Google took to the Official Google Enterprise Blog today to share that the U.S. Coast Guard Academy is the first service academy to adopt the Google Apps platform. The 1,100 cadets at the academy started transitioning to Google Apps in January for all of their email, collaboration, and course assignments. They’ve even taken advantage of video chat features to collaborate and communicate with friends and family back home.
Google described out one group of cadets collaborated using a number of Google services to create a Google Site for their mini gas turbine engine project:
The cadets are also using these tools to improve collaboration on team projects. One group of four cadets created a Google Site for their capstone project designing a mini gas turbine engine. They could simultaneously edit spreadsheets, use video chat to share ideas, and even work together with students and professors from other universities to gather input. The cadets are a driving force of change across the campus. Today, nearly half the faculty and staff have converted to Google Apps and that number continues to climb.
The U.S. Coast Guard Academy is the one of the oldest federal service academies having been founded in the late 1880′s with a small campus in Connecticut. No word on whether Google+, which is now also available to Google Apps users, has also been made available to cadets. Read more
Google on Monday talked about a subtle yet important design change that allows for faster navigation in the Gmail web interface. The company wanted to solve a problem where scrolling the message list in your browser also scrolled the lefthand navigation pane, making it cumbersome to effectively comb through a large message list and at the same time access labels, the chat interface and other gadgets placed in the leftmost column.
They played with two possible solutions (see the above image) calling for both the floating label sections that expands when you are mousing over the Inbox label and the fixed design before settling on a solution combining the two (below). As explained in a blog post:
The final design combines aspects of both approaches. It is a ducking accordion design with only two sections. The bottom section has two tabs, one for chat and one for gadgets, with room to add more tabs in the future. The upper section, which contains labels, expands to show all of the visible labels when you mouse over it. This allows you to see chat contacts but still give quick access to the labels. Best of all, you can easily adjust the balance between labels and chat to fit your own personal preference by dragging the divider between the sections up and down.
They also agonized over the timing and triggering behavior of the expanding labels section in order to minimize accidental triggering. The sections expand only upon moving your mouse below the Inbox label and keeping it there for a moment. Read more
Google chairman Eric Schmidt is set to face the European competition commission this week to address potential antirust issues concerning their dominant position in the search business, according to a report fromThe Guardian. The meeting will be held by the commission’s antitrust chief, Joaquin Almunia, following initial talks held in January stemming from complaints by several search companies including Microsoft’s own Ciao.
Almunia is expected to present Google with a 400-page “statement of objections” that documents the commission’s research regarding “allegations that Google Inc has abused a dominant position in online search, in violation of European Union rules”.
The antitrust investigation started as far back as November 30, 2010, after claims from several search related companies including 1PlusV, Euro-Cities, and German organizations representing publishers filed complaints. The complaints themselves range from Google displaying there own services in search results to unfairly using content from publishers.
If Google is found guilty of abusing its dominant position in the market they could face fines up to 10% of the company’s annual turnover in Europe, or be forced to make changes to the way it runs its search business in the region. While some reported that during initial negotiations in January Almunia told Schmidt he would have a chance to offer up a solution, Almunia had this to say late last week about the upcoming meeting: Read more
Mark Zuckerberg gives us a look into what he really thinks about Google+ in a small clip from this one-hour special on Facebook’s creator aired by the BBC (via TNW). When asked if Google+ is a threat or if he ‘takes it seriously’, Zuckerberg responded (skip to 54:32):
Yeah Google’s a great company, and I think we want to look at and learn from everything that they do. But at the same time, people have shared a lot on Facebook and have already told a lot of their life story on Facebook. And we think that we have by far better tools for doing that.
Fans of Apple’s mobile devices such as the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad often wonder why can’t scrolling on Android phones and tablets be jerk-free as on iOS devices. It’s been something of a mystery, especially taking into account how the original iPhone had nailed smoothness more than four years ago and on sub-par hardware which was substantially slower than the beefy chips powering today’s Android super phones.
Growing tired of misinformation about how graphics rendering works on Android, engineer Dianne Hackborn set the record straight today on Google+. Android has always used some hardware accelerated drawing, she began. “Since before 1.0 all window compositing to the display has been done with hardware”, Hackborn said.
Apple’s user interface has been hardware-accelerated thoroughly from day one, cynics might say. Truth be told, Apple designs the hardware, the chips and the operating system, allowing them to target iOS specifically for a specific CPU and GPU, a luxury Android does not have. Let’s not forget that Android does true multitasking and background processes execution, unlike iOS, which adds to the overhead. Also adding to the overhead: Native iOS apps are binaries pre-compiled for their own hardware while Android uses the Dalvik virtual machine with just-in-time compilation to run Dalvik dex-code (Dalvik Executable), which is usually translated from Java bytecode.
To be perfectly honest here, Google should be credited for treating each platform update as an opportunity to perfect the hardware acceleration features. For example, they just enabled smoother graphics in all Ice Cream Sandwich apps that rely on the new APIs.
In case you’ve been wondering, menus being shown, sliding the notification shade, transitions between activities, pop-ups and dialogs showing and hiding – Android does offload all those bells’n'whistles to the GPU. The speed of the GPU and the memory bus bandwidth directly impact the smoothness of the interface, Hackborn explained:
As device screen resolution goes up, achieving a 60fps UI is closely related to GPU speed and especially the GPU’s memory bus bandwidth. In fact, if you want to get an idea of the performance of a piece of hardware, always pay close attention to the memory bus bandwidth. There are plenty of times where the CPU (especially with those wonderful NEON instructions) can go a lot faster than the memory bus.
But the GPU “is not a magical silver bullet to butter-smooth UI”, she argues. The new Galaxy Nexus smartphone (9to5Google will be reviewing it shortly) uses a number of tricks to achieve smooth scrolling of lists, web pages and other content in apps, including turning off OpenGL hardware acceleration in parts of the interface that would otherwise cost 8MB of RAM and take away from other things, such as background process and multitasking. Provided the phone’s CPU is fast enough, it can draw graphics without the overhead of the GPU. And in the case of the Nexus S:
Nexus S has no trouble doing 60fps rendering of all the normal stuff you see in the Android UI like scrolling lists on its 800×480 screen. The original Droid however struggled with a similar screen resolution.
Summing up, hardware acceleration is not a be-all-end-all solution to the smooth user interface simply because there’s only that much a smartphone GPU can do. For example, Nvidia’s Tegra 2 GPU found in some Android smartphones can do every pixel of a 1280-by-800 screen about 2.5 times at 60 frames per second, leaving little room for complex, layered animations:
Samsung today released the video above showing off a flexible, transparent, concept device that might be the company’s own take on Microsoft’s recently released Productivity Future Vision 2011 concept video.
Judging by a rough translation of the Korean video, the device would be a flexible, foldable, 3D capable sheet of glass (approximately 10-inches) with context sensitive UIs. Of course we’re not likely to see anything close to Samsung’s concept in the first batch of flexible displays, which are expected from the company sometime in 2012. However, the concept is yet more proof that Samsung is, at the very least, strongly considering bringing a flexible device to market. Samsung originally showed off their flexible AMOLED tech at CES 2011 with the 4.5-inch displays seen in the clip below: Read more
