With the introduction of live wallpapers in Android 2.1, you can now enjoy richer, animated, interactive backgrounds on your home screen. A 
live wallpaper is very similar to a normal Android application and has access to all the facilities of the platform: SGL (2D drawing), OpenGL (3D drawing), GPS, accelerometers, network access, etc. The live wallpapers included on Nexus One demonstrate the use of some of these APIs to create fun and interesting user experiences. For instance, the Grass wallpaper uses the phone's location to compute sunrise and sunset times in order to display the appropriate sky.
But if you are not satisfied with the default wallpapers provided, then you can always create your own. And in case you are wondering how to do that, here are some tips.
Creating your own live wallpaper is easy, especially if you have used SurfaceView or Canvas. To learn how to create a live wallpaper, you should check out the CubeLiveWallpaper sample provided with the Android 2.1 SDK; you will find it in the directory platforms/android-2.1/samples/CubeLiveWallpaper.
A live wallpaper is very similar to a regular Android service. The only difference is the addition of a new method, onCreateEngine() whose goal is to create a WallpaperService.Engine. The engine is responsible for handling the lifecycle and the drawing of a wallpaper. The system provides you with a surface on which you can draw, just like you would with a SurfaceView. Drawing a wallpaper can be very expensive so you should optimize your code as much as possible to avoid using too much CPU, not only for battery life but also to avoid slowing down the rest of the system. That is also why the most important part of the lifecycle of a wallpaper is when it becomes invisible. When invisible, for instance because the user launched an application that covers the home screen, a wallpaper must stop all activity.
The engine can also implement several methods to interact with the user or the home application. For instance, if you want your wallpaper to scroll along when the user swipes from one home screen to another, you can use onOffsetsChanged(). To react to touch events, simply implement onTouchEvent(MotionEvent). Finally, applications can send arbitrary commands to the live wallpaper.
Currently, only the standard home application sends commands to the onCommand() method of the live wallpaper:
* android.wallpaper.tap: When the user taps an empty space on the workspace. This command is interpreted by the Nexus and Water live wallpapers to make the wallpaper react to user interaction. For instance, if you tap an empty space on the Water live wallpaper, new ripples appear under your finger.
* android.home.drop: When the user drops an icon or a widget on the workspace. This command is also interpreted by the Nexus and Water live wallpapers.
Please note that live wallpaper is an Android 2.1 feature. To ensure that only users with devices that support this feature can download your live wallpaper, remember to add the following to your manifest before releasing to Android Market:
* <uses-sdk android:minSdkVersion="7" />, which lets Android Market and the platform know that your application is using the Android 2.1 version.
* <uses-feature android:name="android.software.live_wallpaper" />, which lets the Android Market and the platform know that your application is a live wallpaper.
If you do create your own Live Wallpaper, don't forget to let me know through the comments here. And also, don't forget to subscribe to my RSS feed.
Language should not be a barrier in the path of love. And Google understands that. And that's why they have introduced the new Google Translation IME with support for 14 languages.
An IME is an "Input Method Editor" and simply refers to software that lets you type in a language of your choice. Once you download the Google Transliteration IME (did I tell you that it's free and there's no signup required), you can type a word the way it sounds using Latin characters and it will convert the word to its native script. For example, typing "hamesha" transliterates into Hindi as : हमेशा
Google Transliteration IME offers several features focused on an improved user experience, including offline support, word completion, personalized choices, easy-to-use keyboard, quick search and several cool customization options. As a user types, a suggestion menu is displayed with alternatives and word completions. For example, as you type "googl" you will see five options from you can select the correct one.
It is currently available in 14 different languages - Arabic, Bengali, Farsi (Persian), Greek, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu. This application enables users to create content or communicate in their preferred language online or offline and in any application of their choice. The Google Transliteration IME currently supports 32-bit Windows 7/Vista/XP. Google Transliteration is also available in Blogger, Gmail, Knol, Orkut and as a bookmarklet. You can also enable it on your website using the transliteration API. You can download the Google IME from here.
So don't fret about getting a girlfriend this Valentine's who speaks a different language. Cause now your love life is empowered by Google.
