Get Ready to Vote with Google

Get Ready to Vote with Google: Every four years in the United States, people prepare to head to the polls and increasingly search for information about how to register to vote, where to vote and who is on their ballot. Even though it is 2012, important voting information is disorganized and hard to find on the Internet. To help voters research candidates and successfully cast their ballot on Election Day, we’ve launched our new Voter Information Tool.

You can enter your address to find information on your polling place, early vote locations, ballot information with links to candidates’ social media sites and voting rules and requirements. The tool is easy to embed on any website and is open source so developers can modify it to create custom versions. We're working with a number of media partners to ensure the tool is accessible across the web, and partners like Foursquare and AT&T are doing great work building apps on our Civic Information API.




We hope this tool will help make getting to the polls and casting your ballot as simple as possible.



Posted by Jesse Mwaura, Google Politics & Elections Team



(Cross-posted on the Politics and Elections blog)

DIGITAL JUICE

More Art Project online for you to explore

More Art Project online for you to explore: Back in April we announced a major expansion of the Google Art Project. Since then 15 million people have explored the paintings, sculptures, street art and photographs contributed by our partners. From today the number of treasures you can view is increasing by more than 10% as 29 new art organizations from 14 countries bring their collections online.



A wide range of global institutions, large and small, well-known and less traditional, are represented. Explore contemporary works at the Istanbul Modern Art Museum, admire works from the Art Gallery of South Australia (who have contributed almost 600 objects) and access the treasures of the famous Museum of Palazzo Vecchio in Italy and Princeton University. This round has also seen contributions from more unusual sources including a collection from the National Ballet of Canada, pre-Columbian art from Peru and decorative arts from China.

Now that the total number of objects online is more than 35,000, we've turned our attention towards thinking of different ways for you to experience the collections.



The first is a great educational tool for art students, enthusiasts or those who are simply curious. A “Compare” button has been added to the toolbar on the left of each painting. This allows you to examine two pieces of artwork side-by-side to look at how an artist’s style evolved over time, connect trends across cultures or delve deeply into two parts of the same work. Here's an example: place an early sketch of Winslow Homer's 'The Life Line' from the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum next to the completed painting from the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Comparing them in this way allows you to see how the artist's vision altered (or not) over the life of the work.

Beyond following us and discussing great art on our Google+ page, we have also created a Hangout app within the Art Project so that you can share your favorite collections and perhaps give your friends a personal guided tour. If there is a budding museum guide or an art critic within any of you it can finally be unleashed! Watch this video to see how it works.







Around 180 partners have contributed their works to the Art Project so far, more than 300,000 of you have created your own online galleries and we've had more than 15 million visitors since our last launch in April. The cultural community has invested great time and effort to bring these masterpieces online. Watch this space for more to come.



Posted by Piotr Adamczyk, Google Art Project

DIGITAL JUICE

Google’s most advanced voice search has arrived on iOS

Google’s most advanced voice search has arrived on iOS: When you have a question, finding the answer should be effortless—wherever you are and whatever device you’re using. The new Google Search app for iPhone and iPad helps you to do just that with enhanced voice search that answers any question with the comprehensive Google search results you know and love.



Fast and accurate voice recognition technology enables Google to understand exactly what you’re saying. Getting an answer is as simple as tapping on the microphone icon and asking a question like, “Is United Airlines flight 318 on time?” Your words appear as you speak, you get your answer immediately and—if it’s short and quick, like the status and departure time of your flight—Google tells you the answer aloud.



You can get answers to an increasingly wide variety of questions thanks to Knowledge Graph, which gives our search technology an understanding of people, places and things in the real world. Here are a few of the questions that Google can answer:

• “What does Yankee Stadium look like?” Google will show you hundreds of pictures instantly.
• “Play me a trailer of the upcoming James Bond movie.” The trailer starts playing immediately right within Google Search. 
• “When does daylight savings time end?” The answer will appear above the search results, so you can set your clock without having to click on a link. 
•  “Who’s in the cast of The Office?” See a complete cast list and find out who made you crack up last night. 

