Google Archive

It almost sounds like a joke, but it's true enough. Ever since Gmail was instituted in April of 2004 with the invitation scheme, it and many other of Google's Apps have been wearing the beta tag. At long last, however, Google's ripping it off like a bandage.

While most people seem to be rooting for Android to make its debut and bridge the gap between phones and netbooks, apparently there are a few who, for varied reasons, think Android ought stay away from netbooks and stick to what it knows best: smartphones.

Google has quietly announced Fusion Tables, a new online database designed to sidestep the limitations of conventional relational databases. Fusion Tables, announced on Google's Research Blog, has been built to simplify a number of operations that are notoriously difficult in relational databases, including the integration of data from multiple, heterogeneous sources and the ability to collaborate on large data sets, according to Google. Under the hood of Fusion Tables is data-spaces technology, a concept has been around since the early 1990s and that Google has been developing it since it acquired Transformic in 2005.

We barely ended the discussion on Chrome's sandboxing feature and how hard or easy it is to implement such functionality on Mac OS X and Linux, and we have the Chromium project releasing the first builds of Google Chrome for Linux and Mac OS X "officially". Nightly builds for these platforms have been available since earlier this year, but this is the first time the project puts out actual releases for Mac and Linux.

Qualcomm showed off a previously unannounced Eee PC running Android at Computex in Taipei. The machine has a 10-inch screen, built-in webcam, and a universal 3G radio that supports all UMTS and CDMA networks on all frequencies used around the world. The 'smartbook' runs on Qualcomm's Snapdragon, a 1GHz ARM processor core that marks a shift away from Intel Atom x86-based netbooks. A second Android-based netbook -- a prototype by contract hardware maker Compal Electronics -- was also demoed at the show. Google, meanwhile, declined to discuss what steps it is taking to adapt the smartphone OS for laptops.

Google predicts that some 18 to 20 phones, from eight to nine manufacturers, will come with Android OS installed on them by the end of the year. Although Android is open-source, manufacturers will be able to sign distribution deals with Google in order to pre-install their phones with more options such as Google Apps. The Android OS is widely predicted to also make the jump to mini-notebooks soon.

After about 8 months of work, Google has "released Chrome 2" to the general public. Technically, this just means they moved the version of Chrome in the beta channel up to the stable channel. "We're referring to this as Chrome 2, but that's mainly a metric to help us keep track of changes internally. We don't give too much weight to version numbers and will continue to roll out useful updates as often as possible." There's lots of decent goodies in Chrome 2.

Some serious progress is being made with Chrome, Google's foray into the web browsing business. Not only is the plugin framework coming together, the Chromium project also started offering regular builds of the browser for Mac OS X (regular Linux builds have been available since March).

We've already seen numerous rumours about Google's Android making a move into netbooks, only fuelled by companies expressing serious interest in the concept and by Google's CEO making some hints about it not too long ago. Well, the rumours are now no longer rumours, as a Chinese company is now the first to offer an Android-based netbook, at USD 100-200.

"Google has released an experimental browser plugin that will make it possible to display rich 3D graphics in Web content. Google hopes that the plugin will stimulate discussion within the Web development community and contribute to a nascent effort headed by the Khronos group to bring 3D graphics to the Web. The plugin provides an implementation of O3D, a new API conceived by Google that facilitates the development of interactive 3D Web applications. It can be used to programmatically create and manipulate 3D graphics with the JavaScript programming language. The source code of the plugin is distributed under the open source BSD license, which broadly permits third-party developers to study, modify, and redistribute the plugin software."

"Google launched their Google App Engine (GAE) a year ago. The free hosting in App Engine is allocated 500 MB of persistent storage and enough CPU and bandwidth for about 5 million page views a month. Also, if you really want more you can see pricing plans. GAE will support Java going forward. Unfortunately PHP support on the App Engine is still left as the top item in the wishlist. So until Google announces their official PHP support we have a workaround to run PHP using Quercus. Quercus is basically a 100% Java implementation of the PHP language (requires JDK 1.5). Since the App Engine now supports Java this means we can use Quercus to run PHP scripts on the App Engine."

It's been a long time coming, but yesterday Google has announced that Java will be available on their App Engine. While the SDK is available for everyone to develop their applications locally, the initial sign up allowing people to upload their applications to the App Engine is limited to 10,000 users. The Java environment provides a Java 6 JVM, a Java Servlets interface, and support for standard interfaces to the App Engine scalable datastore and services, such as JDO, JPA, JavaMail, and JCache.

We almost had another small riot over the EULA Google uses for its Chrome web browser. On Slashdot, the editors posted an anonymous submission that questioned Google's policies as defined in the EULA used by Chrome. Slashdot readers quickly corrected the wrong assumptions by the anonymous poster, and Google jumped in on its corporate blog to clarify the "issue".

We're six months after the initial release of Chrome for Windows, and we still don't have the promised Linux and Mac OS X versions. Jordan already detailed the progress on the Linux/Gtk+ version of Chrome not too long ago, and now Ars has done the same for the Mac version. As it turns out, Chrome for Mac is making some serious progress.