Google has released a new stable version of their browser, Chrome 4. With today's new stable release, all Google Chrome users on PCs can access over 1,500 new features, through our new extension system.
You would be able to find extensions for your Google Chrome in the extension gallery. Extensions on Google Chrome take only seconds to install, and can be uninstalled easily. You can view and manage the settings for your extensions by clicking on the Tools menu and selecting "Extensions". Apart from extensions, another feature which moved from beta to stable was the bookmark sync. Now you can keep your Google Chrome bookmarks synchronized and up-to-date across computers, without needing to manually recreate your bookmarks every time you switch computers. To read more on bookmark sync, check out this handy guide.
Google has integrated a number of new HTML5 APIs in this stable release, including LocalStorage, Database API, WebSockets, and more. To take a look into these features, read on in the Chromium Blog.
If you're on a PC and haven't tried Google Chrome yet, you can download Google Chrome and give all these new features a test drive. And here's a video to walk you through to installing an extension and some more useful things:
The Google Android team is going on a World Tour where they'll be delivering an update on the state of the Android platform — including a look at the latest Android 
hardware. You would be able to meet like-minded Android app developers, play with the latest Android devices, test your apps, and ask Android team members any questions you might have.
The places that the Android team would visit includes cities in Europe, North America, and Asia. Here's the line-up of Android Developer Lab locations for February and March 2010:
North America
* Austin, Texas – Feb 4
* Seattle, Washington – Feb 8
* Waterloo, Ontario, Canada – Feb 8
* Washington, D.C. – Feb 9
* Mountain View, California – Feb 10
* Cambridge, Massachusetts – Feb 11
* New York, New York – Feb 12
Europe
* London, UK – Feb 2
* Paris, France – Feb 8
* Berlin, Germany – Feb 10
* Zurich, Switzerland – Feb 13
* Madrid, Spain – Feb 13
Asia
* Singapore – Feb 28
* Taipei, Taiwan – March 3
* Hong Kong – March 4
If you want to attend, you'll need to request a spot by February 1st. You can request a spot by clicking here. Space is limited, so please wait for an email to confirm that you have a spot in the lab.
The Android Team are also going to stop by and speak at the following local Android user groups:
* Stockholm, Sweden – Feb 4
* London, UK – Feb 5
* Chicago, Illinois, USA – Feb 6
So don't wait and request your spot fast!
According to Blogger, FTP remains a significant drain on their ability to improve Blogger. And only .5% of active blogs are published via FTP — yet the percentage of engineering resources devoted to support FTP vastly exceeds that. On top of that, critical infrastructure that the FTP support relies on at Google will soon become unavailable, which means that they would have to completely rewrite the code that handles the FTP processing. So they have decided that they will no longer support FTP publishing in Blogger after March 26, 2010.
Although Blogger has provided a number of alternatives for the FTP bloggers to make this transition as seamless as possible.
They are building a migration tool that would help users to migrate from their current URL to a Blogger-managed URL (either a Custom Domain or a Blogspot URL) that will be available to all users in the week of February 22. This tool will handle redirecting traffic from the old URL to the new URL, and will handle the vast majority of situations. They would also provide a dedicated blog and help documentation to provide as much information as possible to help guide users through the migration off of FTP. Moreover, Blogger team members will also be available to answer questions on the forum, comments on the blog, and in a few scheduled conference calls once the tool is released.
So all the FTP users, start packing your bags and prepare to head over to your new home. And if you need any help you can always contact me.
Today with a long post on the Google Blog, David Drummond (SVP, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer) announced that it would cease to censor the search results on Google.cn, even if it means pulling out of China entirely.
In his post, David described the "highly sophisticated and targeted attack" that occurred last month, which not only target Google but a fleet of 20 other companies. These companies are from a wide range of businesses including the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors.
Further investigations by Google revealed that these attacks were made with the primary objective of accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Fortunately, the attackers did not achieve this goal.
They also found out that the accounts of dozens of U.S.-, China- and Europe-based Gmail users who are advocates of human rights in China appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties. These accounts have not been accessed through any security breach at Google, but most likely via phishing scams or malware placed on the users' computers.