Download the Google Search App on your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch and find out how much wood a woodchuck would chuck (if a woodchuck could chuck wood).


Posted by Kenneth Bongort, Engineer, Google Search

DIGITAL JUICE

AMBER Alerts for missing children now in Google Search and Maps

AMBER Alerts for missing children now in Google Search and Maps: Today we are launching AMBER Alerts coordinated by National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) in the Google Public Alerts platform. Public Alerts are designed to bring you emergency alerts when and where they’re relevant to you, and AMBER Alerts aim to help bring abducted children home safely.



If you’re using Google Search or Maps on desktop and mobile you’ll see an AMBER Alert if you search for related information in a particular location where a child has recently been abducted and an alert was issued. You’ll also see an alert if you conduct a targeted search for the situation. By increasing the availability of these alerts through our services, we hope that more people will assist in the search for children featured in AMBER Alerts and that the rates of safe recovery will rise.



AMBER Alerts will provide information about the abducted child and any other details about the case as they become available. Additional details could include the make and model of the vehicle he/she was abducted in or information about the alleged abductor.

Screenshot for a test version of an AMBER alert

The US Department of Justice’s AMBER Alert™ Program is a voluntary partnership between law enforcement agencies, broadcasters, transportation agencies and others to engage the entire community in the most serious child-abduction cases. We are working with NCMEC, who will provide the AMBER Alert data to Google and make it possible to display information in Public Alerts.



We’re working closely with Missing Children Europe and the Canadian Centre for Child Protection to try and scale this service to more countries. We’ll keep exploring different ways to improve child protection through innovative technologies, like what has been used to reduce exploitation and improve reporting to NCMEC.


Posted by Phil Coakley, software engineer, Google Public Alerts team

DIGITAL JUICE

8 Ways to Search on Windows 8: Start and Search Charm

8 Ways to Search on Windows 8: Start and Search Charm:

Windows 8 is here and we couldn’t be more excited.

In fact we’re so excited, we’re kicking off a series in which we’ll showcase 8 ways to use Bing on Windows 8. Check back here on Wednesdays and Thursdays, to see how we’ve reimagined search to be fast, fluid and built for touch.

To “start” things off, check out how search is baked right into Windows 8. From the start screen simply start typing to quickly search across apps and all of your files on your device. If you don’t find what you’re looking for, justclick the search charm to launch a Bing web search.

Tap, type, swipe and search. It’s as easy as that with the new Windows 8.

We have our favorite search tricks in Windows 8, but if there are any areas that you would like to see us cover, please let us know in the comments or on Twitter (@Bing.)

- The Bing Team

DIGITAL JUICE

The Future of SMB POS Defined by GoPago’s Free POS System

The Future of SMB POS Defined by GoPago’s Free POS System:
Sometimes the lights go on and the realization strikes that a new metaphor has taken hold and will change the market going forward. That realization struck when I recently read about GoPago’s Free POS system for SMBs. Greg Sterling first wrote about the product in August but it wasn’t until I saw a second article did it dawn on me that free POS was an incredibly powerful way to get SMBs to fully embrace the possibilities of local.
The product has a symmetry, pricing and usefulness that speaks to a wide swath of the smaller bricks and mortar stores and fills a need that Square and Paypal have only hinted at. The product includes an Android tablet, a free Verizon Internet connection, a cash box, a receipt printer, the company’s app for handling transactions and inventory tracking, and setup and support of the service. The cost? A 2.85% credit card processing fee.
The product includes a built in loyalty program and an interface with social sites but could easily be expanded to include other cloud based services like electronic payments, PPC, offers, reputation management, email management or any other local marketing process.
The product is not a perfect for every business but it is ideal for the small bakeries, coffee shops, restaurants and smaller retailer & service businesses that dot the landscape and often have to pay high processing fees on their credit card transactions.
The early creator of metaphor changing products sometimes reaps the benefits and other times the benefits go to better capitalized late comers. Certainly GoPago has no lock on this market. Square, Paypal, Bing and Google could all step in and have both distribution efficiencies and marketing clout that could give them an advantage in this space. Imagine Google offering up free Moto/Android based POS system that also guides SMBs through a business center experience as the SMB gains familiarity with the many marketing options that Google offers. If I were Bing,in an effort to kick start their Local Business Portal, I would walk over to GoPago and hand them a check even if it meant the POS had to continue to use an Android based product.
Related posts:

