Highlights: Daydream Labs, Firebass Alternate Reality Game, Android N, Google Stackdriver, Auto Generating Forms, Google Maps, Mobile Ads

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TL;DR 029 — June 17th, 2016

Daydream Labs

Daydream Labs has put out another blog post with what they’ve learned from rapidly prototyping virtual reality concepts. This week they discuss social interaction. It turns out, being in VR with others amplifies and improves the experience… as long as you take a few things into account. Click through to the blog post for their guidelines.

Behind the scenes: Firebass Challenge

Did you discover and catch the Firebass time-traveling digital fish at Google I/O? If so, you may want to check out this behind-the-scenes article on how we created the alternate reality game that teaches you about Firebase. If not, follow the link anyway and check out the game. It was a lot of fun.

Notifications in Android N

Notifications are a key interaction between your Android app and your users and Android N provides a better notification user experience with updates that include a visual refresh, improved support for custom views, and expanded functionality through Direct Reply, a new MessagingStyle, and bundled notifications. Check out the post for more details and code.

Security “Crypto” provider deprecated in Android N

Does your Android app derive keys using the SHA1-PRNG algorithm from the crypto provider? If so, you’ll need to start using a real key derivation function and possibly re-encrypt your data in Android N. The post has more.

Google Stackdriver

Google Stackdriver provides monitoring, logging, and diagnostics for applications on Google Cloud Platform and AWS. Learn more in these recent blog posts on adding ad-hoc logs to your application while it’s still running, using logpoints and six things Stackdriver brings to the DevOps table.

Auto-generating Google Forms

Creating a few Google Forms manually is manageable, but what if you needed to create hundreds or thousands? Check out this post on how Google Apps Script can help you scale by generating Google Forms programmatically.

Google Maps APIs Udacity course

The Google Maps Operations team just built a brand new Google Maps APIs course. It was developed in collaboration with Udacity, and teaches developers best practices when using our web APIs. Whether you’re new to Google Maps APIs or just want a refresher, this course will teach you how to start adding location features and map visualizations into your websites, today!

Mobile Ads Garage: Interstitial best practices

In the last episode of The Mobile Ads Garage, the team showed you how to implement AdMob interstitials on iOS and Android. In this new episode, they’re back to show you how to put interstitials to work in the best ways possible with some best practices.