The official Google Code blog

By Alexandra Levich, Product Manager

Cross-posted from the Chromium Blog

We recently expanded the reach of the Chrome Web Store from the U.S. to 24 more countries. Developers from around the world have already launched successful apps in the Chrome Web Store to US users. Now all developers can reach a global user base.

What makes this global reach even more interesting is the global payments infrastructure that goes along with it. The store allows developers from 20 countries to sell apps in the store, and users to buy apps in their local currency. We also recently launched the In-App Payments API, which allows developers (U.S.-only for now; international soon) to sell virtual goods in their apps. Integration is easy and transaction fees are only 5%. Graphicly, an early user of in-app payments, saw its net revenues double after starting to use the API and experienced an even bigger rise in profit margins due to increased conversions and lower transaction fees.

In keeping with our international theme, we’d like to highlight a few developers from different parts of the world who have utilized Chrome’s global reach to find success in the store:

• Audiotool is an online music production app that was built by a team of German developers. They saw the Chrome Web Store as a way to present their app to an international audience. Audiotool’s traffic increased by 20% after launching in the store, and this motivated the team to release another app in the store.
• Psykopaint is the brainchild of French developer Mathieu Gosselin. The Chrome Web Store provided Mathieu an opportunity to get his photo painting app noticed outside of France. Traffic to Psykopaint has jumped by 700% since it launched in the store and Mathieu has found that Chrome Web Store users tend to be more engaged than other users.
• Finally, Nulab, a Japanese company, launched its online diagramming app, Cacoo, in the store to expand its user base outside Japan. In just a few months after Cacoo was released in multiple languages in the Chrome Web Store, the app already accounts for 20% of Cacoo’s user base.

The experience of Audiotool, Psykopaint and Nulab shows that no matter where you’re located, you can always find a global audience for your applications in the Chrome Web Store. To learn more about the stories of these and other successful Chrome Web Store developers, read our case studies. And if you want to find out more about posting your app in the store, visit our documentation at code.google.com/chrome/webstore.


Alex Levich is a product manager working on Chrome Web Store.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

By Amy Walgenbach, Developer Marketing

This year at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) Online we have organized a Developer Day on Oct. 10th full of Google information for game developers. It will feature hardcore technical information on Google products and platforms delivered by Google engineers and developer advocates. We’ll discuss the latest projects we’re working on and how our online technologies can help you better create, distribute, and monetize games that reach a larger audience than ever before. We’ll present everything from how developers can build hardware accelerated 3D games for the browser with WebGL to the game framework used to bring Angry Birds to the Web.

In addition to the Developer Day, we will also have a booth on the Expo floor on Oct. 11th-12th where we’ll have representatives from the Chrome Web Store, Native Client, WebGL, App Engine, Google+, In-App Payments, Google TV, and AdSense/AdMob demoing technologies and platforms for game developers. Come by booth 503 to try out Google products and ask questions, or hang out in our Google TV lounge.

For more information on our presence at GDC Online, including session and speaker details, please visit http://www.google.com/events/gdc/2011. Hope to see you in Austin!

Not able to attend GDC? Check out Google Game Developer Central to get an overview of Google products and services that are particularly relevant to game developers.

Amy Walgenbach is the Product Marketing lead for the Google+ platform and leads developer marketing for games at Google.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

By Christian Stefansen, Native Client Team

Wouldn’t it be great if you could create web apps using your existing C and C++ code? Native Client lets you do just that, and it is now enabled for Chrome Web Store apps in Google Chrome’s beta channel.

Native Client apps live on the web platform, so you don’t need to create separate versions of your app for each operating system. Rather than relying on OS-specific APIs, Native Client apps use Pepper, a set of interfaces that provide C and C++ bindings to the capabilities of HTML5. This means that once you’ve ported your code to Native Client, it will work across different operating systems, and you only need to maintain one code base.

Today Native Client supports the Pepper APIs for 2D graphics, stereo audio, URL fetching, sandboxed local file access (File API), and asynchronous message passing to and from JavaScript. In future releases we will be adding support for hardware accelerated 3D graphics (OpenGL ES 2.0), fullscreen mode, networking (WebSockets and peer-to-peer connections), and much more. As new capabilities are added to HTML5 and Pepper, they will become available to Native Client.

This functionality does not come at the expense of security. To ensure that Native Client is as safe as JavaScript, Native Client code is isolated from the operating system by two nested security sandboxes: the Native Client sandbox and the Chrome sandbox. And unlike NPAPI plugins or ActiveX controls, Native Client apps do not have access to the underlying OS APIs.

