Google I/O session videos posted with slides

As I said earlier, Quite a few presentations from Google I/O have been posted for your viewing pleasure. I'll be glued to these this weekend while I'm on call.

Topics include
Ajax
KML
Sketchup
Android
OpenSocial
Appengine
Data APIs
Theory Talks
Youtube
Gears
Mashups
Maps
and more!

October Speedlinking

I haven't been able to post as often or as in depth as I'd like to have this past month. I chalk it up mostly to work, we all love 12 hour days right? But now that sign-off has passed and our last release of 2007 is calmly approaching (its on Friday), things have settled down a bit. Below are some great links from October, most of which I wanted to mention at some point and haven't gotten a chance to until now. Enjoy.

• The JavaScript Library for Google Calendar was released. This allows for authenticated, cross domain access. Hopefully Picasa Web will follow suit.
  
  
• GWT goes to the iPhone
  
  
• The Python Client Library came out with version 1.0.8
  
  
• The Digg Oracle demonstrates Gears' Worker Pool
  
  
• Google's Stock broke $600. It is now well over $700
  
  
• Orkut ramps up for a US push
  
  
• Vortex combines the know-how of Dojo and Gears
  
  
• LabeledMarker v1.1 in Google Maps comes out with Marker and Label toggling
  
  
• Google Reader comes out with Subscriber stats. Read about the controversy here. Google responds here
  
  
• Google Maps Goes Social
  
  
• The AJAX Search API gives direct access to YouTube Channels
  
  
• Blogger GData JavaScript client library released with offline Blogger client example
  
  
• Google Code Search goes to SiteMaps
  
  
• The Ajax API gets Dynamic Feed Control
  
  
• You can now play Youtube videos in Google Earth
  
  
• Summer of code wrapped up with Graduation
  
  
• Google Finance adds new Gadgets and an API
  
  
• YouTubes player becomes Customizable
  
  
• A Greasemonkey script lets you have nested folders in Gmail
  
  
• Blogger adds Comment Notification
  
  
• Google cracks down on pages selling PageRank links
  
  
• Google contributes to MySQL
  
  
• Google Mac updates Leopard
  
  
• Gmail enables IMAP
  
  
• Google Maps gets Clickable Polygons
  
  
• There is now a wizard for adding Google Gadgets to your blog
  
  
• Webmaster central fixes the Cross Domain Sitemap errors
  
  
• Google maps adds Flash Content into KLM
  
  
• Google Notebook adds labels and bookmarks
  
  
• Blog Search is now included in Google History
  
  
• A cheap "Google PC" is on the market
  
  
• A new Photo Picker for Gmail and Orkut pulls from Picasa
  
  
• GTalk may soon be able to connect to other networks like AIM and Yahoo! Talk
  
  
• The new version of Gmail comes out
  
  
• Google Code gets a facelift
  
  
• Webmaster Tools gets Geographic Targeting
  
  
• The Google Gadget Directory gets a facelift
  
  
• Microsoft is going to release the Microsoft Sync Framework to compete with Gears
  
  
• Picasa Web gets opened. (Flikr can transfer a picasa album to itself)
  
  
• Webmasters can now provide feedback on sitelinks
  
  
• Blog.gears comes out
  
  
• Mapplets gets a documentation and example update
  
  
• New articles are posted for KML
  
  
• The Ajax slideshow gets a full Control Panel
  
  
• Map of the Dead!! Google Maps overlay shooting game!

Top Secret Picasa Features

Google Photos Blog: Lesser-known (and secret) Picasa features

Most people are familiar with Picasa's usual features; Editing, organizing, uploading, printing, etc, but Mike Herf, the Picasa Engineering manager is going to take us on a tour on some of the "easter egg-ish" features. He's going to be posting hidden features and tips on Wednesdays over at the Google Photos blog so check it out.

The first up is search. While you might be familiar with searching for a filename, or a directory you know you put the photo in but can't find, you might not be aware that you can also put in dates, camera models, flash (for if one was used), what type of lens was used, or even the iso settings. All of these are indexed by Picasa and will be returned in a search. Another fun search term is color:red or color:gray. Try is out ;) The last hidden search feature is under Tools->Experimental->Show Duplicate files and Picasa will list all the files that show up more then once on your hard drive, pretty nifty for cleaning space.

For more features on Wednesdays, subscribe to the photo blog.

Picasa gets a blog!

Google Photos Blog: Ready for our close-up

The Picasa team has gotten a blog in the form of the Google Photos Blog. I think this brings the number of Google blogs to 75 (including the international blogs). On the photo blog they will be posting feature updates to Picasa, photography tips, and the team's favorite photo albums.

In addition to working on Picasa and the Web albums features, they are also in charge of hosting blogger's photo upload feature, which is powered by Picasa web, developing Orkut's photo picker, and creating Mapplets for browsing geotagged photos inside of Google Maps.

Subscribe to their feed for updates.

Google Mashup Editor Blog: New Tutorial: Using Picasa Web Album Feeds in GME

The guys over on the Mashup team have posted a new tutorial on how to use the Google Mashup Editor to mash Picasa Web Albums with a Google Map. The example is here. I started working on my own but I haven't really played with the GME before. Hopefully I'll have that tomorrow.

Picasa Web Api updates

Google Data Api's posted a few updates today, a few of which I've really been looking forward to; Community Search, Retrieving a user's recently uploaded photos, Retrieving recently added comments for a particular user, Searching a user's photos, Filtering by tag, Uploading non-JPEG photos, Downloading the original photo.

(my fav) Downloading the original photo: You can now download the original photo, including all EXIF data. This is accomplished by retrieving the feed with the imgmax=d query parameter and value This will return a feed where the media:content elements reference the original downloadable image.

It's nice not having to use a backdoor for this anymore