The New Blogger

Blogger rolled out some nice new stuff this week. It’s different inside and out. As a heavy user of Blogger (you’re soaking in it!), I’m happy with anything that helps us make a better blog for you to read. If you have a Blogger blog of your own, here are a couple of the changes you’ll notice:

  • Each settings page has a button that starts a new post. Creating posts is what bloggers do most, and now you always can get to the post editor with one click.
  • You can see traffic and other stats in one place. The new Overview page shows you page views, comment activity, follower counts, and more.

For more information on what’s new in Blogger, and to find out how to turn on the new features, see this Blogger Buzz post.

Adding features to software is hard enough. Bumping celestial bodies around is another matter entirely. Hexi Baoyin of Tsinghua University has suggested giving a gentle shove to an asteroid so that it ends up in Earth orbit.

New versions of Google Analytics Management API

Google are releasing two new versions of the Google Analytics Management API into public beta: a brand new version 3.0 and a backwards compatible version 2.4. Both new versions migrate the Management API from the existing Google Data Protocol to Google’s new discovery-based API infrastructure. This impacts the way you request and handle data from the API.

All future development of the API will be done to version 3.0, so we also added some interesting new data, including:

  • Event goals are fully represented.
  • An internal web property id that can be used to deep-link into the Google Analytics user interface.
  • Profile configurations for the default page and site search query parameters.

With this change, we are also announcing the deprecation of the legacy version 2.3 of the Management API. It will continue to work for 2 months, after which all v2.3 requests will return a v2.4 response.

The biggest changes in switching to the new versions are that you now need to register your applications via the Google APIs Console and use a developer token. Also, the URL endpoints have changed, which influence how you request OAuth authorization tokens.

For complete details on what’s new, see today’s post on the Google Analytics Blog. If you have any questions or concerns, please join the conversation in our Management API developer group.

Android App Inventor

 

App Inventor for Android provides an easy, gentle way for programming students and other curious folks to create apps for Android devices. Incubated and launched by Google, App Inventor will now be shepherded by the new MIT Center for Mobile Learning. App Inventor godfather Hal Abelson will oversee the new center along with two distinguished MIT colleagues.

While App Inventor is just starting out, the recently discovered Protoanguilla palau eel is an amazing 200 million years old. This eel has never been seen in the fossil record; in fact, it’s being called a “living fossil”. It is so unique that it occupies its own species, genus, and family.

Finally, as you ponder the implications of developing mobile apps and living prehistoric eels, you can enjoy a nice paper banana.