Google to showcase a new version of Android at I O

Tags: Google , Android

Its been confirmed that Big G will announce a new version of its Android operating system and that the latest installment will feature a nickname that starts with the letter "L."

Senior Vice President of Google, Sundar Pichai has indicated that he will preview the newest Android OS during Googles keynote tomorrow. This is a fresh move for the Mountain View company. The next major Android updated isnt expected to drop until later in the year, and this is the first time that Google has previewed its operating system so early on. Apple has made a similar move with the announcement of iOS 8, so this might be Googles way of trying to steal or match the thunder that the Cupertino-based tech company has created recently.

I/O is Googles developers conference, so expect the announcements to reveal a lot of exciting new tools for developers to use in the latest Android build. Another interesting preview tomorrow will be Android Wear, Googles take on the wearable market. Expect to see new devices, as well as manufacturing partners who will be getting in on the wearable action.

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Alleged live photo of Motorola Moto E leaks out

Tags: Nokia , Windows Phone

Alleged live photo of Motorola’s yet to be announced Moto E made the rounds online. The image showcases the previously leaked handset alongside the Moto G.

As you can see in the photo above, the Moto E looks decidedly cheaper than the already budget-conscious Moto G. The white-colored handset appears to lack front-facing camera. The chrome strip below the display on the other hand could well be a speaker slot.

A leaked sketch of the upcoming device with the tagline “Hello new Moto” also suggests that the Moto E will likely have a front speaker. See it below.

Moto E is expected to debut next week, on May 13 at an event in London with a price tag lower than that of the Moto G ($105 is rumored). Rumored specs include 1.2GHz dual-core CPU, 4.3” display, 1GB of RAM, and 5MP camera.

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iOS Games Draw Slasher Origins Free App Of The Day 21 05 2012

Slice, cut, snip, sever, chop, shear and trim hordes of Pirate Monkey Zombies™ using just your finger. Long awaited story finally on iPhone, iPod and iPad.



***FEATURES***

STORY MODE (Boss fights, Multiple locations, RPG elements)
Pirate Monkey Zombies™ invaded young Hanzo The Ninjas village and kidnapped his close ones.Your finger will aid him in his retribution.

CHALLENGES
Push your skills to their limits in multiple tasks. Become a true Shadow Warrior.

ENDLESS MODES
Waves, Tower and Hardcore modes will test your might. Survive as long as possible and rule the leaderboards.

ONLINE MULTIPLAYER
Fight with or against your friend. Kill more zombies than your opponent or aid him against the rottents.


• Enjoyable cool graphics compelling attention
• Diverse opponents and demanding bosses
• Spectacular upgradable Ninjutsu Techniques for boosting the pace
• Game Center and OpenFeint leaderboards and achievements support
• ...and tons of addicting fun for hours!

iOS Games Draw Slasher: Origins

Version: 1.0
Size: 75.6 MB
Language: English
Released: Apr 05, 2012

Requirements: Compatible with iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad.Requires iOS 3.0 or later
get apps
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/draw-slasher-origins/id496836650?mt=8

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iOS Games Ballistik Wars Free App Of The Day 02 02 12

Spray of missiles! Smashing super weapons!

Produce units with single tap. Light-hearted strategy game!

This is "Ballistik Wars"!

Colorful & unique units go ballistic!

You just stick with it!

***How to play "Ballistik Wars"***

Very easy to play!

Step1:Charge energy!

Step2:Tap an icon of any unit!

Step3:Attack and Destroy enemy tower!

Thats all!

***Tips***

1. Strike first!

Attack enemy towers before they attack you, so you can get bonus scores!

2. Destroy enemy tower a.s.a.p.

You get more bonus scores depending on how fast you clear each stage!

3. Find out uniqueness of units.

There is chemistry between units. Produce units by using this advantage!

4. Sometimes, you need to be patient.

Producing units is not always the best strategy.

Save energy and produce many units at once!

5. Air field.

You cannot produce Land units in Air stages. Be prepared!

