31 Most Interesting Features of Android Ice Cream Sandwich (4.0)

Last week in Hong Kong, Google and Samsung unveiled Google’s new flagship Android device, the Nexus Prime, a 4.65″ Super AMOLED-toting, 1.2GHz LTE and HSPA+ smartphone. However nice the hardware of the new device is, it is second to the fact that it is the first device to run Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS), the newest build of Android that unifies tablets and smartphones under a single OS for the first time.

“People like Android, they need Android…but they didn’t LOVE Android,” said Google’s Matias Duarte in today’s presentation. To remedy this, Google has not only introduced new and practical functions to ICS, but gave it a slicker look, faster responsiveness, and some extremely impressive bells and whistles.

Here are 30 of the most interesting new features:

1. “Roboto,” Android’s own font

2. Even more live wallpapers

3. Newly-designed lock screen

4. Disappearing homescreen command buttons

5. Tabbed apps/widgets drawer similar to Honeycomb

6. Resizeable homescreen widgets

7. Redesigned foldering capabilities

8. Hardware accelerated 2D drawing

9. Wi-Fi Direct support

10. “Favorites Tray” at the bottom of the screen that travels across the different homescreens

11. Native Screen grab capability (Press Power+Volume Down)

12. Improved notification bar, customizable notifications

13. New Music player notification in tray controls player

14. Improved keyboard

15. Improved typing error correction

16. In-line spell check and suggestion mode

17. Cut/Copy/Paste similar to Honeycomb, but with animated dragging and dropping

18. Speech for text entry has been improved with no delay

19. “Face Unlock” facial recognition for unlock screen (Did not work in demo)

20. New Browser (Includes new tab management feature. “request desktop site” feature, syncs to chrome, save pages for offline reading)

21. New Gmail (New action bar with compose, search, labels, refresh; offline search by default that searches the last 30 days of email)

22. New Calendar with pinch-to-zoom

23. Updated all of the native Google apps: YouTube, Maps, Google+, Google Music

24. Mobile data usage metrics in system controls, allows users to self-limit their mobile data consumption, and track data usage down to individual app level

25. All-new camera app with slider zoom, facial detection, “zero shutter lag” speed, launchable from home screen

26. Photo editing tools in “edit” menu in the camera

27. Native panoramic camera shot, similar to Sony’s “Sweep” panorama

28. 1080p video capture, continuous focus, includes the ability to zoom while recording

29. Incredible new Time Lapse photography feature

30. New tile-based “People app” interface for contacts, very similar to Windows Phone

31. “Android Beam” NFC-based content sharing with multiple ICS phones (Web Addresses, contacts, maps, YouTube videos, app sharing)

See the full gallery on Posterous

 

“Do a Barrel Roll” on Google, and You Won’t Be Disappointed

“Do a barrel roll” has become a trending topic on Twitter and elsewhere, thanks to an easter egg on Google Search.

Type the phrase in Google, and the screen will tumble around (it’s a barrel roll, after all). The same thing happens if you search for “Z or R twice.” Because it was built in HTML5, it doesn’t work on all browsers. Firefox and Chrome seem to support it best.

Both phrases are references to Star Fox 64, the classic 1997 Nintendo game that sucked up a giant chunk of my life when I was a kid. Peppy, the game’s veteran space pilot rabbit, tells hero Fox McCloud to “do a barrel roll” (a feat accomplished by pressing “Z” or “R” twice) multiple times throughout the game. The phrase spawned an Internet meme that has stood the test of time.

I have no clue how long the Google easter egg has been around, but I love it. It’s yet another testament to Google’s quirkiness and nerdy demeanor.

20 Things I Learnt About Browsers & the Web

Although created about 1 year ago, it still remains an insightful resources to start learning about some of the most commonly used terms in the internet (or rather technology) space – The Web.

For geeks its all HTML5 & CSS3 and for a common man, who doesnt really care about the underlying technology on which this website is running or responding, its A MUST READ !