1. Google Maps: More Mapspam, Again
2. The Future of Shopping? Get Coupons, Scan, Buy & Check Yourself Out via iPhone
3. Google Maps Offering 30 days of FREE advertising with Google Tag Sign Up

DIGITAL JUICE

Microsoft delivers preview of its store in the Windows Azure cloud

Microsoft delivers preview of its store in the Windows Azure cloud: There's a preview version of Microsoft's new Windows Azure store, with third-party services and data add-ons, now available to Redmond's public-cloud customers.

DIGITAL JUICE

PHP at FOSDEM: Call for Papers - Lorna Mitchell

PHP at FOSDEM: Call for Papers - Lorna Mitchell:
There's an excellent open source conference that happens every year in Brussels in February, called FOSDEM. It consists of some main tracks, plus a series of sub-rooms, where various technical communities are given some space to use for whichever talks they choose; the schedules are centralised so that people can pop in and visit any talks in any room that looks interesting. This year, for the first time, this includes a "PHP and Friends" room - I'll be organising this and I'm looking for your input, please.
Basically, we need to get some great submissions, so that when we come to choose the schedule (and it is only one track, one day, there's only a few slots available), we can put together something really fitting to showcase PHP for a wider audience than a PHP conference. Selection will be done on the basis of talk topic, abstract and length in the first instance - we'll only take into account the actual speakers when we're curating the final list.
Key things you need to know:

• link to call for papers form (google forms)


• Event is 2nd (and 3rd, but the PHP room is on the 2nd) of February 2013, at ULB campus Solbosh in Brussels, Belgium


• No expenses will be covered by the event


• There's also a Call for Stands if you have a project that you would like to represent there


• If you're not speaking, come and join us anyway!

Lorna is an independent web development consultant, writer and trainer, open source project lead and community evangelist. This post was originally published at LornaJane


DIGITAL JUICE

XSLT PHP Template Engine

XSLT PHP Template Engine:

Package:

XSLT PHP Template Engine

Summary:

Process templates using XSLT

Groups:

PHP 5, Templates, XML

Author:

Pierre-Henry Soria

Description:

This class can process templates using XSLT...



Read more at http://www.phpclasses.org/package/7744-PHP-Process-templates-using-XSLT.html

DIGITAL JUICE

PHP LDAP

PHP LDAP:

Package:

PHP LDAP

Summary:

Authenticate users connecting to a LDAP server

Groups:

Networking, PHP 5, User Management

Author:

Leigh Edwards

Description:

This class can authenticate users connecting to a LDAP server...



Read more at http://www.phpclasses.org/package/7753-PHP-Authenticate-users-connecting-to-a-LDAP-server.html

DIGITAL JUICE

Community News: FOSDEM 2013 (Feb 2nd & 3rd)

Community News: FOSDEM 2013 (Feb 2nd & 3rd):
Lorna Mitchell has posted to her site today about the Call for Papers that's now open for this year's FOSDEM event (happening in Brussells in February 2013).

There's an excellent open source conference that happens every year in Brussels in February, called FOSDEM. It consists of some main tracks, plus a series of sub-rooms, where various technical communities are given some space to use for whichever talks they choose; the schedules are centralised so that people can pop in and visit any talks in any room that looks interesting. This year, for the first time, this includes a "PHP and Friends" room - I'll be organising this and I'm looking for your input, please.

The event is on the 2nd and 3rd of February and is an interdisciplinary conference of open source minded developers from all over the world. There's lots of different rooms that make up the event and they're accepting submissions for the PHP room right now through December 1st.


