Posted by Jon Simantov, Fun Propulsion Labs at Google

Originally posted to the Google Open Source blog

Fun Propulsion Labs at Google* is back today with some new releases for game developers. We’ve updated Pie Noon (our open source Android TV game) with networked multi-screen action, and we’ve also added some delicious new libraries we’ve been baking since the original release: the Pindrop audio library and the Motive animation system.

Pie Noon multi-screen action

Got an Android TV and up to 4 friends with Android phones or tablets? You’re ready for some strategic multi-player mayhem in this updated game mode. Plan your next move in secret on your Android phone: will you throw at an opponent, block an incoming attack, or take the risky approach and wait for a larger pie? Choose your target and action, then watch the Android TV to see what happens!

We used the NearbyConnections API from the most recent version of Google Play Games services to easily connect smartphones to your Android TV and turn our original Pie Noon party game into a game of turn-based strategy. You can grab the latest version of Pie Noon from Google Play to try it out, or crack open the source code and take a look at how we used FlatBuffers to encode data across the network in a fast, portable, bandwidth-efficient way.

Pindrop: an open source game audio library

Pindrop is a cross-platform C++ library for managing your in-game audio. It supports cross compilation to Android, Linux, iOS and OSX. An early version of this code was part of the first Pie Noon release, but it’s now available as a separate library that you can use in your own games. Pindrop handles loading and unloading sound banks, tracking sound locations and listeners, prioritization of your audio channels, and more.

Pindrop is built on top of several other pieces of open source technology:

• SDL Mixer is used as a backend for actually playing the audio.
• The loading of data and configuration files is handled by our serialization library, FlatBuffers.
• Our own math library, MathFu, is used for a number of under-the-hood calculations.

You can download the latest open source release from our GitHub page. Documentation is available here and a sample project is included in the source tree. Please feel free to post any questions in our discussion list.

Motive: an open source animation system

The Motive animation system can breathe life into your static scenes. It does this by applying motion to simple variables. For example, if you’d like a flashlight to shine on a constantly-moving target, Motive can animate the flashlight so that it moves smoothly yet responsively.

Motive animates both spline-based motion and procedural motion. These types of motion are not technically difficult, but they are artistically subtle. It's easy to get the math wrong. It's easy to end up with something that moves as required but doesn't quite feel right. Motive does the math and lets you focus on the feeling.

Motive is scalable. It's designed to be extremely fast. It also has a tight memory footprint -- smaller than traditional animation compression -- that's based on Dual Cubic Splines. Our hope is that you might consider using Motive as a high-performance back-end to your existing full-featured animation systems.

This initial release of Motive is feature-light since we focused our early efforts on doing something simple very quickly. We support procedural and spline-based animation, but we don't yet support data export from animation packages like Blender or Maya. Motive 1.0 is suitable for props -- trees, cameras, extremities -- but not fully rigged character models. Like all FPL technologies, Motive is open source and cross-platform. Please check out the discussion list, too.

What’s Fun Propulsion Labs at Google?

You might remember us from such Android games as Pie Noon, LiquidFun Paint, and VoltAir, and such cross-platform libraries as MathFu, LiquidFun, and FlatBuffers.

Want to learn more about our team? Check out this recent episode of Game On! with Todd Kerpelman for the scoop!

* Fun Propulsion Labs is a team within Google that's dedicated to advancing gaming on Android and other platforms.

Originally posted to the Google Geo Developers blog

Editor’s note: This post is written by Adam Ratana, developer of Sun Surveyor. Read how Sun Surveyor is using Google Maps APIs to help photographers capture the perfect photo.

Posted by Adam Ratana, developer of Sun Surveyor

I’m a photography enthusiast, and I’m always looking for ways to improve my work. That’s what led me to develop Sun Surveyor, an iOS and Android app that uses Google Maps APIs to visualize the location of the sun and the moon anywhere in the world. The app makes it easy to figure out when the natural lighting will be just right — and get the ideal shot.