A team from Google has come up with some awesome graphics and super easy text to help understand the basics of 20 most popular things about the web & browsers.

Click here to see it in action.

Getting Started on the Google+ API

The Google+ project brings the nuance and richness of real-life sharing to software. The Google+ platform brings that nuance and richness to all of the web. We started with Google’s own products, added the +1 button for site owners and content publishers, and introduced games from a handful of partners. That’s just the beginning though — we want every one of you who builds applications to be able to include rich sharing, identity, and conversations in your app. Today, we’re taking the next step on that journey by launching the first of the Google+ APIs.

Let’s Go Public

Google+ gives users full control over their information, supporting everything from intimate conversations with family to public showcases and debates. This initial API release is focused on public data only — it lets you read information that people have shared publicly on Google+. For example, if you want to get my profile information, you can use the people.get method by sending the following HTTP request:

GET https://www.googleapis.com/plus/v1/people/108189587050871927619?key=yourAPIKey

which returns the following JSON encoded output (excerpted for brevity):

{
 "kind": "plus#person",
 "id": "108189587050871927619",
 "displayName": "Chris Chabot",
 "image": {
  "url": "https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-cQNLOQzkGpE/AAAAAAAAAAI/AAAAAAAAEjo/M9_pXL-ra4Q/photo.jpg"
 },
 "organizations": [
  {
   "name": "Google+ Developer Relations",
   "title": "Developer Advocate & Manager",
   "type": "work"
  }
 ]
}

Similarly, you can get a list of my most recent public posts by using the activities.list method:

GET https://www.googleapis.com/plus/v1/people/108189587050871927619/activities/public?key=yourAPIKey

Because we’re starting with public data only, you simply need to register your app before making requests. And if you aren’t yet sure which Google+ user is running your app (for example, because they’re installing it for the first time), then you can use the new plus.me OAuth2 scope to ask the user who they are.

After your application has requested this scope, you can use the special “me” identifier rather than the long numeric identifier:

GET https://www.googleapis.com/plus/v1/people/me

On The Shoulders of Giants

We love the way the programmable web has evolved, so we’re using existing standards and best practices wherever we can:

• Our API methods are RESTful HTTP requests which return JSON responses.
• Our payload formats use standard syntax (e.g. PoCo for people info, ActivityStrea.ms for activities).
• We use OAuth 2 for secure trusted access to user data.

In addition, since most of us no longer write raw HTTP requests these days, we provide libraries for your favorite language: Java, GWT, Python, Ruby, PHP, Objective-C, and .NET. These libraries are all open source, so we’d love to have your feedback and help with them.

developers.google.com

You can find more information about the Google+ platform, including today’s new APIs to public data, at developers.google.com/+ on our new Google Developers site. This site will be the place to go for access to documentation, terms and policies, discussions with other developers, tools that make development on the +Platform easier and more fun and, of course, the place where announcements concerning new releases will be made.

Included in our policies are three simple guidelines that we aspire to in our own products, and that we’d like all applications built on the Google+ platform to follow also: put the user first, be transparent, and respect user data. The goal behind these guidelines, as with all of the features and fine print, is to work together to build products that our users will love.

And now …

For all of you developers who have been asking for a Google+ API, this is the start. Experiment with it. Build apps on it. This is just the beginning; the Google+ platform will grow and we value your input as we move Google+ forward.

Follow the conversation on Google+.

How Google results are filtered in China ?

Type “Falun Gong” in Chinese into Google’s search engine from Beijing, and the Web browser suddenly becomes unresponsive for about a minute.

Make the same search from Hong Kong, and you’ll get plenty of links to the spiritual movement banned by the Chinese government.

Internet users in mainland China and Hong Kong now share the same Google search site, but their experiences continue to widely differ, particularly on topics deemed sensitive by China’s Communist leaders. The difference is that the government, rather than Google Inc, is now doing the censoring.