6. Road to clear all stages.

Grow your units to clear all stages!

iOS  Games Ballistik Wars 

Requirements: Compatible with iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPod touch (2nd generation), iPod touch (3rd generation), iPod touch (4th generation) and iPad.Requires iOS 4.1 or later.

get apps

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ballistik-wars/id443880063?mt=8

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iOS Games Bravo Force Last Stand Free App Of The Day 30 04 2012

Prepare yourself soldier, for the most intense battle of your life.” Bravo Force has been shot down in enemy territory and YOU are the last survivor. How long will you survive?

‘Join the Fight’ and cause total destruction in this epic arcade shooting game. Unleash Airstrikes, Gunships and other powerful perks to help you annihilate the relentless enemy waves.

Pinpoint grenade throwing, precision shooting and immense firepower will be required in order to obliterate the enemy and earn the rank of Supreme Commander.

----- POWERFUL PERKS -----
Take advantage of six (seventh coming soon) powerful Perks to help you survive on the battlefield.

➤ Gunship
➤ C4
➤ Last Stand
➤ Ammo
➤ Armor

➤➤➤ Airstrike (RARE)
➤➤➤ Perk 7 - Coming Soon

----- RANK & MISSIONS -----
Level up through the 50 different ranks of Bravo Force. Earn experience by playing the game and completing over 175 fun and challenging missions.

Can you become the Supreme Commander of Bravo Force?

----- GET ONLINE -----
Have Facebook? Show off your rank, receive free gifts, challenge your friends, top the leaderboard and post huge scores to earn bragging rights galore amongst your Facebook friends.

iOS Games Bravo Force: Last Stand 

Version: 1.0

Size: 39.6 MB

Language: English

Released: Apr 26, 2012

Requirements: Compatible with iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPod touch (3rd generation), iPod touch (4th generation) and iPad.Requires iOS 4.0 or later.

get apps

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/bravo-force-last-stand/id501056872?mt=8

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Developer Insights Teaching thousands of students to program on Udacity with App Engine part 2

This post is the second of our two-part series discussing how Udacity uses Google App Engine.

Today’s guest blogger is Chris Chew, senior software engineer at Udacity, which offers free online courses in programming and other subjects.  Chris shares how Udacity itself is built using App Engine.

Steve Huffman blogged yesterday about how App Engine enables the project-based learning that makes his web development course so powerful.  People are often surprised to learn that Udacity itself is built on App Engine.

The choice to use App Engine originally came from Mike Sokolsky, our CTO and cofounder, after his experience keeping the original version of our extremely popular AI course running on a series of virtual machines.  Mike found App Engine’s operational simplicity extremely compelling after weeks of endlessly spinning up additional servers and administering MySQL replication in order to meet the crazy scale patterns we experience.

Close to a year later, with ten months of live traffic on App Engine, we continue to be satisfied customers.  While there are a few things we do outside App Engine, our choice to continue using App Engine for our core application is clear:  We prefer to spend our time figuring out how to scale personalized education, not memcached.  App Engine’s infrastructure is better than what we could build ourselves, and it frees us to focus on behavior rather than operations.

How Udacity Uses App Engine

The App Engine features we use most include a pretty broad swath of the platform:

• High Replication Datastore with NDB


• Memcache


• Task Queues - Deferred execution, MapReduce, batch jobs


• App Engine Search API -- Indexing both course content and student résumés


• Blobstore API -- Lecture videos, résumés, data exportation


• Image API - Thumbnail generation


• MapReduce API - Daily usage analytics, data migrations, data maintenance

A high-level representation of our “stack” looks something like this:

Trails and Trove are two libraries developed in-house mainly by Piotr Kaminski.  Trails supplies very clean semantics for creating families of RESTful endpoints on top of a webapp2.RequestHandler with automagic marshalling.  Trove is a wrapper around NDB that adds common property types (e.g. efficient dereferencing of key properties), yet another layer of caching for entities with relations (both in-process and memcache), and an event “watcher” framework for reliably triggering out-of-band processing when data changes.