Although Google does not mention this explicitly on their Blog but implications are that the Chinese government had something to do with these attacks.
Google have already started to use the information gained from this attack to increase the security of Google and it's users by making the necessary infrastructure and architectural improvements.
And because of these attacks, Google have started to rethink about continuing their presence in China. The Chinese government and Google have fought over censorship before, but currently the search engine does block certain results (such as images of the Tiananmen Square massacre).
It's now quite clear that Google would no longer comply with China’s demands any longer. Here's what David had to say about this :
These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered--combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web--have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.
Over the next couple of weeks, Google is rolling out the ability for it's Google Docs users the ability to upload, store and organize any type of file in Google Docs. With this change, you'll be able to upload and access your files from any computer, all you need is an Internet connection.
Instead of emailing files to yourself, which is particularly difficult with large files, you can upload to Google Docs any file up to 250 MB. You'll have 1 GB of free storage for files you don't convert into one of the Google Docs formats (i.e. Google documents, spreadsheets, and presentations), and if you need more space, you can buy additional storage for $0.25 per GB per year. This makes it easy to backup more of your key files online, from large graphics and raw photos to unedited home videos taken on your smartphone. You might even be able to replace the USB drive you reserved for those files that are too big to send over email.
Moreover with shared folders, you can store, organize, and collaborate on files more easily using Google Docs. For example, if you are in a club or PTA working on large graphic files for posters or a newsletter, you can upload them to a shared folder for collaborators to view, download, and print.
You can also search for document files you've uploaded or that have been shared with you just like you do with your Google documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and PDFs. And you'll be able to view many common document file types with the Google Docs viewer.
To learn how businesses can take advantage of this new functionality, check out the post on the Enterprise Blog.
Google has released Android 2.1 SDK so that the developers can take advantage of it's new features. Android 2.1 is a minor platform release deployable to Android-powered handsets starting in January 2010. This release includes new API changes and bug fixes. For information on changes, see the Framework API section.
For developers, the Android 2.1 platform is available as a downloadable component for the Android SDK. The downloadable platform includes a fully compliant Android library and system image, as well as a set of emulator skins, sample applications, and more. The downloadable platform includes no external libraries.
To get started developing or testing against the Android 2.1 platform, use the Android SDK and AVD Manager tool to download the platform into your Android SDK. For more information, see Adding SDK Components.
The Android 2.1 component is available for download through the SDK Manager.
In addition to the new SDK, a new USB driver that supports Nexus One is also available today through the SDK Manager. The USB driver page contains more information. You can also read the Android 2.1 release notes for more details.
No, this is not a new Google product, so you haven't missed anything. At the beginning of the year the Google Search Quality team has announced that anyone can get their site's checked for quality and best practices by the Google team free of cost! The team would actually go through your site and offer constructive advice on accessibility and improvements that can lead to better visibility for your website in Google's search results.
To submit your site at Google Site Clinic, click here and fill in all the information requested. Just a note though, by submitting your site you agree to the use of your website as an example in their future blog posts under the Google Site Clinic banner.
Also, here are a few important guidelines that you need to follow:
1) To participate, your site must be registered on the Google Webmaster tools. This is to ensure that the submitter is the owner of the site and thus they have the owner's permission to use the site for Google Site Clinic. If you don't have a webmaster tools account yet, it's pretty simple to obtain. You can get one here.
2) Your website should meet the Google quality guidelines. This is because they will be using the same guidelines as criteria to select the websites for analysis. You can review the webmaster guidelines for any clarification.
The Site Clinic would be accepting submissions till the 20th of Jan, 2010. To know more you can click here.
Please Note: Not all sites will make it to their analysis list. From those that do, a few representative websites will be chosen as examples for the follow-up posts to share best practices.
Is Google loosing ground. Well, if it didn't earlier then it sure would now after the launch of Nexus One. Nexus One is the most awaited disappointment from the stable of Google Inc.