The findings in a recent Associated Press test offer insights into the sophistication with which China uses its complex “Great Firewall” to filter its citizens’ online view of the world.

Recent searches for taboo topics from Beijing generally produced “page cannot be displayed” errors. The user’s browser stops working for about a minute, longer if one tries to access forbidden sites in quick succession. In other words, it’s not just the links to those sites that don’t work; the results don’t come back at all.

Yet the filters aren’t exact, and English-language sites have a greater chance of slipping through, partly because the government is more concerned about the vast majority of citizens who speak only Chinese. And even as the Great Firewall blocks Twitter and sensitive blog postings, excerpts do show up on Google’s search results page.

The findings illustrate how China’s vast government-run network of Web filters works. When a user enters a sensitive term in a search, it triggers a brief blockage that affects subsequent searches — even those on innocuous topics — by that user or anyone else at the same numeric Internet address. That can be one computer or an entire cybercafe.

Chinese-language searches for missing Chinese activist lawyer Gao Zhisheng, jailed Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, Chinese President Hu Jintao and “June 4 incident” — known elsewhere as the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown — all led to the Web browser in Beijing hanging for a minute or longer.

Before Google killed its mainland search service Monday and redirected “Google.cn” traffic to its existing Hong Kong-based site, Google returned censored results with a note explaining that some items had been removed. Google needed to comply with Chinese laws, but it wanted users to know about the omissions in hopes they would pressure their government to lift restraints.

But Google announced January 12 that it was no longer willing to censor those results after it discovered it was the target of hacking attacks originating from China. Unable to reach agreement with the ruling party on running an uncensored search service, Google decided to send mainland users to Hong Kong, a Chinese territory that is semi-autonomous because of its past as a British colony.

Some Google searches produce the same results whether from Beijing or Hong Kong. Among them: “Michael Jackson” and “March 14 incident,” which refers to the 2008 anti-Chinese riots in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa. “Taiwan” also produced no difference in search results, despite tensions with a region that China considers its own.

In other cases, results appear the same, but the text ads alongside them differ. A recent search for “iPhone” in Hong Kong produced two sponsored links, for the Apple store in Hong Kong and for Vodafone, while the one in Beijing led to the mainland version of Apple’s home page. In most cases, though, the mainland version of the search produced more ads than in Hong Kong.

Google routinely uses a computer’s numeric Internet address to determine the visitor’s location and adjust search results and ads accordingly. Visiting the US-focused Google.com site from Geneva, for instance, often takes you automatically to the Swiss version of the site at Google.ch. Even within the United States, sites for some local businesses may show up higher or lower in the results depending on where you are.

Thus, despite Google’s decision to give mainland users the Hong Kong site, at Google.com.hk, visitors from Beijing still see differences having nothing to do with China’s filters.

With the change, Hong Kong’s site began displaying search results in the simplified Chinese characters that are used in mainland China, but Hong Kong visitors still get a page in the traditional Chinese script, with links to versions for English or simplified Chinese.

Beijing visitors get the simplified version first, and their Hong Kong page looks much like the old Google.cn, with colorful, animated icons offering quick links to video, shopping and other popular features.

The Google-owned online video leader YouTube is typically blocked on the mainland. In Beijing, searches on a separate Google video service are directed to a Google.cn site where the company is still censoring results. Video, music and maps are among the features that Google continues to operate in China. In Hong Kong, however, video searches go to the Hong Kong site, where results are not censored.

Meanwhile, Hong Kong users can reach a China-only music service, but unless you’re on the mainland, you get this advisory when you try to listen to a song: “Music streaming/download services are not available in your region.”

Despite the pervasive reach of the Great Firewall, mainland Chinese can use Google’s Hong Kong site for a glimpse of material that is usually blocked.

Consider a search for “Obama.” One recent search from Beijing produced a page leading with news stories about the US president, but the results page also included recent posts by people on Twitter, a social-messaging service that is blocked in China.