Sun Surveyor uses augmented reality to overlay the paths of the sun and moon on a camera’s view, so you can see where in the sky they’ll be at a specific time and place. Photographers can use it to plan their shots ahead of time, and businesses can use it to gauge things like how best to align solar panels to make the most efficient use of the angle of the sun.

The app uses multiple Google Maps APIs, including the Elevation API, the Time Zone API, the Google Maps SDK for iOS and the Google Maps Android API. The Android API, which includes Street View, was particularly helpful. It allowed me to overlay the path of the sun and moon on any Street View location anywhere in the world. For programming details, see this blog post.

The following screen captures give you a sense of how the app works. They show overlays on top of the iconic Half Dome in Yosemite National Park. The first shows the paths of the sun (yellow line) and moon (blue line) over an aerial view of Yosemite Valley. The green line shows the distance between the photographer and the object to be photographed — in this case, Half Dome.

This next screen capture shows how the app looks when in Street View mode. Again, the yellow line shows the sun’s path, and the blue line shows the moon’s path. The green line represents the horizon. You can see how the app lets you plan the right time to get a shot of the sun behind Half Dome: in this particular instance, 8:06 am.

Nearly 500,000 people around the world have downloaded the free version of Sun Surveyor, and many have paid for the full edition. They’re taking remarkable photos as a result, and what started as a hobby for me has turned into a business — thanks to Google Maps APIs.

Posted by Ankur Kotwal, Software Engineer

The holiday spirit is about giving and though we’re early into April, we’re still in that spirit. Today, we’re announcing that Google's Santa Tracker is now open source on GitHub at google/santa-tracker-web and google/santa-tracker-android. Now you can see how we’ve used many of our developer products to build a fun and engaging experience that runs across the web and Android.

Santa Tracker isn’t just about watching Santa’s progress as he delivers presents on December 24. Visitors can also have fun with the winter-inspired games and an interactive North Pole village while Santa prepares for his big journey throughout the holidays.

Below is a summary of what we’ve released as open source.

Android app

• The Santa Tracker Android app is a single APK, supporting all devices running Ice Cream Sandwich (4.0) and up. The source code for the app can be found here.

• Santa’s village is a canvas-based graphical launcher for videos, games and the tracker. In order to span 10,000 pixels in width, the village uses the Android resource hierarchy in a unique way to scale graphics without needing assets for multiple density buckets, thereby reducing the APK size.
• Games on Santa Tracker Android are built using a combination of technologies such as JBox2D (gumball game), Android view hierarchy (memory match game) and OpenGL with a purpose-built rendering engine (jetpack game).
• To help with user engagement, the app uses the App Indexing API to enable autocomplete support for Santa Tracker games from Google Search. This is done using deep linking.

Android Wear

• The custom watch faces on Android Wear provide a personalized touch. Having Santa or one of his friendly elves tell the time brings a smile to all. Building custom watch faces is a lot of fun but providing a performant, battery friendly watch face requires certain considerations. The watch face source code can be found here.
• Santa Tracker uses notifications to let users know when Santa has started his journey. The notifications are further enhanced to provide a great experience on wearables using custom backgrounds and actions that deep link into the app.

On the web

• Santa Tracker on the web was built using Polymer, a powerful new library from the Chrome team based on Web Components. Santa Tracker’s use of Polymer demonstrates how easy it is to package code into reusable components. Every scene in Santa's village (games, videos, and interactive pages) is a custom element, only loaded when needed, minimizing the startup cost of Santa Tracker.
• Santa Tracker’s interactive and fun experience is built using the Web Animations API, a standardized JavaScript API for unifying animated content - this is a huge leap up from using CSS animations. Web Animations can be written imperatively, are supported in all modern browsers via polyfills and Polymer uses them internally to create its amazing material design effects. Examples of these animations can be found using this GitHub search.

• Santa believes in mobile first; this year's experience was built to be optimized for the mobile web, including a fully responsive design, touch gesture support using Polymer, and new features like meta-theme color and the application manifest for add to homescreen.
• To provide exceptional localization support, a new i18n-msg component was built, a first for Web Components. Modeled after the Chrome extension i18n system, it enables live page-refresh for development but has a build step for optimization.

