So this dude wrote an app for his android phone that goes out and grabs arrival times for nearby bus stops. Which is cool. But then it takes results and communicates them via bluetooth to his watch, which displays the info on the face. So awesome.
Browsing Posts in Google
Android 2.0 is now available from Google. This puts to bed concerns about Google not releasing the sdk or perhaps being in some kind of exclusivity deal with Verizon around 2.0. The release notes give a nice overview of what is there. Those who already have the SDK can grab the updated tools as SDK components, everyone else will pick up everything when downloading the new SDK.
I have no idea when Google first released Google Calendar Sync or why I never noticed it before, but I’m really liking it. The install was painless and worked well. My google calendar is much more user friendly than my Outlook calendar. The simplicity of Google calendar really makes it obvious how bad the calendar functionality is in outlook.
I have Ingrid’s calendar and mine shared with one another, and set up syncing for her today as well. Now it is much easier for each of us to see what is going on with the other. I’ve also got sports schedules, holidays and weather stuff in my google calendar, none of which I have in outlook.
A Google blog post yesterday announces their new Google Translator Toolkit. The blog post does a great job of explaining how it works – with a very nice diagram and video thrown in. But if you want a little more info to decide if it is worth the jump or not, here is a little cut and paste from the post.
At Google, we consider translation a key part of making information universally accessible to everyone around the world. While we think Google Translate, our automatic translation system, is pretty neat, sometimes machine translation could use a human touch. Yesterday, we launched Google Translator Toolkit, a powerful but easy-to-use editor that enables translators to bring that human touch to machine translation.
For example, if an Arabic-speaking reader wants to translate a Wikipedia™ article into Arabic, she loads the article into Translator Toolkit, corrects the automatic translation, and clicks publish. By using Translator Toolkit’s bag of tools — translation search, bilingual dictionaries, and ratings, she translates and publishes the article faster and better into Arabic. The Translator Toolkit is integrated with Wikipedia, making it easy to publish translated articles. Best of all, our automatic translation system “learns” from her corrections, creating a virtuous cycle that can help translate content into 47 languages, or over 98% of the world’s Internet population.
Nod to TechCrunch
Google has announced availability of the Android Scripting Environment(ASE). The ASE brings scripting languages to Android by allowing you to edit and execute scripts and interactive interpreters directly on the Android device. Scripts can be run interactively in a terminal, started as a long running service, or started via Locale. Python, Lua and BeanShell are currently supported, with plans to add Ruby and JavaScript support, as well.
Gmail now has themes. It isn’t that big a deal but I think that they do make the product more pleasant to use. It’s also handy for me as I use multiple accounts. I’ve set each to a different theme, and it just makes it that much easier to remember which one I’m using.
Some change throughout the day and ask for location so that the changes match up with local time. There look to be 31 themes available at this point. I’ll throw some screen shots below the jump – click for larger. continue reading…
I was just scoping out this piece on new WordPress 2.6 features and while it may only be exciting to the folks using WordPress, there was one part that jumped out at me as very cool. It was this, “WordPress 2.6 makes use of Google Gears when available to speedup and cache static files that are loaded every time you visit your WordPress admin panel.”
I was pretty excited when I found out about Gears. I downloaded all the example code and documentation immediately. There are some cool possibilities there I think, and it is just too awesome that I’m not the only one who sees that. And here we have an example where it is not only seen as a possibility but will be made a reality.
So anyway – just thought I’d share my late night excitement over blogging with gears! Coming soon to a WordPress install near you.
