Google Plugin for Eclipse and GWT 2.2 now available

Google Plugin for Eclipse and GWT 2.2 are now available with several new features that we’re excited to share with you. First, Google Plugin for Eclipse 2.2 directly integrates GWT Designer, a powerful WYSIWYG Ajax user interface (UI) designer that makes it much easier to quickly build UIs. Second, developers can take advantage of the modern web with the first round of HTML5 support within the GWT SDK. Additionally, GWT’s CellTable widget now offers new functionality, such as default column sorting and the ability to set column widths. These new features make it even easier to build best in breed web apps using Java-based tools and Eclipse. And while these apps can be run on any platform, Google Plugin for Eclipse makes it very easy to deploy, and run, on Google App Engine.

Instructions for installing this new release of the Google Plugin for Eclipse and GWT SDK can be found here: Getting Started with Google Plugin for Eclipse.

If you’re simply looking for the GWT 2.2 SDK, you can find it here: GWT SDK Download.

GWT Designer

Directly integrating GWT Designer into the Google Plugin for Eclipse has been a top priority for us over the past few months. We’ve had some very positive feedback from the community early on, and for this release we not only wanted to provide the best developer experience when using GWT Designer, we also wanted a seamless experience across GWT Designer and GPE.


HTML5 features

GWT 2.2 includes support for HTML5-specific features, such as the Canvas element, which allows for dynamic, scriptable rendering of 2D shapes and bitmap images, and the embedding of Audio/Video tags. These APIs are still experimental and may change a bit over the next couple releases, but we feel that they’re stable enough to deserve some real mileage (by you). Below is a demo that one of the GWT team members, Philip Rogers, put together to showcase the new Canvas support in the GWT SDK. You can find the code for this demo here: http://code.google.com/p/gwtcanvasdemo/.

Your browser does not support iframes.

New CellTable APIs

With GWT 2.1, we found that developers were often times incorporating a CellTable widget into their project, and immediately adding the boilerplate code to add sorting, and then having to jump through hoops to set column widths. With the GWT SDK 2.2 release, this functionality is now part of the CellTable widget itself. Where we can, we want to improve the native GWT widgets, adding features and functionality that minimize the custom code that developers have to write.

If you would like to see these updates in action, checkout out the CellTable example with the GWT Showcase app.

A note about Java 1.5

GWT version 2.2 will only have deprecated support for Java 1.5, resulting in warnings when building applications. While Java 1.5 will still work for this release of GWT, developers should upgrade their version of Java to correct these warnings and ensure compatibility with future versions of GWT.

If you have questions or want to provide feedback, we’d love to hear it, and the best place to do so is in the Google Web Toolkit Group.

Proper Animation is a very cool plugin

Somewhere near the top of SketchUp’s all-time list of feature requests, there’s a big, bold headline that reads ANIMATE THE MOVEMENT OF OBJECTS. It’s something all of us have wanted to do at one time or another. Unfortunately, it’s also not something we’ve managed to tackle just yet. And that’s why Ruby script plugins for SketchUp are so darn useful.

A while ago, I found out about a nice little plugin called Proper Animation. Watching the teaser video (below) inspired me to model and animate my very own robotic contraption. Shockingly, it only took me about half and hour to do; Proper Animation is refreshingly easy to figure out and use.

This script’s premise is that objects in your model—groups and components—can each have multiple positions. You manually assign each position to build an animation. Playing that animation involves using SketchUp’s already-existing Scenes feature. The really nice thing is that Proper Animation automatically connects positions to scenes.

The first thing you need to do is download and install the plugin. Its developer is MorisDov; you can find it on his site. Proper Animation also comes bundled with its own tutorial PDF. If you’re looking for even more encouragement/inspiration/support, you can check out the plugin’s SketchUcation thread.

Here’s how I recommend getting started with Proper Animation:

Step 1

Build a box and turn it into a group. This plugin only works with groups and components.

Step 2

Right-click the box and choose Proper Animation > Set Position – 1. This tells the plugin where the box should start out.

Step 3

Move the box using SketchUp’s Move tool. It doesn’t matter where you move it to.

Step 4

Right-click the box again and choose Proper Animation > Set Position – 2.

