The Voice Actions for Android in the UK, France, Italy and Germany

The Voice Actions, a series of spoken commands that let you control your Android phone or tablet with your voice. You can call businesses and contacts, send texts, browse the web and complete other common tasks, all just by speaking into your phone.

Today, we’re pleased to announce that users in the UK, France, Italy, Germany and Spain can now use Voice Actions in British English, French, Italian, German and Spanish.

To use Voice Actions, tap the microphone button on the Google search box on your home screen, open the Voice Search app, or press down for a few seconds on the physical search button on your phone to activate the “Speak Now” screen. You can see how it works in this video.

Speak any of these commands to perform a Voice Action on your phone:

  • send text to [contact] [message]
  • call [business]
  • call [contact]
  • go to [website]
  • navigate to [location/business name]
  • directions to [location/business name]
  • map of [location]

And of course, you can still conduct a Google search using your voice.

Use Voice Actions to get directions, or send a text using just your voice

Voice Actions is available on phones and tablets running Android 2.2 and higher. If you don’t have Voice Search on your phone yet, you can download it from Android Market – if you do have Voice Search, you can just start using Voice Actions.

The iOS Blogger app

We’re excited to announce the new Blogger app for iOS. With the Blogger app, you can write a new blog post and publish it immediately or save it as a draft right from your iOS device. You can also open a blog post you’ve been working on from your computer and continue editing it while you’re on-the-go. Your blog posts are automatically synced across devices, so you’ll always have access to the latest version.

Pictures are worth a thousand words, and the Blogger app makes it easy to add photos either by choosing from the gallery or taking a new photo right within the app. You can also add labels and location to provide more details about the post.

Download the Blogger app today for iOS versions 3.2 and above in the App Store. Although the user interface is only available in English at this time, the app supports blog posts written in all languages. If you’re using an Android-powered device, you can download the Blogger app for Android from the Android Market.

Blogger Buzz blog

The Pictarine: Building a mashup in the cloud with Google App Engine

 

Pictarine is a photo management web application, launched in 2010, that allows people to easily manage and share all of their photos from Flickr, Picasa, Facebook, Twitter and other sites. Pictarine developers Guillaume Martin and Maxime Rafalimanana have contributed the following post discussing their experiences using Google App Engine and Google Web Toolkit.

From the start, we used Google technologies in developing Pictarine and we wanted to share our experience with them so far. In this post, we will shed some light on the weaknesses and strengths we found in Google Web Toolkit (GWT) and Google App Engine. We will also discuss how we leveraged GWT to build a new technology that allows Pictarine to seamlessly display photos from the computer directly into the browser. The following diagram is an overview of how our application works.

Building a mashup in the cloud with Google App Engine

The Pictarine team is made of a web designer and two developers who previously worked mainly with Java based enterprise technologies and had a little experience with web technologies. When we started the project in early 2009, we were quite open on learning new languages like Python or Ruby, but when App Engine announced that Java would be supported, we were really excited to give Google App Engine a try.

The first few months, learning about the App Engine environment was quite easy and dare I say fun. Testing our code on Google’s servers from Eclipse IDE was only one click away. So we built our first prototype fast and we quickly decided to adopt App Engine. Then we started to build the core of our application: the engine that uses the API from Flickr, Picasa, Facebook to fetch the users’ photos. This is where we hit the first limitations of App Engine. Most users have a lot of photos on these services and retrieving them can take some time. But App Engine has strict limits on how long a request should last: an outgoing HTTP request cannot last more than 10 seconds and cannot process a request for more than 30 seconds. So while building our architecture we found ourselves writing approximately one third of our code dealing with these limitations: paginating our requests, creating background tasks to store data in small batches, etc.

In early 2010, when we launched our alpha version, everything went smoothly. We had some good press coverage and App Engine met our expectations in handling our first users. During 2010, we worked on implementing new features requested by our users, and during this period of time we were really impressed by the way App Engine evolved. Many of the limitations were lifted and great new features were added. We are now able to use Task Queues for requests that last up to 10 minutes, which we fully use to sync our users’ photos and albums. One of the features we like the most is the Channel API, a push notification system that allows us to instantly show a photo in every connected browser as soon as it is uploaded.
App Engine is still not perfect but has greatly improved and when we see its roadmap, we are quite confident it will continue to improve.