It’s been an exciting nine months since we launched the Google Chrome browser. Already, over 30 million people use it regularly. We designed Google Chrome for people who live on the web — searching for information, checking email, catching up on the news, shopping or just staying in touch with friends. However, the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web. So today, we’re announcing a new project that’s a natural extension of Google Chrome — the Google Chrome Operating System. It’s our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be.

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we’re already talking to partners about the project, and we’ll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve.

Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.

Google Chrome OS will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips and we are working with multiple OEMs to bring a number of netbooks to market next year. The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform.

Google Chrome OS is a new project, separate from Android. Android was designed from the beginning to work across a variety of devices from phones to set-top boxes to netbooks. Google Chrome OS is being created for people who spend most of their time on the web, and is being designed to power computers ranging from small netbooks to full-size desktop systems. While there are areas where Google Chrome OS and Android overlap, we believe choice will drive innovation for the benefit of everyone, including Google.

We hear a lot from our users and their message is clear — computers need to get better. People want to get to their email instantly, without wasting time waiting for their computers to boot and browsers to start up. They want their computers to always run as fast as when they first bought them. They want their data to be accessible to them wherever they are and not have to worry about losing their computer or forgetting to back up files. Even more importantly, they don’t want to spend hours configuring their computers to work with every new piece of hardware, or have to worry about constant software updates. And any time our users have a better computing experience, Google benefits as well by having happier users who are more likely to spend time on the Internet.

We have a lot of work to do, and we’re definitely going to need a lot of help from the open source community to accomplish this vision. We’re excited for what’s to come and we hope you are too. Stay tuned for more updates in the fall and have a great summer.

[Sourced from Google]

Starting today, there is a simpler way to use the Java^TM language to develop and deploy world-scalable web applications. We are very happy to announce today:

• Google Web Toolkit 1.6,
• An early look at Google App Engine for Java, and the brand-new
• Google Plugin for Eclipse that supports a productive integration of the two.

What does this mean for you? It is easier than ever to create sophisticated web applications entirely in the Java language with Google Web Toolkit while working productively in Eclipse. And the moment you’re finished, with only a few button clicks you can upload and publish your application to the world on App Engine.

In GWT 1.6, we’ve tried to make common tasks simpler while making it possible to do even more advanced things. If you’re brand new to GWT, some of this is going to sound like gibberish, so you’ll also want to take a look at the Product Overview as a gentler introduction.

Direct support for war output and related tools

• GWT 1.6 changes the conventions for project organization to center on the standard Java web archive deployment structure. This new war support makes it easier to introduce GWT modules into existing web applications. It also makes GWT development more flexible by allowing hosted mode to work easily with any standard servlet container. 
• In conjunction, there is a new webAppCreator tool which replaces the older projectCreator and applicationCreator tools. It is a unified, war-aware tool that can quickly create a working GWT module, configuration files, source files, and an ant build file that you can use as a starting point for your own code.
• And, of course, it’s pretty easy to create a war directory layout that you can upload to App Engine.

Hosted mode and compiler enhancements

• Hosted mode has been enhanced to take advantage of the new war-centric project structure to provide additional conveniences. For example, the new “Restart Server” button reloads server-side code without you having to restart your debugger, which can save you time when you’re developing RPC services. Also, for you GWT experts out there using hosted mode with your own custom servers — if you know what “-noserver” is, I’m talking to you — you’ll be glad to know that hosted mode integration “just works” now; generated resources such as bundled image files are automatically recreated when you refresh the hosted browser. This, too, can help speed up your development cycle.
• Hosted mode has also been modified to work smoothly with EMMA’s on-the-fly instrumentation, so that you can easily generate code coverage reports. If you’re an Eclipse user, in addition to using the new Google Plugin for Eclipse, you should also look at EclEmma, which makes it easy to enable code coverage for any launch configuration. 
• Finally, the GWT compiler has gone parallel. It can compile multiple output permutations in parallel using the new -localWorkers flag, which can speed up web mode compiles noticeably on multi-core machines. In more elaborate build systems, it is also possible now to do parallel distributed compiles using the new compiler lifecycle classes Precompile, CompilePerms, and Link.