Step 5

Open the Scenes Manager (Window > Scenes) and create a couple of new scenes. Clicking the Add Scene button twice is the quickest way to do this.

Step 6

Choose Plugins > Proper Animation > Start Scenes Observer from the menu bar. This tells SketchUp to start paying attention to the Proper Animation plugin.

Step 7

Click the first scene tab and watch the box travel back to its original position. Now click the second scene tab to animate the box back to Position 2.

Step 8

Telephone Pixar to let them know you’ll be applying for a job shortly.

Proper Animation does a whole bunch of other stuff, too. There are controls for scene transition and delay timing, as well as fancier parameters like easing. You can use the plugin’s dedicated “Animation Attributes Map” dialog box to fiddle with individual settings. Extremely advanced people are even experimenting with combining animation and rendering—take a look at the most recent pages of this SketchUcation thread to read all about it.

Note: Running Proper Animation on my Mac with the latest version of SketchUp 8 installed, I’m experiencing some weird crashing that didn’t seem to happen before. Using the plugin in connection with Scenes (as described above) seems to resolve the issue, though.

Thanks to MorisDov for a truly nifty piece of technology. A thousand nerdy assembly line robot models owe their lives to you.

Android 3.0 Platform Preview and Updated SDK Tools

Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) is a new version of the Android platform that is designed from the ground up for devices with larger screen sizes, particularly tablets. It introduces a new “holographic” UI theme and an interaction model that builds on the things people love about Android — multitasking, notifications, widgets, and others — and adds many new features as well.

Besides the user-facing features it offers, Android 3.0 is also specifically designed to give developers the tools and capabilities they need to create great applications for tablets and similar devices, together with the flexibility to adapt existing apps to the new UI while maintaining compatibility with earlier platform versions and other form-factors.

Today, we are releasing a preview of the Android 3.0 SDK, with non-final APIs and system image, to allow developers to start testing their existing applications on the tablet form-factor and begin getting familiar with the new UI patterns, APIs, and capabilties that will be available in Android 3.0.

Here are some of the highlights:

UI framework for creating great apps for larger screen devices: Developers can use a new UI components, new themes, richer widgets and notifications, drag and drop, and other new features to create rich and engaging apps for users on larger screen devices.

High-performance 2D and 3D graphics: A new property-based animation framework lets developers add great visual effects to their apps. A built-in GL renderer lets developers request hardware-acceleration of common 2D rendering operations in their apps, across the entire app or only in specific activities or views. For adding rich 3D scenes, developers take advantage of a new 3D graphics engine called Renderscript.

Support for multicore processor architectures: Android 3.0 is optimized to run on either single- or dual-core processors, so that applications run with the best possible performance.

Rich multimedia: New multimedia features such as HTTP Live streaming support, a pluggable DRM framework, and easy media file transfer through MTP/PTP, give developers new ways to bring rich content to users.

New types of connectivity: New APIs for Bluetooth A2DP and HSP let applications offer audio streaming and headset control. Support for Bluetooth insecure socket connection lets applications connect to simple devices that may not have a user interface.

Enhancements for enterprise: New administrative policies, such as for encrypted storage and password expiration, help enterprise administrators manage devices more effectively.

For an complete overview of the new user and developer features, see the Android 3.0 Platform Highlights.

Additionally, we are releasing updates to our SDK Tools (r9), NDK (r5b), and ADT Plugin for Eclipse (9.0.0). Key features include:

  • UI Builder improvements in the ADT Plugin:
    • Improved drag-and-drop in the editor, with better support for included layouts.
    • In-editor preview of objects animated with the new animation framework.
    • Visualization of UI based on any version of the platform. independent of project target. Improved rendering, with better support for custom views.

To find out how to get started developing or testing applications using the Android 3.0 Preview SDK, see the Preview SDK Introduction. Details about the changes in the latest versions of the tools are available on the SDK Tools, the ADT Plugin, and NDK pages on the site.

Note that applications developed with the Android 3.0 Platform Preview cannot be published on Android Market. We’ll be releasing a final SDK in the weeks ahead that you can use to build and publish applications for Android 3.0.