Techno Babble

An interesting visual representation of the available Google APIs and Developer Products presented in the form of a periodic table

Interact with the real thing at

http://code.google.com/more/table/

The Google URL Shortener is a service that takes long URLs and squeezes them into fewer characters to make a link that is easier to share, tweet, or email to friends.

The service was launched back in September of 2010 ( see http://goo.gl/ ) and now has an accompanying API which will allow developers to access programmatically the functionality provided by the web interface.

http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2011/01/google-url-shortener-gets-api.html

Available from the Google Code Labs, the Google URL Shortener API allows you to develop applications that interface with this service. You can use simple HTTP methods to create, inspect, and manage short URLs from your desktop, mobile, or web application.

Documentation is available from

http://code.google.com/apis/urlshortener/overview.html

and a Getting Started Guide at

http://code.google.com/apis/urlshortener/v1/getting_started.html

App Inventor allows you to build applications for Android if if you have no experience of programming. Instead of writing code, simply design how you want the application to look and use pre-built blocks to specify the application behaviour.

There are blocks for almost everything you can do on an Android phone as well as specific blocks for doing “programming stuff”.

Watch it in action in the following 60 second video showing an application being made.

The blocks editor uses the Open Blocks Java library ¹ for creating visual blocks programming languages. Open Blocks is distributed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Scheller Teacher Education Program and derives from thesis research ² by Ricarose Roque. We thank Eric Klopfer and Daniel Wendel of the Scheller Program for making Open Blocks available and for their help in working with it. Open Blocks visual programming is closely related to the Scratch programming language ³, a project of the MIT Media Laboratory’s Lifelong Kindergarten Group.

To find out more about App Inventor go to

http://appinventor.googlelabs.com/about/index.html

Remember Scratch – a drag and drop programming paradigm from MIT?

If not refresh your memory at

http://www.kf12.com/blogs/techno/2007/11/drag-and-drop-programming/

or

http://scratch.mit.edu/

Well, now there’s something else, in a similar vein, Kodu from Microsoft Research. (Based on Boku – here’s a Boku report from March 2007)

http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2007/03/microsoft_resea.html

Kodu is a a visual programming language which has been designed for creating games by children. It runs on the Xbox and uses the game controller for input.

Kodu - Visual Programming

Using a simple language, which is entirely icon-based, programs are broken down into rules which are further divide into conditions and actions.

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/kodu/

There’s a video of an interview with Matthew MacLaurin the man behind Kodu

CES 2009 Matthew MacLaurin on Kodu

Kodu will be available for download from the XBox Live Community Games channel.

Scratch is an application that makes the process of creating interactive stories, animations and games etc. as simple as dragging and dropping pre-defined program blocks/modules into order.

Scratch is aimed at children between the ages of 8 and 16 years old (but can be used by anyone). It was developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten group

http://llk.media.mit.edu/

at the MIT Media Lab

http://www.media.mit.edu/

in collaboration with the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, with financial support from the National Science Foundation, Intel Foundation, and MIT Media Lab research consortia.

Here’s a sample application I put together in about 30 minutes

In the left hand panel, you can see the palette of blocks which can be used. The next panel to the right contains a number of blocks which have been snapped together to create the program segment and the right-hand panel contains the running application.

Scratch is an easy-to-use application for developing programs and learning about programming concepts. It includes a community which users can join and share applications they have developed. It could have an appeal to a wider audience who have always wanted to learn how to program.

All the details are available at:

http://scratch.mit.edu/

Some useful, if possibly dated, notes from a course at Stanford on C# and the .NET Framework

http://cs193n.stanford.edu/

The Microsoft Journal for Developers (MSDN Magazine) is available from

http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/default.aspx

Also noticed Charles Petzold is venturing into 3D with his latest book. (He published his first book “Programming Windows” back in 1988)

http://www.charlespetzold.com/

3D Programming for Windows explores and elucidates the 3D graphics programming facilities of the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) under Windows Vista and the .NET Framework 3.0.

http://www.charlespetzold.com/3D/index.html

The IBM Systems Journal (Volume 45, NUmber 1, 2006), although aimed at aspects of online game technology, nevertheless contains an interesting hint at the possible future direction of compiler technology which is being designed take advantage of the growth in processor complexity.

http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj45-1.html

Using advanced compiler technology to exploit the performance of the Cell Broadband Engine architecture, describes the research that is progressing to optimise (compile) code written in a high-level language to fit a multi-processor (cell) architecture.

The prototype compiler innovatively takes advantage of and extends existing parallelization technology to enable partitioning and parallelization across multiple heterogeneous processing elements from within a single compilation process.

The implication is that the programmer will not have to worry too much about the machine architecture the application is aimed at relying instead on the compiler to produce code that is optimised for the hardware it will execute on (although the capability will still exist for lower-level dabbling if necessary).

Although at an early stage, it won’t be long before this approach is likely to be adapted to the mass market of application writers for the multi-core architectures from Intel and AMD.

http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/451/eichenberger.html

(For those diehards there’s lots of detail about IBMs compiler research at Compiler Technology for Scalable Architectures

http://domino.research.ibm.com/…/cellcompiler.index.html)