New widgets and a shiny new approach to event handling

• A big change that you will surely notice is GWT’s overhauled event handling. The new Handler pattern for managing widget events is easier to understand and more succinct than in previous releases. Widget writers can also easily create their own custom events.
• The customizable and internationalized DatePicker is now a standard widget, and the new LazyPanel helps you speed up your code by delaying the creation of widgets until they’re actually needed.
• There’s also a new API for triggering browser native events programmatically, which is a real boon for unit testing. 

As usual, there are many more improvements than we can list above. The issue tracker has the full list of changes. We hope that these new features in GWT 1.6 will seem like only the beginning, though, as you start to using GWT alongside the new Google Plugin for Eclipse and deploying your code on App Engine. There’s lots more to come on how these technologies work together to help you do cool new stuff faster.

Last but not least, the GWT team will be at Google I/O on May 27-28, giving in-depth sessions on GWT and eager to hear your feedback on these new features. We hope you’ll join us.

Download Google Web Toolkit 1.6

Sourced via Google

Today we’re excited to announce Google Ventures, Google’s new venture capital fund. This is Google’s effort to take advantage of our resources to support innovation and encourage promising new technology companies. By borrowing the best practices of top-tier, financially focused venture capital firms and bringing to bear Google’s unique technical expertise and brand, we think we can find young companies with truly awesome potential and encourage their development into successful businesses.

At its core, Google Ventures is charged with finding and helping to develop exceptional start-ups. We’ll be focusing on early stage investments across a diverse range of industries, including consumer Internet, software, clean-tech, bio-tech, health care and, no doubt, other areas we haven’t thought of yet. Central to our effort will be our fellow Googlers, whom we view as a critically important resource to help educate us about potential investments areas and evaluate specific companies.

Economically, times are tough, but great ideas come when they will. If anything, we think the current downturn is an ideal time to invest in nascent companies that have the chance to be the “next big thing,” and we’ll be working hard to find them. If you think you have the next big idea, or if you just want to to learn more, please see our website at www.google.com/ventures.

Google Labs added four new offerings to their already rich set of optional features you can enable in Google Mail. The new features arrive in the form of previews for different site content, specifically YouTube, Flickr, Picasa and Yelp. The new Labs features all work the way you would expect them to, activating when a link to one of these services is detected and appending the message with a small gallery.

Of course, each of these services offers a way of sending a content-enhanced email to your friends without much more than basic HTML support on the other end. But often, it’s easier for people in a hurry to just drop a URL into an email and fire it off. That’s where these features help – they often save you the step of having to navigate over to the linked item.

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Some of the new features you can try out include form autofill, full page zoom and autoscroll (both thanks to a new version of WebKit), and a cool new way to drag tabs out to get a side-by-side view (shown below).

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Google today finally announced its plans for GrandCentral, the telephony service it acquired in July 2007. GrandCentral will be reborn as Google Voice, a comprehensive suite of telephony services, including all of GrandCentral’s features. In addition, Google Voice will also include an automated voicemail transcription service, the ability to send and receive text messages, and integration with your Gmail contacts. Users can now also call any number in the the U.S. for free.

The new interface will look a lot like Gmail, with your inbox, SMS messages, access to voicemail and other features in a sidebar on the left.

Making Calls

You can make calls directly from the Google Voice web interface. After you initiate the call, the service will actually first call your mobile phone or landline, and after that your call will be placed over Google’s network.

Calls within the U.S. will remain free, and users can purchase credit to make international calls (we don’t have information about the international rates yet, but we assume that they will be competitive with those that Skype currently offers).

Google Voice will also offer free conference calls.

Voicemail

The automated voicemail transcription feature looks like it will be one of the most useful functions of Google Voice. Transcriptions are fully automated and Google will mark passages in the text where the algorithm was not very confident about the transcription. Transcriptions will automatically appear in your inbox, but Google Voice can also email them to you, or even send you an SMS with the text.

Future Integration with Android?

We can’t help but wonder if Google will integrate the voicemail and transcription service with Android as well. In this video, Google shows the mobile version of Google Voice in the browser on an Android phone, but we assume that Google will release a dedicated Google Voice app for Android in the future and maybe even make it an integral part of the Android experience (if the carriers allow Google to do so, that is).

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