The European Parliament has voted in favour of breaking Google up, as a solution to complaints that it favours is own services in search results.
Politicians have no power to enforce a break-up, but the landmark vote sends a clear message to European regulators to get tough on the net giant.
I'm glad they're keeping a close watch on these powerful companies, but a break-up?
Good luck with that.
Currently Chrome supports NPAPI plugins, but they are blocked by default unless the user chooses to allow them for specific sites (via the page action UI). A small number of the most popular plugins are whitelisted and allowed by default. In January 2015 we will remove the whitelist, meaning all plugins will be blocked by default.
In April 2015 NPAPI support will be disabled by default in Chrome and we will unpublish extensions requiring NPAPI plugins from the Chrome Web Store. Although plugin vendors are working hard to move to alternate technologies, a small number of users still rely on plugins that haven’t completed the transition yet. We will provide an override for advanced users (via chrome://flags/#enable-npapi) and enterprises (via Enterprise Policy) to temporarily re-enable NPAPI while they wait for mission-critical plugins to make the transition.
Definitely a big chance some Chrome users will have to account for.
Using Photoshop usually requires lugging a typically cumbersome, expensive computer around, and changing that experience has been the dream of many creatives for years. As we found out back in September, it's a problem that Adobe has been actively working with Google to solve. The two companies have been working together for almost two years to bring Photoshop to the browser, and they finally have a working version called Photoshop Streaming that they're letting educational institutions apply to test over the next six months. Yesterday, I got a look at it in action when Adobe's director of engineering, Kirk Gould, remotely ran me through a brief demo of the program.
Google Genomics could prove more significant than any of these moonshots. Connecting and comparing genomes by the thousands, and soon by the millions, is what’s going to propel medical discoveries for the next decade. The question of who will store the data is already a point of growing competition between Amazon, Google, IBM, and Microsoft.
This seems like a great technology to help advance medicine, but this being Google, one does have to wonder just what Google will do with data like this - or, better put, what can be done with data like this at all beyond its intended and promised purpose.
Chromebooks are fast, easy to use and secure. They bring the best of the cloud right to your desktop, whether that's Google Drive, Google+ Photos or Gmail. Today, in partnership with Adobe, we're welcoming Creative Cloud onto Chromebooks, initially with a streaming version of Photoshop. This will be available first to U.S.-based Adobe education customers with a paid Creative Cloud membership - so the Photoshop you know and love is now on Chrome OS. No muss, no fuss.
This streaming version of Photoshop is designed to run straight from the cloud to your Chromebook. It's always up-to-date and fully integrated with Google Drive, so there's no need to download and re-upload files - just save your art directly from Photoshop to the cloud. For IT administrators, it's easy to manage, with no long client installation and one-click deployment to your team's Chromebooks.
This is quite interesting - and a direct assault on Windows and OS X. We'll have to see just how well it works, but if it works well, and a lot of the heavy lifting is done server-side, it might a winner.
Google has gone to valiant lengths to convince us that rumors of Google+’s demise have been greatly exaggerated, but Google is no longer forcing new Gmail users to connect their account to a Google+ profile - yet another move that could signal the end for Google’s troubled social network.
I think I speak for all of us when I say - well, nice of them to do something Google+-related right for a change.
In all seriousness - nobody asked for Google+, nobody wanted it, and virtually everyone hated it, and it does not solve any actual problem anyone had with Google products. It doesn't have to die, but it shouldn't be forced down our collective throats anymore.
Oh, right, there's an entirely new version of Android right around the corner. It could be days away, it could be weeks away. We're not totally sure what Google has planned for what is easily the most ambitious and promising update to the platform since Android 2.1. It's easy to forget that there's a whole new world right around the corner, because Android is in this seemingly constant state of change now. We have core apps updating on a regular and consistent bases, manufacturers pushing their apps to the Play Store in order to update them in a timely manner, and the beating heart of the platform is on a six week release cycle. Of all the incredible things that we saw and heard about at Google I/O this year, Sundar Pichai's announcement that Google Play Services would be updating and improving every six weeks is one of those things that didn't get nearly as much attention as it probably should have.
