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

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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.

Highlights: TensorFlow, Parsey McParseface, AnyPixel, Google Creative Lab, Project Tango, Google VR.

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SyntaxNet goes open source

SyntaxNet, the world’s most accurate parser, is now open source. It’s a neural network framework implemented in TensorFlow that provides a foundation for Natural Language Understanding systems. The release includes all the code needed to train new SyntaxNet models on your own data, as well as, Parsey McParseface, a parser already trained for you that you can use to analyze English text. Actually, it’s the most accurate model of it’s kind in the world. Visit the post for more information and the GitHub link.

Interactive displays controlled through the web

Make big, unusual, and interactive displays controlled through a web page using the newly open sourced library, AnyPixel dot J-S. The Google Creative Lab built it for a really cool interactive display made from six thousand light-up arcade buttons acting as interactive pixels. Check out the video and grab the code from the post.

Virtual cats and Project Tango

Project Tango has a new tutorial project that enables you to place virtual cats in your augmented reality environment. It’s got a simple interface, and well, cats. Lots and lots of cats. Check it out.

Daydream Labs

In Daydream Labs, the Google VR team is exploring the possibilities of Virtual Reality and sharing what they learn with the world. In this recent post, they describe one of their app experiments — a keyboard made out of tiny virtual drums that works really well.

Mobile Ads Garage

The Mobile Ads Garage is a new series that covers how to use the Mobile Ads SDK to display ads from AdMob and Doubleclick For Publishers. Check out the series and the newest episode now available with a detailed explanation of the interstitial ad lifecycle, how to load ads, and how to display at just the right time.

Ads and analytics for a mobile-first world

Every year, there are trillions of searches on Google and over half of those searches happen on mobile. And across the millions of websites using Google Analytics today, we’re seeing more than half of all web traffic now coming from smartphones and tablets. To help marketers succeed in this mobile-first world, we have redesigned AdWords, from the ground-up, and re-thought everything from creatives and bidding, to workflow and measurement. Check out the post for highlights of recent announcements and links to learn even more.