Chrome, HTML5, webdev

Share Location On The Web With Waze

If you have a website that contain ‘just’ your (business) address you can do better.

How?

You can use the links below to help your users navigate to you with one click.

This will save them the trouble to ‘select’, ‘copy’ and open their map app in order to get to you. Waze supports an API which enables developers to open the Waze client application through an external URL. The URL can be accessed from within your mobile web page or web app.

waze-logo

The following are the available parameters you can insert to your ‘a href’ tag: Continue reading →

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look carefully
bots

Integrate Your API.AI Bot With Slack

It’s really easy and powerful to work with API.AI as a tool for creating your bots. Not only you are getting a powerful machine learning algorithm to understand your users, you get in the same time an easy way to integrate with many services (e.g. Google Home, Twitter, Facebook messenger, Slack, Telegram, Skype and many more).

What is API.AI?

API.AI is a natural language understanding platform that makes it easy for developers to design and integrate intelligent and sophisticated conversational user interfaces into mobile apps, web applications, devices, and bots.
If you never worked with API.AI – You can check it out in this post.

What is Slack?

I just copied from this site, because it’s short and to the point:

Where work* happens.

*Whatever work means for you, Slack brings all the pieces and people you need together so you can actually get things done.
If you are a developer that worked with IRC in the past – Slack is a (much) ‘nicer’ version of it. You get the productivity of a mobile chat tool with many options for integrations and automations.

Now, that we got the tools defined, let’s see how to integrate API.AI and Slack in nine elegant ‘dance movements’. Continue reading →

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bots

Google Assistant Talks At I/O 2017

This Google I/O (less than two weeks!) there are many great sessions that will help you create amazing assistant apps and actions on google. The Google Assistant’s mission is to help users get things done in their world and there is a lot of interesting content on that during the 2017 conference.

Here is a list of all the talks that devoted to the assistant: Continue reading →

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bots

How To Add Users To Google Home

Today, we are adding an important feature to Google Home. The ability to add users, so they could get their own: schedule, email, plans etc’.

You do it in 3 easy steps:

  1. Make sure that you have the latest Google Home app. Then, look for a card that says ”multi-user is available” when you open the app. If you don’t see a card, click on the icon in the top right to see all of your connected devices.
  2. Once you see your Google Home in the list, select “Link your account.”
  3. Now, you’ll teach your Assistant to understand it’s you, not your partner, family member or roommate—and vice versa, based on who’s speaking. For certain features, like personalized music and commute, you’ll also need to set up your preferences within the app.

Continue reading →

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bots, JavaScript

Build Your First Smart Bot For Google Home

In the past few months, I heard someone smart saying that “the future is artificial intelligence first”.

Artificial intelligence, is making computers “smart” so they can think on their own and be even more helpful for us. It’s clear that Google, has been investing heavily in the areas of:

  • Machine learning – Teaching computers how to see patterns in data and act on it.
  • Speech recognition and Language understanding – Meaning, being able to understand you when you are talking with all the little differences and nuance.

These days we can see it all come together in the Google Assistant. It allows you to have a conversation with Google and be more productive. In this post, we will see how it’s all working by building a new Action for Google home. In the same time, we will have a nice bot that in the future we will integrate with many apps. Cool? Continue reading →

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life

Golden Gate Relay Run – Progressive Web App

GGR MAP

On May, We (a team from Google) are going to run from Napa Valley to Santa Cruz. It’s a relay 191 miles race or as some call it: “The longest party in CA”. There are teams of 12 members that will run 36 legs (3 legs per runner, 3-8 miles each) through 36 cities and… across the Golden Gate Bridge at midnight. All that is in support of Organs R Us.

Btw, if you want to help us, please donate.

In a quick effort from few Googlers, we came with a nice script that took a KML file and compile the information so we see all the legs of the race on one page.
The goal at the beginning was to print it so we could have it with us during the race. However, the final results is a little progressive web app (you can get it also at: https://bit.ly/ggrr1 ) that is working offline so you can save some trees and still see all the details for your next leg. If you do want to print this page, you can find this ‘printer friendly’ document useful. Continue reading →

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Business, life

Einstein: His Life and Universe

I just finished to read this book and there are few aspects I really enjoyed.

It was a long book that the master of biographies (Walter Isaacson) wrote based on the newly released personal letters of Albert Einstein.

I liked to learn about Einstein personality and his private life as well as his academic achievements. His imaginative and ‘thinking out of the box’ approaches enable him to create a revolution. To me, the amazing part, is that he only used his mind. No experiments or ‘tools’ that will guide him.

The book explores how an imaginative patent clerk came with theories that changed the way we understand the universe. We get a description of a struggling father in a difficult marriage who couldn’t get a teaching job or a doctorate. I learned that unlike the pop culture that claimed he was an awful student, he was a good one. He wasn’t strong in french but in math and physics, he was a good student who got high scores.

One of the thing that I found as a surprise, was the fact that he knew that he is going to win the Nobel prize. He also promised his first wife the money from the prize. Continue reading →

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Business, life

You Don’t Need Status Meetings

The most valuable and scarce resource is time.

As a young startup you must do your best to use it as efficient as possible because you have limited time to show traction and become a profitable business.

Now, there is no doubt that you need to focus and try to spend most of your time on real work. However, we all did it in the past, we get into a room of 5-10 people and everyone is telling the group what they did.

It’s such a waste of time! Even if each person is talking for 5-10min you got here 50-100min of boring meeting which is equal to a waste of time.

Why not have this updates in a tool that let everyone in the team to see what all the others are working on? Continue reading →

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Chrome, JavaScript, webdev

Online Editors For Web Developers

One of the most powerful aspects of the web is the ability to share your ideas and work with others quickly.

Over the years, I tried several options to share code and do demos. It’s true that you can always start your own server and serve your site, but in many cases, you want to focus on your demo and not do administrative work again and again. Here are some tools that I enjoyed using and I still find myself returning to check them from time to time. In most of them you got a nice ability to move (even) faster and to use GitHub for your code. Continue reading →

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Chrome

Browsers And Their Capabilities

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The web is by far the biggest platform out there.

It’s everywhere or at least it’s on the way to be everywhere. From powerful cutting-edge devices down to devices that can do nothing more then send few bytes of information.

However, this pluralism of ways to consume this information bring a challenge to web developers. We need to understand what are the limitations and what are the capabilities of the browsers that will run our work of art.

Here are set of tools that will help you with that challenge.

Research

  • chrome status – Web platform feature support and examples. It’s a great way to see what is coming up… and try to test it today in Chrome Canary. You can also check blink-dev forum. Blink is Chromium’s rendering engine so I found some very interesting discussions.
  • status modern ie – Like Chrome Status but for Edge and Internet Explorer. It gives you the current status and the roadmap.
  • ES6 compatibility – From server side to browsers. Learn what will run and where. After all, the common technology to ‘run’ things is javascript. OK – ECMAScript, fine.
  • caniuse.com – Mobile and desktop browser capabilities.
  • what web can do today – Stuff that your browser can do, with links to demos and information about browser support.
  • mobile html5 – A table that contain features per mobile browser.
  • If you testing a new browser for its CSS3 support this tool will do the work for you – css3test.com

Continue reading →

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