We encourage you to start developing apps with Native Client. You can download the SDK and find tutorials, examples, API documentation, and our FAQ on the Native Client site. Once version 14 of Chrome hits stable channel, you’ll be able to upload your Native Client apps to the Chrome Web Store, where you can reach Chrome’s 160 million users.

The next milestone for Native Client is architecture independence: Portable Native Client (PNaCl) will achieve this by using LLVM bitcode as the basis for the distribution format for Native Client content, translating it to the actual target instruction set before running. Until then the Chrome Web Store will be the only distribution channel for Native Client apps. This will help us ensure that all Native Client apps are updated to PNaCl when it’s ready – and in the meantime avoid the spread of instruction set architecture dependent apps on the web. We’ll be providing updates on the progress of PNaCl on this blog.

Christian Stefansen is the Product Manager for Native Client. In his spare time, when he is not writing Native Client apps for fun, he likes playing tennis, playing the piano, and living as a travel writer in India for a couple of weeks at a time

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

Even though the Chrome Web Store launched in the US just a few months ago, some developers are already seeing great results. From games to productivity apps, the store has helped all kinds of web applications grow.

Our friends from World Golf Tour, Sliderocket, Wikinvest, Todo.ly and Springpad share their experiences with the Chrome Web Store through five brand new case studies. While each of these developers has a unique view point, some common themes have surfaced:

1. The Chrome Web Store can help you acquire more users really fast: For example for Todo.ly, users of the Chrome Web Store app account for more than 50% of the web site’s traffic.
   
2. Chrome Web Store users are very engaged with apps: Springpad and Wikinvest report that Chrome app users spend up to 100% more time interacting with the app, than a typical visitor spends on their regular website.
   
3. You can improve the monetization of your app through the Chrome Web Store: Premium apps like the World Golf Tour and Sliderocket report significantly higher conversion rates for Chrome app users than the rest of the user base and a growing percentage of business leads originating from the store respectively.
   
4. Posting your app in the store requires relatively little effort: The app publishing process in the store is smooth and required little to no custom work for all the developers, profiled in the case studies.
   

If you are interested in publishing your app in the Chrome Web Store or learning more about how the Chrome Web Store can help your business, explore our developer documentation and join us in our developer forum.

By Christos Apartoglou, Product Marketing

Today, we released a developer preview of the Chrome Web Store. Besides brand new documentation, we now allow developers to upload their apps using the developer registration flow of the Google Chrome Extensions Gallery.



The Chrome Web Store will be launching later this year. In the meantime, we’ll continue to share news on apps and the store through blog posts on the Chromium and Google Code blogs. We also encourage you to join our discussion group for apps for updates on our efforts.

By Rahul Roy-chowdhury, Google Chrome Team

Many of the developer and enterprise products presented at Google I/O are of great interest to the Rails Community. We know developers attending RailsConf are ready to roll up their sleeves to start hacking, so Google is hosting a hackfest and reception at the Renaissance Baltimore Harborplace Hotel in Maryland DF (5th Floor). The event will be on June 9th from 7:00pm to 11:30pm, and of course we'll have food, beer and swag. Space is limited, so please register now, we'll send out an email when your registration has been confirmed.

Steven Bazyl will be helping folks integrate their existing Rails apps into Google Apps Marketplace using OpenID, OAuth, and the Google Data APIs. The Google Apps Marketplace offers products and services designed for Google users, including installable apps that integrate with Google Apps.

Ryan Brown and John Woodell will be getting folks setup with Duby or JRuby on App Engine, and David Masover will be helping folks with the DataMapper adapter. Google App Engine enables developers to build and host web apps on the same systems that power Google applications. JVM languages like Duby and JRuby operate on App Engine for Java.

Seth Ladd will be available to talk about the Chrome Web Store. The Chrome Web Store a very easy way to distribute and monetize apps written in HTML, HTML5, or even Flash. The Chrome Web Store is a perfect way to market and distribute your Rails application, run that app on any platform or device (mobile or desktop), sign up users, and make money.

Seth will also be running two surveys at the conference, and would love your feedback on HTML5 and the Chrome Web Store. These in-person surveys are to help him gauge developer interest and knowledge in these technologies. To entice participants, he will have lots of t-shirts on hand to give away to attendees at the conference who participates in the survey. Look for him while at the conference, let him know your thoughts, and collect your t-shirt (while supplies last).

RailsConf attendees that sign up for the hackfest by June 8th, can request a Google Storage account to use at the hackfest. Google Storage for Developers a RESTful service for storing and accessing your data on Google's infrastructure. The service combines the performance and scalability of Google's cloud with advanced security and sharing capabilities.