In a Chinese-language search for “Tibet,” Google includes excerpts from such blogs as Invisible Tibet, which is written by the well-known Tibetan poet and activist Woeser and is usually blocked in China.

Not surprisingly, attempts to access the blog from the search page failed. By comparison, a search for Woeser’s blog on the Chinese search site Baidu.com produced one line: “The search results could involve content that fails to comply with the relevant laws, regulation and policies, and are not displayed.”

Meanwhile, a search for “Tibet” in English shows links to Free Tibet, the International Campaign for Tibet and other activist sites.

The Great Firewall isn’t an exact science, but it’s meant to keep most of the sensitive content from most of the citizens most of the time.

Near field communication: What it is and how it works ?

For the layperson, how does NFC work?

NFC is basically a form of radio communication, but it uses very low-power radios. It’s related to radio-frequency identification (RFID) as well.

In its simplest form, you have two electronic devices. Each has a battery, a radio, and a processor on-board. One sends a stream of data to the other, and the other responds. They transmit with such low power that the signal is lost after only a few inches. So in order for them to communicate, you have to basically touch them together.

RFID can also be classified as Near Field Communication, though not all forms of RFID use the same data protocols as NFC devices. RFID comes in two flavors: active and passive.

Active RFID works just as NFC does: two powered devices, two radios, and a transmission between them. The range doesn’t need to be short; it can be as long as you have power to transmit. The EZ-Pass system you see on toll roads is a good example of active RFID — it can cover several meters.

Passive RFID, on the other hand, is generally very short range, because there is only one powered device. The RFID reader sends out a radio signal. When an RFID tag is in range, it receives the signal, and uses the energy of the radio transmission to power itself. The amount of energy isn’t great, so the RFID tag can only power itself long enough to send a signal back to the reader, then it shuts down.

How significant will NFC technology be in the coming years?

NFC, coupled with RFID tags, creates a really cool channel for devices and objects to talk to one another. Tom and I have done lots of freaky projects with Bluetooth, XBee/ZigBee, Wi-Fi — all things that communicate over a reasonable distance. But NFC and RFID give us the ability to have objects that are close to one another talk to each other. And one thing I love is that the RFID side of the equation lets un-powered objects — anything you can embed a tag in — play in this game of networked objects.

That, to me, is the starting point for all this. I don’t want to worry about whether NFC payments are going to take off, or if NFC will replace the business card. What I love about this is that it gives us another way for objects to participate in the “Internet of things.”

Are there any impressive or unique ways that NFC is being used right now?

There’s one story that seems to dominate the headlines, and that’s about using NFC for payments. But for me, the more interesting application is replacing QR codes. Imagine you’re standing outside a restaurant, and there’s a sticker in the window with a QR code that takes you somewhere for reviews. How long does that take? Half a minute to fire up your QR code scanner, two minutes of cursing because there’s not enough light or there’s glare on the glass, and when you eventually get it working, your friends have already searched for it on Google and read the reviews. And that’s assuming you’re enough of a power user to already have an app like Barcode Scanner or Red Laser installed.

Compare that to NFC. I can tap the sign with my Nexus S, and it will fire up the built-in Tags app (see video below), and take me right to the URL. It’s really fast. Tap your phone to the thing you want to create a relationship with, and you’re done.

NFC security is a concern for some. How well is this issue being addressed?

When people ask that question, I find that they haven’t done enough research to know why they should be concerned. Why are you not worried about Wi-Fi security? Or mobile phone security? Both of them use the same technology: radio transmission. Yet no one raises concerns about those.

I think the confusion stems from the fact that people think an RFID tag or an NFC device actually contains secret data about them. In fact, most of the time the only data on an RFID tag or NFC device is a serial number. In order for that number to mean anything, it has to be associated with other data in a database, and the database has to be attached to an RFID reader. The same is true of magnetic stripe credit cards — the data is not on the card. It’s a serial number that associates that card with your record in the database. It’s possible to record more than just the serial number on your card, but in order to extract that information, a more complex transaction involving encryption and passkeys has to happen.

