December 2013 Summaries

In December 2013, Google announced enhancements to Google+ Sign-In, making it more versatile and user-friendly for app developers. The updates include support for all Google account types, facilitating easy migration from OpenID v2 or OAuth 2.0 Login to Google+ Sign-In, and introducing incremental auth. This new feature allows apps to request permissions gradually, aligning with user actions, thereby minimizing friction and potentially boosting user engagement. With compatibility with the OpenID Connect standard, Google+ Sign-In offers benefits such as over-the-air installs and interactive posts, aiming to expand app audiences and improve user experience by aligning permission requests with actual user needs.

Network performance is crucial for delivering a fast and responsive user experience, with the goal of loading pages in under one second. The W3C Navigation Timing API provides tools to measure critical milestones for the main HTML document, but the Resource Timing API extends this capability to all page resources, such as CSS, JavaScript, and images, by offering high-resolution timestamps for each resource. This API allows developers to track and optimize the performance of each resource, even those from third-party servers, which require an additional HTTP header for detailed data access. Many third-party assets, including Facebook and Disqus widgets, Google+ plugins, and Google Hosted Libraries, can now be monitored using the Resource Timing API. This data can be further analyzed by sending it to analytics servers to generate detailed performance reports and set SLAs. Despite long cache lifetimes potentially delaying access to timing data, the Resource Timing API is a significant enhancement to the web platform, enabling performance optimization through measurement.

Maile Ohye, a Developer Programs Tech Lead, provides a comprehensive checklist for improving mobile websites, aimed at enhancing user experience and optimizing functionality. The checklist is divided into three main steps: stopping user frustration by removing unnecessary features like cumbersome pop-ups and overlays, facilitating task completion by optimizing search engine processes and improving popular mobile workflows, and turning customers into fans by integrating mobile apps with search and enhancing cross-device functionality. The guide emphasizes using tools like Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools to understand user behavior and improve website performance. The document encourages feedback to further refine the checklist and highlights the importance of creating a strategic online presence.

In December 2013, Google Calendar introduced a new behavior for "all-following" changes to recurring events, allowing users to modify the entire series of events without splitting them into separate series as was previously done. This update enables users to perform operations such as modifying, replying, deleting, or applying additional "all-following" changes to recurring events while preserving specific changes to individual instances within the series. To maintain backward compatibility, API clients will still display a separate recurring event after each "all-following" change, and further API support will be announced to enhance these functionalities. An example illustrates how a user can make multiple changes to a recurring event, such as adding a new attendee or changing the location, while still preserving individual responses from other attendees. The changes ensure that all attendees see the series as a single entity, allowing them to manage it collectively with ease. The post concludes with a light-hearted note about Grisha Yakushev's interests and a nod to the consistency and safety of users' data on Calendar servers.

Google Compute Engine, now generally available, offers virtual machines known for their performance, scalability, and security with features like data encryption at rest. The service has expanded its operating system support to include a variety of Linux distributions and FreeBSD, alongside introducing transparent maintenance with live migration and automatic restart capabilities to ensure high reliability without downtime. New 16-core instance types and reduced prices for both persistent disks and standard instances make it more cost-effective and powerful for developers, while enhanced persistent disks offer significantly improved I/O performance. Google emphasizes the flexibility and reliability of its platform, highlighting customer success stories such as Mendelics and Scalr as examples of its robust capabilities in meeting complex computational and storage needs.