Shaderlight creates a Winter Wonderland, and is now available on Mac

Back in January we told you about Shaderlight, a plug-in for Google SketchUp that helps you create photorealistic renderings from your models.

Back in November they announced the “Winter Wonderland” contest, encouraging users to to render festive image using their impressive plug-in. They recently announced the winners of the contest, all three of whom created some incredible scenes:

First Place: Luke Holdmann: Milwaukee, WI, USA

wheel.jpg

Second Place: Abedallah: Christchurch, New Zealand

cabin.jpg

Third Place: Zoungy: USA

sleigh.jpg

Shaderlight is an amazing plug-in, and it’s really starting to show the power behind Google SketchUp. The only downside to Shaderlight was that it has only been available on Windows, but just a few days ago they finally released a version of the plug-in for Mac. They had promised it “sometime in March” and delivered on March 1. Impressive!

Have you tried out Shaderlight yet?

Cloud printing on the go

Back in April 2010 we announced Google Cloud Print, a service that in Beta allows printing from any app on any device, OS or browser without the need to install any software. Just last month we opened Google Cloud Print to users in the Chrome notebook pilot program. Today we are very pleased to announce the beta launch of Google Cloud Print for mobile documents and Gmail for mobile, which we will be rolling out to users throughout the next few days.

Imagine printing an important document from your smartphone on the way to work and finding the printout waiting for you when you walk in the door. Just open a document in Google Docs or an email in Gmail in your mobile browser and choose “Print” from the dropdown menu in the top right corner. You can also print certain kinds of email attachments (such as .pdf or .doc) by clicking the “Print” link that appears next to them.

This feature will be rolling out today and tomorrow for English speaking users in the US and will work on most phones that support HTML5, such as devices running Android 2.1+ and iOS 3+. To get started, you’ll need to connect your printer to Google Cloud Print. This step requires a Windows PC for now, but Linux and Mac support are coming soon. You can learn more at the Google Cloud Print help center.

Happy printing!

Amping Up Chrome’s Background Feature

Many users rely on apps to provide timely notifications for things like calendar events and incoming chat messages, but find it cumbersome to always keep a Chrome window open. Extensions and packaged apps can already display notifications and maintain state without any visible windows, using background pages. This functionality is now available to hosted apps – the most common form of apps in the Chrome Web Store – via a new background window mechanism.

Apps and extensions that use the new “background” feature can continue to run in the background—even if the user closes down all of Chrome’s windows. “Background apps” will continue to run until Chrome exits. The next time Chrome starts up, any background windows that were previously running will also be re-launched. These windows are not going to be visible but they will be able to perform tasks like checking for server-side changes and pre-emptively loading content into local storage.
One way you can use background windows is to preload content and data so that they are immediately available when the user opens your app. You could also issue HTML5 notifications to alert the user when important events occur—for example, a friend wants to initiate a chat session. There are plenty of possibilities here, and we look forward to seeing what you’ll do.

To protect our users’ privacy, we’ve made this functionality available only to apps and extensions; regular websites will not be able to open background windows. Developers will also need to declare the “background” capability on their apps.

Users can easily see which background apps (and extensions) are running in their system through the “Background Apps” menu of the Chrome icon in the system tray (Windows/Linux) or dock (Mac). Chrome will automatically load background components when the user logs in, and the Chrome icon will remain in the system tray or dock as long as background apps are running- even if all Chrome windows are closed. To close all background components, a user just needs to exit Chrome.

The feature is already available in Chrome’s Dev channel. For details on the API, check out our developer’s guide, which also includes sample apps to try out.

Posted by Andrew Wilson, Software Engineer and Michael Mahemoff, Developer Relations