It really is quite remarkable. In some ways, Android is starting to faintly look like a rolling release, with more and more core smartphone applications, as well as several core smartphone APIs, updated continuously through Google Play. The pace is quick, and I like it.
Still, the Android update situation has not been resolved. There's a lot more work to do.
Google is set to institute a new policy in the Play Store, and it has some developers up in arms. A message in the developer console (seen below) has appeared asking developers to add a physical address to their account profile. For those offering paid apps and in-app purchases, this is mandatory as of September 30th. Failing to do so could result in Mountain View pulling the apps.
The notice points out that this address will be visible on the app details page for all users of the Play Store.
Chromebooks were designed to keep up with you on the go - they're thin and light, have long battery lives, resume instantly, and are easy to use. Today, we're making Chromebooks even more mobile by bringing the first set of Android apps to Chrome OS.
These first apps are the result of a project called the App Runtime for Chrome (Beta), which we announced earlier this summer at Google I/O. Over the coming months, we'll be working with a select group of Android developers to add more of your favorite apps so you’ll have a more seamless experience across your Android phone and Chromebook.
I was under the impression all applications would work when they announced this at I/O. I had no idea only select applications would work. That's a bit of a bummer.
Ars Technica reports about Project Athena:
Google-watchers may have already head about "Project Athena," a Chrome OS-related experiment of Google's that has appeared in the Chromium source code a few times in the past. Today we got our first official look at the new interface via Francois Beaufort, a Chrome enthusiast who was hired by Google last year after leaking several high-profile Chrome features.
It looks a heck of a lot like Material Design and Android L UI behaviour coming to Chrome OS. Fascinating to see where this is going, but one thing appears to be clear: in the tug of war between Chrome OS and Android, the latter has won.
We know you've been calling for this change for a while. We know that our names policy has been unclear, and this has led to some unnecessarily difficult experiences for some of our users. For this we apologize, and we hope that today's change is a step toward making Google+ the welcoming and inclusive place that we want it to be. Thank you for expressing your opinions so passionately, and thanks for continuing to make Google+ the thoughtful community that it is.
Good move, but Google+? Who cares about Google+?
Google's Project Ara is such a drastic departure from the hardware designs that make up mainstream smartphones that it's pretty impressive to see just how swiftly progress is moving forward on the effort. From the earliest announcement back in the fall of last year, we've moved on to developer conferences and the release of the Ara Module Developers Kit. Now it's nearly time for Ara's next phase to begin, as Google prepares to distribute the dev boards that will let hardware makers continue with work towards creating the modules that will go into Ara devices.
Will this project go anywhere? No idea. Will it change the smartphone world forever? Probably not. Is it awesome? Pretty much, yeah. Runaway success or no, I like this crazy idea.
Russell Ivanovic comparing his experiences at WWDC and Google I/O. For instance, the differences between Apple and Google developer representatives.
Perhaps it's just the ones I've met at Apple, but I've never had this experience before. Our developer rep is a nice guy, but he's not the least bit technical, and in general I could only talk to him when he contacts me. I say 'could' because ever since we've had success on the Android platform he's made it very clear that his services are no longer available to us. Perhaps that makes me bitter and jaded about the Developer Rep experience at Apple, but if you ask me it's justified.
Seems to be in line with how Apple handles the press. A long, long time ago, Apple loaned me one of the first Intel MacBook Pros. Those models got notoriously hot to the touch under heavy use. I dared to mention in my review that the device would sometimes get uncomfortably warm. Let me just say that it did not exactly go down well with Apple.
Moving on, it's not just the companies' employees that have differing attitudes.
One of the first things that struck me was the contrast between the kind of people that attend I/O vs those at WWDC. Granted in both cases I didn't meet all 5000 attendees, so there's nothing scientific about what follows. That said everyone I met at I/O was open-minded and tended to work on more than one platform. As such it wasn't the least bit strange when someone pulled out their iPhone to check something on it. The majority of phones there seemed to be Androids, with the Nexus 5 making up the lions share of the devices I saw. What I'm getting at, and let me put it bluntly if I may, is that it highlighted just how insular and superior a lot of Apple developers act and feel. If you don't believe me, just join a group of them at WWDC and whip out your Android phone. Within moments, you'll wish you had whipped out something less offensive, like your genitalia instead.