Now that the source code is also available, developers can see many of the parts that come together to make Santa Tracker. We hope that developers are inspired to make their own magical experiences.

Posted by Kalyan Reddy, Developer Programs Engineer

Originally posted on the Google Apps Developer blog

Apps Script includes many built-in Google services for major products like Gmail and Drive, and lately, we've been working to add other APIs that developers have been clamoring for as advanced Google services. Today, we are launching seven more advanced services, including:

• Admin SDK Groups Migration service
• Admin SDK Groups Settings service
• Admin SDK License Manager service
• Admin SDK Reseller service
• Apps Activity service
• DoubleClick Campaigns service
• Google+ service

Like all other advanced services in Apps Script, they must first be enabled before use. Once enabled, they are just as easy to use as built-in Apps Script services -- the editor provides autocomplete, and the authentication flow is handled automatically.

Here is a sample using the Apps Activity advanced service that shows how to get a list of users that have performed an action on a particular Google Drive file.

function getUsersActivity() {
  var fileId = 'YOUR_FILE_ID_HERE';
  var pageToken;
  var users = {};
  do {
    var result = AppsActivity.Activities.list({
      'drive.fileId': fileId,
      'source': 'drive.google.com',
      'pageToken': pageToken
    });
    var activities = result.activities;
    for (var i = 0; i < activities.length; i++) {
      var events = activities[i].singleEvents;
      for (var j = 0; j < events.length; j++) {
        var event = events[j];
        users[event.user.name] = true;
      }
    }
    pageToken = result.nextPageToken;
  } while (pageToken);
  Logger.log(Object.keys(users));
}

This function uses the AppsActivity.Activities.list() method, passing in the required parameters drive.fileId and source, and uses page tokens to get the full list of activities. The full list of parameters this method accepts can be found in the Apps Activity API's reference documentation.

Posted by Wouter van Oortmerssen, Fun Propulsion Labs at Google*

Originally posted to the Google Open Source blog

After months in development, the FlatBuffers 1.1 update is here. Originally released in June 2014, it’s a highly efficient open source cross-platform serialization library that allows you to read data without parsing/unpacking or allocating additional memory. It supports schema evolution (forwards/backwards compatibility) and optional JSON conversion. We primarily created it for games written in C++ where performance is critical, but it’s also useful more broadly. This update brings:

• an extensive overhaul to the Java API
• out-of-the-box support for C# and Go
• an optional verifier to make FlatBuffers practical in untrusted scenarios
• .proto parsing for easier migration from Protocol Buffers
• optional manual assignment of field IDs
• dictionary functionality through binary search on a key field
• bug fixes and other improvements thanks to 200+ commits from 28 contributors -- thank you!

Download the latest release from our github page and join our discussion list for more details.

*Fun Propulsion Labs is a team within Google that's dedicated to advancing gaming on Android and other platforms.

Originally posted on the Google Geo Developers Blog
Posted by Todd Kerpelman, Developer Advocate

If you're an iOS developer, you're probably aware that you have the ability to open some apps directly by taking advantage of their custom URL schemes. (And if you're not aware of that fact, I have an excellent set of videos to recommend to you!)

Of course, we wouldn't be telling you all of this on the Google Geo Developers blog if it weren't for the fact that you can also use the comgooglemaps:// custom URL scheme to open up a map, Street View, or direction request directly in Google Maps on iOS.
Constructing these URLs, however, isn't always easy -- I don't know about you, but I don't spend a lot of my time memorizing key/value pairs for URL arguments. And adding x-callback-url support, while super useful for redirecting users back to your app, means adding even more URL arguments and escaping. And because not everybody has Google Maps installed on their iOS device, you may also want to build URLs to open up Apple Maps, which have their own similar-but-slightly different set of URL arguments.

It was one of those situations that made me say, "Hey, somebody should write a utility to make this easier." And that's how, a few months later, we ended up publishing the OpenInGoogleMapsController for iOS.

