Julia meets HTML 5

Posted by Daniel Wolf, Software Engineer

Today, we launched Julia Map on Google Labs, a fractal renderer in HTML 5. Julia sets are fractals that were studied by the French mathematician Gaston Julia in the early 1920s. Fifty years later, Benoît Mandelbrot studied the set z2 − c and popularized it by generating the first computer visualisation. Generating these images requires heavy computation resources. Modern browsers have optimized JavaScript execution up to the point where it is now possible to render in a browser fractals like Julia sets almost instantly.

Julia Map uses the Google Maps API to zoom and pan into the fractals. The images are computed with HTML 5 canvas. Each image generally requires millions of floating point operations. Web workers spread the heavy calculations on all cores of the machine.

We hope you will enjoy exploring the different Julia sets, and share the URLs of the most artistic images you discovered. See what others have posted on Twitter under hashtag #juliamap. Click on the images below to dive in to infinity!

Letting everyone do great things with App Inventor

Posted by Karen Parker, App Inventor Program Manager

In July, we announced App Inventor for Android, a Google Labs experiment that makes it easier for people to access the capabilities of their Android phone and create apps for their personal use. We were delighted (and honestly a bit overwhelmed!) by the interest that our announcement generated. We were even more delighted to hear the stories of what you were doing with App Inventor. All sorts of people (teachers and students, parents and kids, programming hobbyists and programming newbies) were building Android apps that perfectly fit their needs.

For example, we’ve heard of people building vocabulary apps for their children, SMS broadcasting apps for their community events, apps that track their favorite public transportation routes and—our favorite—a marriage proposal app.

We are so impressed with the great things people have done with App Inventor, we want to allow more people the opportunity to do great things. So we’re excited to announce that App Inventor (beta) is now available in Labs to anyone with a Google account.

Visit the App Inventor home page to get set up and start building your first app. And be sure to share your App Inventor story on the App Inventor user forum. Maybe this holiday season you can make a new kind of homemade gift—an app perfectly designed for the recipient’s needs!