Apple's employees seem "overly obsessed with Google", he notes, which shouldn't be a surprise considering the amount of time Tim Cook spends bashing Android during a keynote - often with facts of questionable value. This kind of stuff trickles down to lower employees, too, of course.
In any case, this doesn't exactly seem like a great way to treat developers. I wonder if this will ever come back to bite Apple in the butt.
Google CEO Larry Page on privacy issues:
I'm not trying to minimize the issues. For me, I'm so excited about the possibilities to improve things for people, my worry would be the opposite. We get so worried about these things that we don't get the benefits. I think that's what's happened in health care. We've decided, through regulation largely, that data is so locked up that it can't be used to benefit people very well.
Right now we don't data-mine health care data. If we did we'd probably save 100,000 lives next year. I'm very worried that the media and governments will try to stoke the people's fears and we'll end up in a state where we could benefit a lot of people but we re not able to do that. That's the likely outcome.
The problem is not that people aren't open to the possible benefits from information gleamed from large piles of data. No, the problem is that both governments and companies alike have a history of abusing and/or leaking this data. In other words, the people's skepticism is entirely the industry's own fault.
Introspection, Mr. Page.
So, the Google I/O keynote just finished, so I guess it's time to start summarising the most important announcements so we can go on to discuss them to death. Google announced a lot today - and most of it focused on Android. They detailed the next version of Android, dubbed the L release, which brings biggest visual overhaul of the platform since Honeycomb.
Google calls it Material Design, and it covers every aspect from Google - from Android to web. Material Design covers both how the user interface looks and how it behaves - with entirely new animations, dynamic shadows, and Z-depth. It is accompanied by loads of new APIs - both on Android and for the web - to make all these new transitions and Z-depth as easy as possible to code, and to ensure it always runs at 60 FPS (both on Android and on the web). Material Design covers all screen sizes - from round watches to big televisions.
There's a stylised video and a website laden with designer talk, and The Verge has the Android screenshots to show it off. Still images don't do the subtle animations and transitions any justice, but as you can see, if you've used Google Now you already have a very basic idea of where Google is going with this. The transitions, Z-depth, and dynamic shadows counter the lifelessness and coldness that are inherent to modern 'flat' design, making it feel livelier and warmer. It feels like it sits somewhere between the neon garishness of iOS 7/8 and the starkness of Metro.
While the focus was on the visual redesign, Android L will bring more to the table. One personal favourite of mine is a completely redesigned application switcher, which now resembles the card stack already in use by Chrome for Android, and displays Chrome tabs as individual applications. I've always found the current application switcher in Android to be cumbersome, and often very slow and choppy. This one looks very, very smooth on a Nexus 5.
Another huge change for Android is the definitive switch from Dalvik to ART, Android's new runtime. You've been able to use it for a while now, and I'm sure some of you already were, but Android L will run exclusively on ARt. It'll improve performance and all that, but it's also ready for 64bit, and supports ARM, x86, and MIPS. For developers - literally nothing changes. They won't have to change a single line of code to be ART-compatible.
Google showed off more features, such as battery life improvements and better notifications, but these were definitely the most prominent. The Android L SDK and developer images for the Nexus 5 and Nexus 7 (2013) will be available tomorrow, and the final release will take place in autumn. As for when you can get it on your phone - this is Android, so all bets are off, of course. Nexus devices will het it first, custom ROMs will follow shortly after that, and those of you running stock Samsung, HTC, etc. ROMs are at the OEM's mercy. HTC has promised to begin rolling out Android L to the HTC One flagships within 90 days after Google drops the code, but OEMs have broken these kinds of promises before.
Google also shed much more light on Android Wear, but there was little here we didn't already know. The LG and Samsung Android Wear devices will be available in Google Play starting today, but the much more awesome Moto 360 will only become available later this summer. Google also unveiled Android Auto (whatever) and Android TV (I'm sure it will take off this time). While the Moto 360 is quite interesting because of its round display and just how awesome it looks, the rest of these devices and platforms aren't particularly exciting to me. The good thing for developers is that all these platforms have SDKs available starting today, and a single APK can cover all of them.