OpenInGoogleMapsController is a class that makes it easy to build links to open a map (or display Street View or directions) directly in Google Maps for iOS. Rather than creating URLs by hand, you can create map requests using Objective-C classes and types, so you can take advantage of all the type-checking and code hinting you've come to expect from Xcode.

For instance, if you needed biking directions from Sherlock Holmes' apartment on Baker Street to Scotland Yard, your request might look something like this:

GoogleDirectionsDefinition *defn = [[GoogleDirectionsDefinition alloc] init];
defn.startingPoint =
    [GoogleDirectionsWaypoint waypointWithQuery:@"221B Baker Street, London"];
defn.destinationPoint = [GoogleDirectionsWaypoint
    waypointWithLocation:CLLocationCoordinate2DMake(51.498511, -0.133091)];
defn.travelMode = kGoogleMapsTravelModeBiking;
[[OpenInGoogleMapsController sharedInstance] openDirections:defn];

My favorite feature about this utility is that it supports a number of fallback strategies. If, for instance, you want to open up your map request in Google Maps, but then fallback to Apple Maps if the user doesn't have Google Maps installed, our library can do that for you. On the other hand, if it's important that your map location uses Google's data set, you can open up the map request in Google Maps in Safari or Chrome as a fallback strategy. And, of course, it fully supports the x-callback-url standard, so you can make sure Google Maps (or Google Chrome) has a button that points back to your app.

Sound interesting? Give it a try. Just add a couple of files to your Xcode project, and you're ready to go. Feel free to add issues or enhancements requests you might encounter in the GitHub repository, and let us know if you use it in your app. We'd be excited to check it out.

Posted by Amir Shevat, Google Developers Launchpad Program Manager

With new events, improved courses and an expanded mentorship network - Startup Launch is now Google Developers Launchpad. We’re changing our program name to emphasize how you can use our resources as a launch pad to scale and monetize your app business. Read on to learn about our upcoming events and how you can apply to participate.

Events: Launchpad Week goes global

Launchpad Week, Launchpad’s weeklong in-person bootcamp for early-stage apps, continues to expand, with new 2015 programs planned in Munich, Mexico City, Helsinki, Bogota, and Sydney, to name a few. We’ll also regularly host these events in Tel Aviv, London, Berlin, and Paris.

We kicked off Launchpad Week in Bengaluru, India and Bordeaux, France last month. 32 startups and 80 experts from these communities gathered at Idiom Design Center and Le Node for a week of product, UX, and technology sprints designed to help transform ideas into validated, scalable businesses.

Featured startups from Bengaluru included iReff, an app that helps pre-paid mobile users find the best recharge plan for their specific needs. In Bordeaux, Google Developer Expert David Gageot volunteered as a tech mentor, helping startups “ship early, ship often” through testing and continuous integration.

Events: Google Developers Summits

For later-stage startups, we’re providing some of the best tech experts to help optimize apps for Material Design, Android TV, and Google Cast at two-day Google Developer Summits. At an event in Buenos Aires, Argentina, last week, we had participants such as game developer Etermax, the team behind Trivia Crack. Similar events happened in Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, and Bengaluru this month, and we’re looking forward to inviting more startups to this program in London, Tokyo, Tel Aviv, and New York in 2015.

Products: Your app, powered by Google

In 2014, we helped over 5,000 developers in 170 countries get their ideas off the ground by providing the infrastructure back-end that allows developers to build incredible products. For example, our program delivered software architecture reviews and Google Cloud Platform credits to help entrepreneurs in the program build businesses that scale with them. Check out how Fansino is using Google Cloud Platform to let artists interact with their fans.

We’ve also expanded our product offer for early-stage startups to include AdWords promotional offers for new accounts. Whatever your monetization plan, we’re making it easy to get started with tools like the new In-app Billing API and instruction from the AdMob team.