We're looking forward to the great talks and to meeting lots of developers. Can't wait to do some coding with you at RailsConf 2010!

By Seth Ladd, Chrome Developer Relations Team

We kicked off Day 1 of Google I/O this year by highlighting the progress of the web platform.

The Day 1 keynote included a number of exciting announcements and demos from the Chrome Team. To demonstrate the power of building with HTML5, Sundar Pichai invited on stage a number of Chrome partners, including Clicker who demonstrated the power of video and highlighted one of the big open questions for the web: the need for a freely available, high quality video codec for the tag. With the support of Mozilla, Opera, and Adobe, we announced the launch of the WebM Project, which makes a high quality video codec freely available to everyone.

We also announced the upcoming Chrome Web Store, which will launch later this year to help make great web applications more discoverable. We showed how rich web apps and content like Sports Illustrated will be discovered, launched, and even purchased from the Web Store when it launches later this year.

In addition to our keynote announcements, the Chrome Team also led a number of sessions throughout both days of the conference, focusing on Chrome, HTML5, and the web as a platform.

Here’s a recap of what was covered in our sessions:

• Beyond JavaScript: programming the web with native code - Although JavaScript performance is rapidly increasing, there are still applications for which native code is a better choice. Learn about Native Client and how you can use it to build rich applications with all of the advantages and power of the web.

• Chrome Extensions - how-to - Google Chrome shipped an extensions API in version 4.0. Since last year, new capabilites have been added to the extensions framework, and many people have already written powerful extensions with minimal effort. Find out how to write an extension, and what's coming next in Chrome Extensions.

• HTML5 status update - Where is HTML5 today? What new features are now broadly supported, what features are on the horizon, and what features are on the chopping block? How do we decide what to implement, what to propose, and what to drop? Find out.

• Developing web apps for the Chrome Web Store - Google Chrome is a powerful platform for developing web apps. With Chrome web apps, we're making it easier for users to discover and use these apps. Learn how to build and sell apps for the Chrome Web Store.

• WebM Open Video Playback in HTML5 - The new open VP8 codec and WebM file format present exciting opportunities for innovation in HTML5 . In this session, you'll see WebM playback in action while YouTube and Brightcove engineers show you how to support the format in your own HTML5 site.

• Google Chrome's Developer Tools - In this session we'll give an overview of Developer Tools for Google Chrome that is a part of the standard Chrome distribution. Chrome Developer Tools allow inspecting, debugging and tuning the web applications and many more. In addition to this overview we would like to share some implementation details of the Developer Tools features and call for your contribution.

• Developing With HTML5 - This session covers the HTML5 APIs available to Google Chrome and Google Chrome OS applications and Google Chrome extensions. Learn how to design web applications for a Google Chrome OS netbook using the latest web technologies.

• Using Google Chrome Frame - Google Chrome Frame brings the HTML5 platform and fast Javascript performance to IE6, 7 & 8. This session will cover the latest on Google Chrome Frame, what it can do for you and your customers, how it can be used, and a sneak peak into what's planned next.

In case you couldn’t attend in-person, all the links above include videos and slides from each session. You can also find all the Chrome session videos on this YouTube playlist. Thanks to everyone who showed up this year and made Google I/O such a great event.

By Ian Fette, Google Chrome Team

The Chrome Developer Tools are great for debugging HTML, JavaScript and CSS in Chrome. If you're writing a webpage or even a web app for the Chrome Web Store, you can inspect elements in the DOM, debug live JavaScript, and edit CSS styles directly in the current page. Extensions can make Google Chrome an even better web development environment by providing additional features that you can easily access in your browser. To help developers like you, we created a page that features extensions for web development. We hope you’ll find them useful in creating applications and sites for the web.


For example, Speed Tracer is an extension to help you identify and fix performance issues in your web applications. With Speed Tracer, you can get a better idea of where time is being spent in your application and troubleshoot problems in JavaScript parsing and execution, CSS style, and more.


Another useful extension is the Resolution Test that changes the size of the browser window, so web developers can preview websites in different screen resolutions. It also includes a list of commonly used resolutions, as well as a custom option to input your own resolution.


With the Web Developer extension, you can access additional developer tools such as validation options, page resizing and a CSS elements viewer; all from an additional button in the toolbar.


Another extension you should check out is the Chrome Editor that allows you to easily code within your browser, so you don’t have to flip between your browser and code editor. You can also save a code reference locally to your computer for later use.

These are just a few of the extensions you can find in our extensions for web development page. You can also look for more in the extensions gallery.

By Koh Kim, Google Chrome Team