To start with, let me first tell you what Nexus One is. In case you are from Mars or were living under the rock since the beginning of the Earth, Nexus One is a phone launched by Google. But even though the name Google is associated with it, I really would not like to use it until the next 3 upgrades. Why? Here's why.
1. Are you on the Google "cloud"? If "no" then you would find it hard to synchronize Nexus One with you laptop or PC.
2. It's on T-Mobile. Doesn't that say it all? I mean C'mon, everyone knows that if there is any less well-liked than AT&T, it's T-Mobile. Remember, they even suffered a huge data loss late last year. Although Google did promise to put it up on the Verizon network, till then would you really like to use T-Mobile?
3. Nexus One does not have multi touch capabilities, despite support for the feature in Google's Android 2.0 mobile operating system.
4. It would be bad for Android.
5. It's fast, but not that fast. And not as fast as your iPhone for sure. So people who were using iPhone would keep using them. So it sure is not a iPhone killer!
So other than the fact that Nexus One is pretty "slim" and runs on an open OS, Android Mobile Technology Platform 2.1 (Eclair), I don't find anything fancy with it that I would suggest it to my readers. Not that it would put eggs on the face of Google Inc. but it sure would not get a good start.
Google has finally introduced Label Clouds on Blogger. Actually it's two features that they introduced yesterday, Label Cloud being one of them, Selected Labels being the other one. It was posted on Blogger Buzz by Wiktor Gworek, who is a Software Engineer with Google, who also posted a seemingly gibberish post, sans title, earlier on Blogger Buzz itself!
Now about the new features, most of us voted for them when Google asked us for our wishlist in April. As we all know, Google listens and so they did. Using these features is pretty simple, go over to the Label Gadget and enable them, that's all! Previously, the Label Gadget used to show the labels as a bulletted list. The Label Cloud was a third-party code which was really a pain to implement for most of us. But once enabled, the new Label Cloud feature of Blogger displays the labels as a cloud with the most popular labels appearing in bigger font than the less popular labels. Moreover, if you have been blogging for a while you must have added some labels that you don't use anymore and would not like your readers to see. With the new Selected Labels feature you can display only the labels of your choice. So no more fussing with the codes, now you can get your Label Cloud up and running in no time.
These features were a gift from Google on Blogger's 10th Birthday. Quite a gift, huh! Happy Birthday Blogger.
Microsoft was always good in finding new names for their old piece of code. Wish only they would have spent an equal time improving it. No, not the name, the code I mean.
Take Bing for example. Yes, Microsoft Live Search is now Bing and it has already received quite a buzz. Now the first thing I tried to search in Bing (India) was "hot indian girls". And it never came up with a result. Does that mean that there are no hot girls in India. HELL NO! Ladies please don't get offended. Bing just wants to play the spoil sport and never display any results to Indians that may return explicit content. So this is what I got instead of my desired search result.
So I tried to find out how to turn off the Safe Search setting. Surprisingly, there is no such setting under Preferences! So I tried the Help pages where more surprise was waiting for me. Bing is still using Live's search page! What was the people in Microsoft thinking when they made Bing live with the Help pages from Live Search?
Anyways, from the Help pages I found out how to turn off the Safe Search setting. But for that one needs to go to the http://search.live.com page which redirects the user to the Bing home page, and we are back to square one. But since this was an issue with Bing (India) only where Bing deprived only Indians from searching porn easily, I thought about trying out some more non-perverted searches. So I search for Bing in both Google and Bing itself. Here too Bing is an epic fail. Google returned 23,100,000 results whereas Bing returned a mere 3,060,000 results. And even out of those 3,060,000 results, the CNet article for Bing was missing. So in a way Bing showed less relevant search results.
I would say that Bing was released in a hurry. So what we are seeing is a half-cooked search engine. Chances of Bing being a Google killer? Not in the near future.
Last Saturday Bloglines was down for a long time. The Bloglines official, Eric Engleman said that the data center that Bloglines is currently housed in had some hardware issues.
My day begins with reading somewhere around 500 feeds, it helps me to remain updated about the latest happenings in the world of technology and social media. So when I could not access any of my feeds the whole day, I felt quite disturbed. And it was then that I realized, the service which I had adored for so long had multiple flaws in it.