Something notable that is not represented in the drawing above is a specific set of monkey patches from Trove we apply to NDB to create better hooks similar to the existing pre/post-put/delete hooks.  These custom hooks power a “watcher” abstraction that provides targeted pieces of code the opportunity to react to changes in the data layer.  Execution of each watcher is deferred and runs outside the scope of the request so as to not increase response times.

Latency

During our first year of scaling on App Engine we learned its performance is a complex thing to understand.  Response time is a function of several factors both inside and outside our control.  App Engine’s ability to “scale-out” is undeniable, but we have observed high variance in response times for a given request, even during periods with low load on the system.  As a consequence we have learned to do a number of things to minimize the impact of latency variance:

• Converting usage of the old datastore API to the new NDB API


• Using NDB.tasklet coroutines as much as possible to enable parallelism during blocking RPC operations


• Not indexing fields by default and adding an index only when we need it for a query


• Carefully avoiding index hotspots by indexing fields with predictable values only when necessary (i.e. auto-now DateTime and enumerated “choices” String properties).


• Materializing data views very aggressively so we can limit each request to the fewest datastore queries possible

This last point is obvious in the sense that naturally you get faster responses when you do less work.  But we have taken pre-materializing views to an extreme level by denormalizing several aspects of our domain into read-optimized records.  For example, the read-optimized version of a user’s profile record might contain standard profile information, plus privacy configuration, course enrollment information, course progress, and permissions -- all things a data modeler would normally want to store separately.  We pile it together into the equivalent of a materialized view so we can fetch it all in one query.

Conclusion

App Engine is an amazingly complete and reliable platform that works astonishingly well for a huge number of use cases.  It is very apparent the services and APIs have been designed by people who know how to scale web applications, and we feel lucky to have the opportunity to ride on the shoulders of such giants.  It is trivial to whip together a proof-of-concept for almost any idea, and the subsequent work to scale your app is significantly less than if you had rolled your own infrastructure.

As with any platform, there are tradeoffs.  The tradeoff with App Engine is that you get an amazing suite of scale-ready services at the cost of relentlessly optimizing to minimize latency spikes.  This is an easy tradeoff for us because App Engine has served us well through several exciting usage spikes and there is no question the progress we have already made towards our mission is significantly more than if we were also building our own infrastructure.  Like most choices in life, this choice can be boiled down to a bumper sticker:

Editor’s note: Chris Chew and Steve Huffman will be participating in a Google Developers Live Hangout tomorrow, Thursday, November 1st, check it out here and submit your questions for them to answer live on air.

-Contributed by Chris Chew, Senior Software Engineer, Udacity



Posted by Zafir Khan, Product Marketing Manager, Google App Engine

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High Quality Image of iPhone 5S and 5C Leaked

New high quality images of the iPhone 5S and 5C have appeared online again. Apart from the factory image of these devices that was leaked, another image just surfaced online again. These latest leaked images have come from Apple researcher Sonny Dickson, who has recently established a reputation as a reliable source for many Apple iPhone 5S and iPhone 5C leaks. One question that someone asked was that "is the iPhone 5C cheap for both Apple and you or for just Apple alone"?

Apple is set to unveil the iPhone 5S and 5C by September 10th and it can be said that everything needed to make sure that the devices are ready before the unveiling event is being put in place.

iPhone 5S would have black, white and champagne colours and the iPhone 5C would have Red, Blue, Yellow and White range of colours.

The latest leak by Dickson involves the champagne colored iPhone 5S and the iPhone 5C with various colour cases. 

Although some have said that the iPhone 5C is just an iPhone 5 wrapped in a plastic case. Even though that may be the case, the face that it will sell cheaper than the normal iPhone 5 and come pre-loaded with iOS 7  will make it a success.

The truth is, no matter how much we see the images of Apple devices, we are never satisfied until we hold one in our hands.

Stay tuned for more images of iPhone 5S and 5C as they emerge.

Like our Facebook page and follow on Twitter for more info

Image Source: SonnyDickson

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