DIGITAL JUICE

Shashikant Jagtap: Automating Web Performance Data Collection with Behat and BrowserMob Proxy

Shashikant Jagtap: Automating Web Performance Data Collection with Behat and BrowserMob Proxy:
Shashikant Jagtap has a new post to his site about using the PHP-based Behat TDD testing tool and the BrowserMob-Proxy to make an automated system that collects performance data on your applications (including load time, recording headers and simulations of network traffic and latency).

BrowserMob Proxy is a utility which is used for capuring HTTP traffic and performance data from the browser. BrowserMob-Proxy adds in essential missing capabilities such as checking HTTP status codes and injecting headers for HTTP Basic Auth. Web Perfomance data can be manually captured by other tools like Firebug or Developers Tools. Using BrowserMob Proxy we can capture perfonace data in HAR format while running automated tests.

He includes the commands you'll need to set up the PHP interface for BrowserMob (PHPBrowserMob) the proxy itself and a sample test and context file that runs some checks against Facebook.


DIGITAL JUICE

Improving My Use of Database Lookup Tables in PHP - Chuck Burgess

Improving My Use of Database Lookup Tables in PHP - Chuck Burgess

DIGITAL JUICE

Smashing Magazine: Powerful Command Line Tools For Developers

Smashing Magazine: Powerful Command Line Tools For Developers:
On the Smashing Magazine site today they've posted a list of powerful CLI tools that every developer should at least know about to help make their lives easier - six of them ranging from SSH tunnels to HTTP testing.

Good tools are invaluable in figuring out where problems lie, and can also help to prevent problems from occurring in the first place, or just help you to be more efficient in general. Command line tools are particularly useful because they lend themselves well to automation and scripting, where they can be combined and reused in all sorts of different ways. Here we cover six particularly powerful and versatile tools which can help make your life a little bit easier.

The tools they mention are all things you'd install on a unix-based system:

• Curl
  


• Ngrep (network packet searching)
  


• Netcat (to work with network connections)
  


• Sshuttle (SSH tunneling)
  


• Siege (HTTP benchmarking)
  


• Mitmproxy (capturing proxy, both HTTP and HTTPS)
  

DIGITAL JUICE

NetTuts.com: Quick Tip: Deploy PHP to Heroku in Seconds

NetTuts.com: Quick Tip: Deploy PHP to Heroku in Seconds:
For anyone that's wanted to try out the Heroku hosting platform but just want a bare-bones guide to getting up and running, NetTuts.com has what you're looking for.

We've raved about the brilliance of Heroku before, mostly around the fact that it makes launching a Rails or Node app rather simple without having to configure your own server. But what if you want the same kind of freedom and speed of deployment with PHP? Fortunately, Heroku has quietly offered support for PHP for quite some time.

You'll need to get their CLI deployment tool and set up an account but the rest is pretty easy. The steps to set up the git repo, add a new "heroku" branch and push the checked in code directly out to the server.


DIGITAL JUICE

PHP Women: A letter to all members of the PHP community (The Ada Initiative)

PHP Women: A letter to all members of the PHP community (The Ada Initiative):
As Lineke Kerckhoffs-Willems has posted to the PHP Women site today, the Ada Initiative, an organization that supports women in technology, is looking for donations to help improve the work they can do for women all around the world.

Over a year ago I first heard about the Ada Initiative, an organisation to support women in open technology and culture. This is exactly why PHPWomen was founded, only we narrow it down to women within the PHP community, because that is our level of expertise. However, we are an organisation based on volunteers and therefore, we often struggle with finding the time to do more. Luckily, The Ada Initiative isn't based on volunteers, but on people working full time to reach their goal, our goal. We share their vision: "a world in which women are equal and welcome participants in open source software, open data, and open culture" and therefore we support the organisation.

As they are a non-profit, they can use all of the financial support they get to help further their cause. There's one catch to donating - the campaign ends tomorrow, October 31st. If you want to contribute to the cause (they've already collected over $73,000) you can do it here.