First, there is no official Twitter account for Bloglines. Although there is an unofficial one, but it is maintained by someone who is not a current employee neither a former employee of Bloglines. So @bloglines was as clueless to the outage as others were.
Second, there is no official Bloglines blog. There is something called Bloglines news, but it too was of little help since the whole Bloglines site was down including the Bloglines news page.
Moreover, Bloglines does not have a feed either so that the Bloglines officials could have conveyed the news about the downtime through that. Imagine a service for reading feeds that does not have a feed of it's own!
So I started searching for alternatives for Bloglines and I discovered these two great articles.
The State of Online FeedReaders (by @techcrunch)
Which FeedReader is Best? (by @ProBlogger)
Google Reader was the obvious next best option for me. And since I already had all my feeds pretty well organized with Bloglines, I simply exported my Bloglines feeds to Google Reader as an OPML file. OPML is an XML format, which is used to transfer feeds between feed readers without having to worry about any compatibility issues.
Since I transferred the feeds using OPML, all the folder structure from Bloglines was intact in Google Reader, which meant less work for me. And with Google Reader, you can even add tags to the feeds which is an added advantage. You can make some or all of your feeds private, or you can choose to make them public and share with your friends who use Google Reader. You can also star certain items for quick access. Once set up, the Google Readers seems pretty well responsive and low on system resources. And it looked really easy to use for those who are new to feed readers.
I feel that Bloglines should become more approachable to it's users. It's time they should think about having an official Twitter account through which they can remain in touch with their users. Honestly, it was a surprise that they haven't done that already. Seems they are living under the rock in this advanced age of social media.
[P.S. You can also use the Google Reader widget to display your favorite stories on your blog.]
Using Google Apps on your BlackBerry was not really an easy job. But things are about to change soon as yesterday Google has announced the upcoming release of the Google Apps Connector for BlackBerry Enterprise Server.
The Google Apps Connector for BlackBerry Enterprise Server would allow Blackberry Smartphone users to access their Gmail and other Google applications using the Blackberry applications they already have. For instance, users can instantly receive Gmail messages within the built-in email client on their Blackberry smartphones. And they can continue to use the same shortcuts to manage their BlackBerry messages.
New events recorded in Google Calendar would be immediately updated on the BlackBerry Calendar, keeping both calendars in sync. Users can also access the email addresses and phone numbers of their co-workers using a company wide Global Address List. Both personal and business contacts saved on Google Apps are automatically synchronized over the air to users' BlackBerry smartphones and integrated into the native Blackberry smartphone applications. Users would also be able to synchronize BlackBerry folders with labels in Gmail, search for email addresses and phone numbers of other users on your company domain etc.
And the good news for the IT administrators is that this transition is seamless. Admins are given full control of the solution and can continue to manage BlackBerry smartphones using BlackBerry Enterprise Server. Google Apps Connector installs on BlackBerry Enterprise Server, connecting it to the Google Apps cloud and synchronizing email, calendar and contacts for all BlackBerry smartphone users.
The system requirement for the Google Apps Connector for BlackBerry Enterprise Server requires Windows 2003 Server SP2 (approximately 1GB of disk space per GAC for BES user) and BlackBerry Enterprise Server 4.1 Service Pack 6 Maintenance Release 4. You can download the datasheet from here.
Currently in it's Beta testing phase, the Google Apps Connector for BlackBerry Enterprise Server would be released this July, and it would be available free of charge to all Premier and Education Edition customers.
Google has finally separated it's contact manager from Gmail and other Google apps, and made it into a separate standalone application.
On May 1st, Debbie Leight (Google Apps Marketing Manager) announced that the Google Contact Ma
nager is not available as a separate standalone service. So in order to access your contacts, you need not be logged into your Gmail account. Just as with the Gmail contact manager, this standalone version would let you create groups, add multiple email, phone, or home addresses and even adjust chat preferences for your contacts. You can import your contacts from other sources or export the ones you have currently.