Courses: Upskilling you and your app

Starting this month, we’ll offer a virtual curriculum of how Google products can help your startup. We’re kicking things off with new Launchpad Online videos covering Google Analytics - are you observing how your users use your app? How do different promotional channels perform?

The series continues in April 2015 with AdMob products, and will expand with instruction in implementing material design and conducting user research later in the year.

If you can’t wait, we’ve also built courses together with Udacity to take your technical skills to the next level on topics, including Android, Java, Web Fundamentals, and UX.

Apply to get involved

Apply to Google Developers Launchpad program to take advantage of these offers - g.co/launchpad. Here’s to a great launch!

Posted by William Denniss, Product Manager, Identity and Authentication

Over the past few years, we’ve publicized that ClientLogin, OAuth 1.0 (3LO)¹, AuthSub, and OpenID 2.0 were deprecated and would shut down on April 20, 2015. We’re moving away from these older protocols in order to focus support on the latest Internet standards, OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect, which increase security and reduce complexity for developers.

The easiest way to migrate to these new standards is to use the Google Sign-in SDKs (see the migration documentation). Google Sign-in is built on top of our OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect infrastructure and provides a single interface for authentication and authorization flows on Web, Android and iOS.

If the migration for applications using these deprecated protocols is not completed before the deadline, the application will experience an outage in its ability to connect with Google (possibly including the ability to sign in) until the migration to a supported protocol occurs. To avoid any interruptions in service, it is critical that you work to migrate prior to the shutdown date.

If you need to migrate your integration with Google:

• Migrate from OpenID 2.0 to Google Sign-in
• Migrate from OAuth 1.0 to OAuth 2.0
• For AuthSub and ClientLogin, there is no migration support. You’ll need to start fresh with OAuth 2.0 and users need to re-consent

If you have any technical questions about migrating your application, please post questions to Stack Overflow under the tag google-oauth or google-openid.

¹ 3LO stands for 3-legged OAuth: There's an end-user that provides consent. In contrast, 2-legged (2LO) correspond to Enterprise authorization scenarios: organizational-wide policies control access. Both OAuth1 3LO and 2LO flows are deprecated.

Since we introduced add-ons for Google Docs, Sheets, and Forms last year, our developer partners have brought a world of new features to millions of users. Still, administrators for Google Apps domains (and developers!) kept asking for two things:

• Installing and pre-authorizing of an add-on for every user in a domain or group. Starting today, admins can do just that, if the add-on's developer has published the add-on for domain-wide installation. This automatically creates a listing for the add-on in the Google Apps Marketplace.


• Installing some approved add-ons while restricting users from installing others. Thanks to the feature above, a domain admin can now disable add-on installation for users, then personally install approved add-ons either for all users in the domain or for a specific organizational unit.

So, if you’ve built (or are thinking of building) a Google Docs, Sheets or Forms add-on, then be sure to make your add-on available in Google Apps Marketplace today.

Posted by Saurabh Gupta, product manager, Google Apps Script

Posted by Carol Smith, Google Open Source team

Originally posted to the Google Open Source blog

If you’re a university student looking to earn real-world experience this summer, consider writing code for a cool open source project with the Google Summer of Code program.

Students who are accepted into the program will put the skills they have learned in university to good use by working on an actual software project over the summer. Students receive a stipend and are paired with mentors to help address technical questions and concerns throughout the course of the project. With the knowledge and hands-on experience students gain during the summer, they strengthen their future employment opportunities. Best of all, more source code is created and released for the use and benefit of all.

Interested students can submit proposals on the website starting now through Friday, March 27 at 19:00 UTC. Get started by reviewing the ideas pages of the 137 open source projects in this year’s program and decide which projects you’re interested in. Because Google Summer of Code has a limited number of spots for students, writing a great project proposal is essential to being selected to the program — be sure to check out the Student Manual for advice.

For ongoing information throughout the application period and beyond, see the Google Open Source Blog, join our Summer of Code mailing lists or join us on Internet relay chat at #gsoc on Freenode.

Good luck to all the open source coders out there, and remember to submit your proposals early — you only have until March 27 to apply!