We know you care about women in the PHP community, and technology as a whole, as much as we do. Donating to the Ada Initiative is an easy way to help and our community is based around helping others. Will you donate too?

DIGITAL JUICE

PHPMaster.com: Debugging PHP Code with FirePHP

PHPMaster.com: Debugging PHP Code with FirePHP:
On PHPMaster.com today there's a new tutorial showing you a different method for debugging your code than the usual print_r or var_dump - using FirePHP, a tool that uses messaging to relay information back to your browser.

As the technical manager of a suite of software projects, one of my duties is doing code reviews. One of the things I see far more often than I'd like when doing reviews is debugging PHP code committed and pushed up the chain. [...] The safest method of debugging requires configuring your IDE to use a tool like Xdebug or Zend Debugger to trace currently executing code. This isn't always practical. In the absence of using a fully configured debug environment, I turn to FirePHP.

He shows how to set up and configure FirePHP to work with your debugging and some suggestions on browser extensions you can install to view the messages. Sample code is included showing you how to use the tool to send messages back to the browser including grouping messages, building tables and something that shows a conditional caching report message.


DIGITAL JUICE

We Like to Move It

We Like to Move It:
In this episode we will explain several ways you can interact with layers using the Move tool. These techniques can save a lot of time especially when you are working with many layers. Let’s get started!

---

DIGITAL JUICE

Using The New Layer Comps Panel In Photoshop CS6

Using The New Layer Comps Panel In Photoshop CS6: Here's a tutorial by Adam Smith from Photoshop Daily that deals with working with layer comps in Photoshop CS6. The layer comps panel gives you the ability to share image stages and updates much quicker with new automated options. READ MORE...

(posted by Jennifer Apple for www.PhotoshopSupport.com)

DIGITAL JUICE

Create a Photo Composite With Filter Forge and Photoshop

Create a Photo Composite With Filter Forge and Photoshop:
This tutorial walks you through the process of creating a photo composite using portrait photography with Photoshop and Filter Forge. We will start by isolating the subject in Photoshop, then we will show how to use Filter Forge to generate a variety of digitally rendered textures that we will use to create foreground and background elements for our composite. Let’s get started!

---

Filter Forge is a powerful third-party plugin that allows you to apply over 4,000 amazing effects to your images, and even create your own. To learn more about Filter Forge, you can visit their website, download the trial version of the software, or check out their filter gallery.

Download Trial

Editor’s note: This tutorial was sponsored by Filter Forge.

DIGITAL JUICE

Create a Sinister Haunted House in Photoshop – Tuts+ Premium Tutorial

Create a Sinister Haunted House in Photoshop – Tuts+ Premium Tutorial:
Halloween is almost upon us; it will soon be time to dress up, go trick-or-treating and put a jack-o’-lantern in your window. With that in mind, this tutorial will focus on blending several stock images to create a sinister haunted house. This Tuts+ Premium tutorial by Mark Mayers is all about setting the mood of the scene and to give the viewer a sense of foreboding and trepidation without the use of spirits, ghouls or any other cliche tricks. This tutorial is available exclusively to Tuts+ Premium Members. If you are looking to take your illustration skills to the next level then Log in or Join Now to get started!

View the Tutorial

Tuts+ Premium Members can login now for instant access to this tutorial. Membership to Tuts+ Premium gets you access to hundreds of exclusive premium tutorials, top selling ebooks, in-depth courses, member forums, and much more. To learn more about Tuts+ Premium, Take the Tour or Join Today.

DIGITAL JUICE

How To Create An iPad App Using InDesign CS6 Without Writing Any Code - Video Tutorial

How To Create An iPad App Using InDesign CS6 Without Writing Any Code - Video Tutorial: In this episode of the Adobe Creative Suite Podcast, Terry White shows how to use InDesign to create iPad Apps without writing code. See the complete process from InDesign to the App running on my New iPad. READ MORE...

(posted by Jennifer Apple for www.PhotoshopSupport.com)

DIGITAL JUICE