Moving on to Chrome, Google dropped the inevitable bombshell: Android applications can now run in windows on Chrome OS. On top of that, there will be a lot of integration between Android and Chrome OS to bridge the gap between the two. The latter looks very similar to what Apple is doing with Yosemite and iOS 8, and is a very welcome addition to the Chrome OS platform. In fact, these two additions - especially Android applications on Chrome OS - actually make me interested in trying out Chrome OS.
The last announcement I want to touch upon is the first major announcement during the keynote: Android One. This is a new initiative in which Google creates a reference platform for entry-level devices that smaller OEMs in developing countries can use to build devices and sell them at prices below $100. These devices will ship with stock Android, but carriers can install localised applications. Luckily, though, users will be able to uninstall those. The cherry on top: Google will be solely responsible for updating these devices, meaning they will always be running the latest Android release.
This was a very interesting keynote, and especially the Android stuff consisted of solid, welcome improvements to the platform. I'm very excited about the new design, since we're not just looking at a coat of paint, but also new behaviour and the APIs and developer tools to back it up.
In 2012, Patrick Gibson wrote down a remark by one of his friends: "Google is getting better at design faster than Apple is getting better at web services". Now that we know what iOS 8 and Android L will look like - it sure looks like this remark has come full circle.
Announced three weeks ago, the Diane Von Furstenberg accessory set offers five new frames and eight shades designed specifically for ladies. They're available for sale individually (i.e., separate from Glass, for existing Explorers) in the official online Glass store, and they're available with Glass on the luxury fashion site, Net-A-Porter.
I haven't spent a whole many words on Google Glass on OSNews thus far, partly because these things are quite expensive and only available to a select group of Americans.
Since this is as good a time as any to show my cards on Glass: I think Google has been botching, and continues to botch, the publicity around Glass in a spectacular way. They've been positioning it as a consumer product that you wear all the time, through all your daily activities, but I don't think that's where the real value of Glass (and technology like it) will come into its own.
Glass is geeky, and while that's not really a bad thing in my book (no matter what certain looks-obsessed bloggers say), it does limit the device's appeal. They can make it really small and unobtrusive, but that'll raise concerns regarding privacy even more than Glass already does today. On top of that, I simply doubt that most people have any need for Glass in their regular, day-to-day life.
No, I think the real value of Glass lies in an entirely different area Google seems to have been ignoring so far. It's a far less sexy area than the world of designer glasses and paragliders, but one that offers far, far more potential: 'traditional' workplaces. Construction. Road works. Law enforcement. The military. Farmers. Firefighters. Plumbers. Roofers. You name it. People who work with their hands in potentially dangerous environments, who can use the heads-up display for at-a-glance, crucial information while out in the field.
In short, I think Glass could be huge for people who do what I admiringly refer to as "real work" (to differentiate it from my own job, which comes down to sitting behind a desk translating crap). Sadly, Google seems to ignore this area, overflowing with potential, completely, continuing down its path of trying to make Google Glass hip and fashionable. I am much more interested in seeing what Glass can do for the kinds of professions I just mentioned.
Those traditional workers might not be VC-sexy, but I'm convinced they'd benefit a whole lot more from Glass than privileged tech bloggers, supermodels, and translators.
Ever since we first saw ART appear alongside the release of Android 4.4 KitKat, we all knew that it would eventually replace the aging and relatively inefficient Dalvik runtime compiler. Well folks, the time is now upon us, as commits made late last night to the AOSP master branch show Dalvik getting the axe and ART being set as the default.
Should deliver some decent performance improvements. I tried switching to ART months ago but ran into problems with some applications not working properly. Has the situation improved? Are any of you using ART?
To prevent any more of Android's past from being lost to the annals of history, we did what needed to be done. This is 20+ versions of Android, seven devices, and lots and lots of screenshots cobbled together in one space. This is The History of Android, from the very first public builds to the newest version of KitKat.
Very detailed, and a fun read.