The Google Contact Manager can be accessed from here. This service is also available for Google Apps users. To access their Contact Manager, Google Apps users will need this longer address: http://www.google.com/contacts/a/example.com (replace "example.com" with the domain name you use). However, before accessing your contacts this way, your administrator will have to enable this functionality within the control panel by clicking on the "add more services" link, finding the "Contacts" option and clicking the "add it now" button.
I think this is a great feature, which would allow you to access your data more easily, where you would not have to go through the clutter of emails just to access a single contact. It would also help you to organize your contacts easily.
Since the word leaked out a few weeks back about Wolfram|Alpha, it has taken quite a hype. In many camps, it's being dubbed as the next Google killer. But would it really live upto it's hype? Let's first see what Wolfram|Alpha actually is before we start drawing conclusions.
Created using Mathematica, Wolfram|Alpha is not a conventional search engine. Rather, it's a computational knowledge engine. Long story cut short, it is a place to look up for facts, facts in the field of which would be backed up with analytics and stats, and it's ability to do sophisticated computations to achieve these. Why do we need something that has computational power? Because computation is what turns generic information into specific answers. According to Stephen Wolfram, the creator of Wolfram|Alpha, "It tries to tell us useful information based on what it can compute", he also said that "The goal is to provide expert level access to anyone at anytime."
For example, if you give Wolfram|Alpha a mathematical formula, a polynomial say, or something involving sines and cosines, it will give you back a number of useful results: a graph of the function, a list of its zeros, factored and expanded forms, and more. And it will give you the derivative and integral of the function you entered. Now, computing the derivative of an arbitrary function is a straightforward process, but computing integrals can be among the most difficult problems in mathematics.
Larry Dignan of Between The Lines said, "The Wolfram|Alpha search engine seemed slow, according to Wolfram. What will happen when the public starts poking around on it?." Frederic Lardinois of Read Write Web, who had participated in a one hour web demo by Stephen Wolfram, says that Wolfram|Alpha would be available in 2 flavors. A free web version, and a paid version, which would allow users to download and upload data to Alpha. It would also allow users to embed not just a Wolfram|Alpha search box on their own pages, but they will also be able to embed results and a custom Alpha portal on their own sites. Users will also be able to receive email alerts when a result changes.
A year or so back, Cuil was termed as the next Google killer. Today how many of us swear by Cuil? I doubt it would be a large number. So how will Wolfram|Alpha do? With the academic types it would probably be like a gift of God. But what about the mainstream internet searchers? How many of them would be interested in these type of search results? Would Wolfram|Alpha click with them? I doubt.
And the question that remains in the heart of millions of mainstream internet searchers, would it be able to search for porn? Probably no, and even if it did, it would present lots of stats with it. Now who needs porn with stats!
And just in case you want to join the Wolfram Alpha hype, here's the Wolfram|Alpha blog and their Facebook group. You can also follow them on Twitter here.
After introducing vanity URLs for your Google profiles and including them in Google Search results, Google has gone one step further in promoting Google profiles. Google is giving away business cards, all for FREE.
Google has tied up with iPrint.com, and is giving away 10,000 sets of 25 business cards to all those who owns a Google Profile. And all this for free. If you go to your Google profile, you would be able to see this deal on a huge link right at the top of the page. It says, "New! Order profile business cards to tell your friends about your profile." When you click on the link, you would be taken to the ordering page.
The cards are pretty simple, with a big Google logo on a white background. It has a search box in the middle with your real name in it, and below it your vanity URL is displayed. To avail of these cards you need to sign up with iPrint.com. The only glitch is that these cards are available to be shipped only in the continental U.S.
It even has a "I'm feeling lucky" button on it. But as MG Siegler points out, sadly it doesn’t have a watermark.
Okay, hope you are ready for this. Google is hiring goats. Recession maybe, of course everyone has to lower their standards sometimes. But good news is, they are not being employed as developers, so you still have a chance in Google.
According to Dan Hoffman, Director Real Estate and Workplace Services, Google has hired about 200 goats to mow their fields. And so, being the green company they are, they resorted to goats from California Grazing to do the job instead of a noisy, air polluting, gasoline guzzling automatic mower.
Hope the goats won't complain of the grass being greener on the other side.