Unlike mag-stripe cards, however, you don’t need to swipe an RFID or NFC card through a reader in order to read it. You merely need to bring it within a few centimeters of your reader. So people often ask, “Does that mean you can read my card in my wallet or my purse?” Sure, if you touch your wallet or purse to my reader. But if I get that close to you, I might as well just steal your whole wallet!

Practically speaking, it’s as difficult — or more so — to steal your credit card number off your RFID-enabled credit card as it is off your traditional credit card, assuming you handle your card with the same amount of basic caution. Practice some common sense, and you’re not in danger.

What are the most significant obstacles NFC faces?

The biggest issues at this point are compatibility — there are several different protocols that are incompatible with each other — and documenting the technologies in such a way that industrial designers know how to make them work best. Timo Arnall, Einar Martinussen, and the folks at BERG studios have done some good work on this at nearfield.org.

If you were to implement a solution today using RFID, you’d have some good choices at your disposal for secure solutions. However, there are insecure, first-generation — and probably second-generation and beyond — systems still in use that should be replaced.

Source: O’Reilly

10 must-know Google Search tricks

By now you know how to use Google to search for a flight, look up a definition, or solve a simple math problem. But what if you want to do a search comparison or want information from a certain time period? Here we bring you 10 tips and tricks for searching Google like a pro.

Google Squared

Searching for a comparison chart on a certain topic? Try using Google Squared for a collection of information. For instance, try searching Google Squared for “roller coasters” to see a chart of the top 20 tallest roller coasters, or check out chart of hurricanes for images, descriptions, and damage estimates of recent hurricanes.

Wonder Wheel

Not quite sure what you’re looking for? Google’s Wonder Wheel gives another way of looking at the related searches near what you’re looking for.

Located in the left-hand sidebar, Wonder Wheel produces a circular chart with searches that other people have done recently that are related to yours.

Search history

Need to find something you have found on Google before? Try searching your own Google search history. Sign into your Google account and enable web history.

Run your searches and then visit http://www.google.com/history to see your search history and revisit previous searches. Search history also syncs to your mobile device.

Google Voice Search

Google Voice Search lets you speak your search queries into your mobile device while on the go. Google Voice Search app is available on iPhone, BlackBerry, and Nokia S60 V3 phones. If you have an Android phone, search for the “Voice Search” app in Android Market.

Timeline

For those who want info from a certain time period, Timeline option is a sure shot help. Located in the left-hand toolbar, the feature lets you zoom in on any time range and see news pulled from assorted sources, including books, news, and web pages. Searching for the Anglo-French Wars, for instance, brings up a timeline that runs from 1600-2010, stepping down into individual years, then months.

Google Images

Want to filter your results in Google Images. Try searching for a word that could be found in a range of images, such as names like heather or raven or cliff. Towards the bottom of the left-hand sidebar in Google Images, you will find a dedicated option to only clip art, photos, or line drawings.

Searching files

Trying to find a particular type of file? Google doesn’t only look for HTML. Type what you’re looking for and then add ‘filetype:tag’ on the end. For instance, ‘filetype:doc’ will only results with those types of file. This search supports PDF, Microsoft Office formats, Shockwave Flash and so.

Google Suggest

To compare different Google Suggest results side-by-side, go to http://hint.fm/seer/ to get a visual comparison of two search prefixes. Though not a Google product, Web Seer was built by two Googlers and gives interesting insight into Google results.

Search in the URL

If you know there’s a specific string of letters or words in the URLs of pages you are looking for, you can use “inurl” to find them.

For example, many websites with public webcams have URLs that contain “view/view.shtml”. So search for inurl:view/view.shtml and your search results will display the URLs for webcams around the world.

Searching websites

You can search a wide variety of sites by inserting > before the type of site you want to search. For example, [penguins site:>.edu] searches for penguins across all .edu sites. [crater image site:>nasa.gov] searches for crater images across nasa.gov.