callbacks and event handlers into simple, straightforward code such as: fetch(url).then(decodeJSON).then(addToPage)...

Promises are used by many new web standards, including Service Worker, the Fetch API, Quota Management, Font Load Events,Web MIDI, and Streams.


We’ve just opened up a online course on Promises, built in collaboration with Udacity. This brief course, which you can finish in about a day, walks you through building an “Exoplanet Explorer” app that reads and displays live data using Promises. You’ll also learn to use the Fetch API and finally kiss XMLHttpRequest goodbye!

This short course is a prerequisite for most of the Senior Web Developer Nanodegree. Whether you are in the paid Nanodegree program or taking the course for free, won’t you come learn to make your code simpler and more reliable today?

Get ready for Javascript “Promises” with Google and Udacity

Sarah Clark, Program Manager, Google Developer Training

Front-end web developers face challenges when using common “asynchronous” requests. These requests, such as fetching a URL or reading a file, often lead to complicated code, especially when performing multiple actions in a row. How can we make this easier for developers?

Javascript Promises are a new tool that simplifies asynchronous code, converting a tangle of callbacks and event handlers into simple, straightforward code such as: fetch(url).then(decodeJSON).then(addToPage)...

Promises are used by many new web standards, including Service Worker, the Fetch API, Quota Management, Font Load Events,Web MIDI, and Streams.


We’ve just opened up a online course on Promises, built in collaboration with Udacity. This brief course, which you can finish in about a day, walks you through building an “Exoplanet Explorer” app that reads and displays live data using Promises. You’ll also learn to use the Fetch API and finally kiss XMLHttpRequest goodbye!

This short course is a prerequisite for most of the Senior Web Developer Nanodegree. Whether you are in the paid Nanodegree program or taking the course for free, won’t you come learn to make your code simpler and more reliable today?

The Learning Continues! New lessons for Advanced Android course

Posted by Joanna Smith, Developer Advocate

Magic moments happen when your app does something very useful with minimal effort from your users -- like figuring out their location for them automatically. The new Places lesson in the Advanced Android App Development course teaches you how to add a Place Picker to your app so that users can pick a nearby location without having to type anything.

The Advanced Android App Development course, built by Udacity in conjunction with Google, is a follow-up course to Developing Android apps. The advanced course is for Android Developers who are ready to learn how to polish, productionize and publish their app, and even distribute it through Google Play.



Updates to the course also include an explanation of the new GCM Receiver, as well as an entirely new lesson on publishing your app, which explains how to build and sign an APK so you you can distribute your app on Google Play.

After all, why build an app if you can’t get it to your users?
Get started now, because it's going to be awesome!