Last week I came across the new Google Font API and Google Font Directory. They are both in beta but that is nothing unusual for something from Google. The Google Font Directory provides high-quality web fonts that you can include in your pages using the Google Font API. Web fonts, enabled by the CSS3 @font-face standard, are hosted in the cloud and sent to browsers as needed. A total of 18 royalty free fonts were released. Woo Hoo! More web fonts!
I was using Google the other day (surprise) and noticed something was different but I couldn’t put my finger on it. I went to their blog and see that they have made a few subtle changes.
First off, the Google logo has been updated to be brighter and simpler and a little more up to date in my humble opinion. There is still a drop shadow but it is much more subtle. The letters still have dimension but are more refined with subdued shadows and hi-lites. They got rid of the ™, too. Here’s an image comparing the old logo (top) and the new logo (bottom):
The footer on the search results page no longer has a light blue bar and the links now have no underlines. The letters that spell Goooooooogle are also bigger and brighter. Here’s the old footer (top) compared with the new (bottom):
The “left-hand nav” of search tools has also been updated with icons and a bit of reorganization.
You can check out some of the prototypes that were tried before settling on the designs above by clicking the links below that I pulled from their blog page:
In a phenomenon bringing both the craft brewing and geek world together (once again), Portland, Oregon’s own Hopworks Brewery has released a special seasonal beer called Gigabit IPA. This, in an effort to help the City of Portland convince Google to select our city for one of the rollout locations for their upcoming gigabit fiber network. Go Portland!
The description of the beer, according to Hopworks, “This fresh & edgy IPA honors Portland’s new gigabit network project to pioneer a connected future with Google fiber-to-the-home. Embrace the bandwidth with a massive NW hop aroma, with rich citrus and pine accents aggressively balanced with clear malt caramel flavor, and a deep, clean, satisfying finish.”
Google will announce their target communities by the end of 2010. The gigabit plans will deliver Internet speeds more than 100 times faster than what most Americans have access to today with 1 gigabit per second, fiber-to-the-home connections.
Personally, I have been eagerly awaiting the possible arrival of gigabit fiber from Google in Portland, but now we can all quench our thirst in anticipation with this delicious craft brew from Hopworks. End result: WIN.
Portland Hearts Google – read more & keep updated
Five teams from around the world have been selected as finalists from more than 100 entrants in Google’s Model Your Town Competition. Now, it’s up to you to vote for the best entry.
The competition was announced in December 2009 as a way for citizens to show pride in their hometowns by creating detailed 3D models of their communities. The contest also served as a cheap way to add more 3D content to Google Earth (
) () 3D modeling tools: SketchUp (a 2006 acquisition) and Building Maker (a Google product launched in fall 2009). and as a nice platform for showcasing the capabilities of two Google
Teams in Barranco, Lima, Peru; Braunschweig, Niedersachsen, Germany; Donostia-San Sebastián, Gipuzkoa, Spain; Dursley, Gloucestershire, United Kingdom; and West Palm Beach, Florida, United States have all made the cut. It’s interesting to note that the Spanish team is the only entrant with multiple contributing members; every other town modeled was a solo project.
Check out this video of the finalists here:
Thanks to Mashable for the info!
Google, Intel and Sony are collaborating on a new platform currently called “Google TV”. This would likely lead to the development of set-top boxes and integrated hardware in future consumer screens to utilize the platform. Content focus would be to merge social applications, digital television, and local digital files. Additionally, the current plan is to base the platform on the Android operating system, allowing developers to quickly produce another set of open source applications for users of Google TV.
How does this measure up? A win for Sony, being a leader in entertainment technology. Intel is getting involved because the technology will be run on their Atom chips. And Google? They want to be able to leverage their advertising to take over consumer eyes sitting on their couch at home.
Personally, I believe they should drop the “TV” moniker to use a more relevant current name, like “Google Screen”. Some people might get the idea that it is specific to television, and wouldn’t provide a complete media service.
This may be another set-top box, similar to Boxee’s beautiful set-top they recently released. Apple TV? Assume this will be far superior. Time to start developing Android apps which will run on your home theater system? Yes, please.
I’d like to take a few minutes and talk about one thing that we all use each and every day. The Internet. Whether or not you log on every day, you are surrounded by it. Even if you don’t sit down at your computer or pull out your 3G phone to log on, the Internet has changed the way our world communicates. It’s both a blessing and a curse (although, in my opinion, it’s a much larger blessing). Because the Internet is the first medium to bring you media content to your house without any platform to control it, you have to control it. It’s a double edged sword.
Google’s recent release of Buzz has been surrounded by hype and questions. Only a couple days after its release, it remains to be seen if this new social networking tool will actually take off. Could it really become one of the social networking elite, or fall flat like Wave?
What is Buzz all about?
Currently, it shares a spot somewhere between Twitter and Facebook. It can be open to the public like Twitter, or updates can be private like Facebook. The API is open to developers in the same way Twitter is, but access is limited to those who own a Google account (similar to Facebook). You can send out short text updates to your followers, but it also has built-in media sharing capabilities such as: Twitter, Flickr, Blogger, Google Reader, Picasa, and YouTube. It only takes one click to tie in each service, as most of those services already belong to Google. You can have Buzz send out an update whenever you post to any of these services, or you can choose not to share. And just like Twitter and Facebook, Buzz is available on your phone to share from anywhere you happen to be. (more…)
When using JavaScript libraries to perform a function on a public-facing web site, the traditional way of referencing your library is using something like this:
<script src="/js/jQuery.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
Here, we are loading a jQuery library in to the HTML header for future use on the web page. This means each time you want to use the jQuery library (or any other JavaScript library) on your new web site, you must download the latest version, upload it to your server, and then reference it here. This technique works well enough, but lets explore a better way to perform this same library load. We’ll do it in a way which will help us with version control, decreased latency, and better caching. How? By utilizing a CDN (content delivery network).
Below is an example on how to go about using the Google AJAX Libraries CDN, using jQuery as the library to load. (more…)
The Internet is full of variables. As web developers and web designers, we constantly wrestle with web user variables. Things like: browser types, browser versions, platforms, Flash, JavaScript, cookies, web-safe colors, connection speed, visual impairments, and fonts.
Our goal is to find the most common settings, and to deliver web sites which match settings with a majority of users viewing the sites. Also, we need to mitigate any problems which might arise if the user doesn’t have their environment settings similar to the development team’s in-house settings. Let’s face it, not everybody uses Firefox or Chrome.
(more…)
Over the weekend I was researching some new web technologies and stumbled across a new plug-in for Internet Explorer (IE). It’s called Google Chrome Frame, and it solves some big problems in the current development cycle for web apps.
Many people don’t know this, but a lot of time is devoted entirely to making IE (especially older versions) behave properly with W3C standard based browsers (Mozilla Firefox, Safari, Google Chrome, Opera, etc.). This makes developing for the web more complex than it needs to be because most browsers function as you would expect them to. Unfortunately, IE is used by most users across the planet, so the fact that it isn’t based on current standards and behaves oddly isn’t something that we developers can ignore. This is where Google-Chrome-Frame comes to the rescue.
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|||
Categories |
Contact |
Interact |
Archive |
Zoom Creates Blogs is proudly powered by WordPress, Entries (RSS) and Comments (RSS).
|
 |
||
